Romantic Poetry and Poetics MA Unit
Seminar Programme, Autumn 2015
1. Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Imagination (JF)
Main Preliminary Reading:
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805) (books 6 and 13), ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ (1802)
and ‘Preface to Poems’ (1815); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Kubla Khan', Biographia Literaria
(chapters 12, 13, 14, 17 and 18)
Available in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. by Stephen Gill and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. by H. J. Jackson (Oxford World’s Classics Series)
2. Romantic Autobiography (DK)
Main Preliminary Reading:
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805) (recommend editions: Jonathan Wordsworth et al,
eds., The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton Critical Editions, 1979); Jonathan Wordsworth,
ed., The Prelude: The Four Texts (Penguin Texts, 1995).
3. Thomas De Quincey (SC)
Main Preliminary Reading:
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) (recommended edition:
Penguin)
Also Recommended:
De Quincey’s ‘Suspiria De Profundis’ (1854)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Limbo’, ‘Ne Plus Ultra’, ‘The Pains of Sleep’.
Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradise (1860)
4. Language and Silence in Romantic Poetry (JF)
Main Preliminary Reading:
William Wordsworth, ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’, The Prelude (1805) (book 5), ‘The Brothers’;
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Love’, ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’; John Keats,
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
‘Essays upon Epitaphs’ are available in William Wordsworth, Selected Prose, ed. by John O
Hayden (Penguin Classics)
5. Romantic Women Poets (SM)
Main Preliminary Reading:
Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, 3rd edition, 1786, in Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology,
ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 67-88.
Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon, 1796, in Wu 1997, pp. 108-204.
Felicia Hemans, Records of Woman, 1828, in Wu 1997, pp. 514-572.
6. Romantic Scotland (RP)
Main Preliminary Reading:
Walter Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
2
7. Romantic Ecology (RP)
Main Preliminary Reading:
William Wordsworth, The River Duddon, ‘The Kitten and the Falling Leaves’, ‘The Redbreast
(Suggested in a Westmoreland Cottage)’
William Cowper, ‘The Needless Alarm’, ‘Yardley Oak’, ‘The Castaway’, ‘Epitaph on a Hare’,
‘To the Nightingale: which the author head Sing on New year’s Day’, ‘Walking with God’
John Clare, ‘[The Mouse’s Nest]’, ‘[Sheep in Winter]’, ‘[The seeding done the fields are still at
morn]’, ‘[Wild Bees’ Nest]’, ‘[The Badger]’, ‘The Flitting’ (all available in the Oxford Authors
John Clare, ed Robinson and Powell (1984))
Also Recommended:
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Picador, 2008), chapter 8: ‘The Place of Poetry’ (pp.
205-42)
(SC = Dr Stephen Cheeke; JF = Dr Jessica Fay; DK = Professor Daniel Karlin; SM = Dr Samantha
Matthews; RP = Professor Ralph Pite)