Dr. Kurt Cline
Fu-Jen University
Fall, 2009
ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY
Romanticism, with its emphasis on imagination, individualism, spiritual insight and
heightened emotion, arose as a reaction against the highly rationalist Neo-Classical
movement. It was an international movement, involving philosophers, writers and
artists from across Europe but is best known and exemplified by the English
Romantic poets. We will witness the first stirrings of the Romantic worldview in
works by Thomas Traherne, Dame Julian of Norwich and Thomas Vaughn, and then
move to a detailed examination of the Romantics proper through a reading of major
works by William Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Our
study will be somewhat exceptional in that we will take the time to examine many of
the lesser known, largely uncanonized female romantic poets. We will conclude with
Romanticism’s final death throes in the convulsive works of Poe, DeQuincey and
Baudelaire which can be seen as leading (via Symbolism) to the Modernist aesthetic
of the late 19th and early 20th Century.
Students completing the course will have gained a firm grounding in English poetry
and poetics. The questions asked by the Romantics were never completely answered,
and the problems they posed were never fully solved, but only transformed into new
approaches and new dilemmas. Arguably, all Western poetries (and even some prose
works) of the Modernist and Post-Modern eras in some way respond to, even if only
to negate, the praxes, paradoxes, postulations and self-contradictions of the Romantic
writers. Course will be conducted in a seminar style: grading will be based on student
participation in discussions, the giving of an oral presentation (or two), the keeping of
a journal based on the readings and the preparation of two writing assignments.
GRADING
25%
25%
Class Participation and Journals
Oral Presentations
25%
25%
Midterm Paper
Final Paper
TENTATIVE COURSE SCHEDULE
September 19 INTRODUCTION: God, Science and Doubt: Thomas Traherne and
Unlearning the Devices of this World
September 26 The Alembic and the Crucifix: Mystical Vision and Alchemical
Allegory in the works of Dame Julian of Norwich and Thomas Vaughn
October 3
Imagination and Perception: Blake’s Song’s of Innocence and
Experience
October 17
The Active Imagination: Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell
October 24
Other Visions: Blake’s Pickering Manuscript and Prophecies
October 31
Such Splendid Torment: Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” “This Lime Tree
Bower My Prison,” “Cristabel” and others
November 7
The Dark Voyage Toward Sanctity: Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, pt. 1
November 14 The Dark Voyage Toward Sanctity: Coleridge’s Rime, pt. 2
November 21 MIDTERM PAPER DUE/ Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads, “The World is Too Much With Us,” “Tis Said, That
Some Have Died for Love”
November 28 The Contemplation of Emotion: Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a
Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,”
Prelude, Book 12, 13
December 5
The Revolutionary Without a Cause: Lord Byron’s “She Walks in
Beauty,” “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimmage” Canto 3, “The Prisoner of
Chillon”
December 12 The High Ideal: Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” “Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “Adonais,” “To---”
December 19 Beauty and Truth: Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a
Nightingale,” “Ode to Psyche,” “To Autumn”
December 26 Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Sleep and Poetry,”
“Endymion” Book One
January 2
Lesser Known Women Romantic Poets
January 9
Emily and Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett considered as
Romantics
January 16 Romanticism’s Last: Poe, DeQuincey, Baudelaire and the passage
through to Modernism
FINAL PAPER DUE