5AAEB044 Lyric and the inner life: poetry and selfhood in the Romantic era
Level, semester taught
Convenor
Teachers
Credit Value
Teaching Arrangements
Assessment
2nd year module, Band 1, taught semester 2
Elizabeth Eger
Elizabeth Eger and Rowan Boyson
15 credits
1 hour lecture and 1 hour seminar weekly
One critical commentary of 1,500 words, on a set poem
(15% of final mark)
One essay of 3,000 words (85% of final mark)
Module outline
The Romantic era is associated with poetry of profound intensity, passion and
ambition. In an age of political, social and intellectual revolution, great claims were
made for poetry as a genre. Shelley famously wrote in his Defence of Poetry (1821) that
poets were the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ Wordsworth argued that
‘the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth and all time.’ But while poetry was hailed
as a medium of social transformation, it was equally sought out as a means of selfdiscovery and emotional retreat, introspection and reflection. Poets used their
writing to explore the boundaries of perception, memory and mental excursion. Why
did poetry matter, perhaps more than it has mattered since? How did poets address
and even construct new notions of selfhood?
This module will explore the theme of ‘selfhood’ in a range of Romantic
poems. We will consider how different poetic forms emerged (or were modified and
restructured) in response to contemporary ideas about individual identity in the
realms of philosophy, politics and medicine. Enlightenment philosophers such as
Locke and Hume placed fresh emphasis on the idea of ‘human nature’, viewing the
individual person as an integrated whole of biological, affective and cognitive
processes. Yet they doubted it was possible to define or know the ‘self’ as something
isolated, unitary or unchanging. Hume wrote that the self was ‘nothing but a bundle
or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an
inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.’ How did poetry try
to capture such perpetual flux and movement? Could poetic rhythm, form and
music communicate the complexity of the self? Topics and terms for discussion will
include the following: poetic vocation, sensibility, moral sentiment, virtue, genius,
imagination, introspection, retrospection, memory, perception, mind and body,
reason, liberty, freedom, slavery, melancholy, enthusiasm, confession and the
association of ideas. Many of these concepts were fiercely debated –and some redefined – in the Romantic era. We will explore the Romantics’ prolific and
innovative use of poetic forms, in order to arrive at a clearer understanding of how
they used their craft in order to describe the contours of modern selfhood.
Lecture/Seminar programme (including texts studied)
Week One Introduction: histories and theories of the self from
Enlightenment to Romanticism
Reading
Anne Finch, A Nocturnal Reverie (1713), John Clare, I am (1848,c. 1840)
Week Two Mind and body
Reading
Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717)
Mary Wortley Montagu, Saturday: The Smallpox (1716)
and Epistle from Arthur Gray the Footman, after his Condemnation for
attempting a Rape (first published 1747)
Week Three Vision, Disorder and Vocation
Reading
Richard Savage, The Wanderer (1729)
Samuel Johnson, The Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744)
Week Four Elegy and autobiography
Reading
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821)
Week Five
Reading
Sensibility and solitude in the Romantic sonnet
Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, and other Essays (1784)
Week Six
READING WEEK
Week Seven Nature and the language of man
Reading
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Mary Robinson, Lyrical Tales (1800)
Week Eight ‘Is there aught beyond?’ Conversation poems and the self
Reading
Anna Barbauld, A Summer Evening’s Meditation (1773)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight (1798)
*Week Nine ‘Growth of a poet’s mind’: epic and autobiography
Reading
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805) Book 1
Week Ten
Reading
Legendary selves: mock-epic and the Romantic hero
Byron, Don Juan, canto 1 (1819)
Week Eleven Memory and identity in the Romantic Ode
Reading
Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood (1807)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dejection: an ode (1802)
John Keats, Ode to Melancholy (1819)
Supplementary Bibliography
Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition.
(Oxford, 1953).
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature.
(New York: Norton, 1971).
Barton, Anne, Byron: Don Juan (Cambridge UP, 1992)
Bennett, Betty T, and Stuart Curran (eds) Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Johns
Hopkins UP, 1996)
Bewell, Alan, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the
Experimental Poetry (Yale UP, 1989)
Bromwich, David, ed., Romantic Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987).
Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English literature and its background
1760-1830 (Oxford UP, 1981)
*Curran, Stuart, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990 - second edition)
Curran, Stuart, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism (Cambridge, 1996)
Ferguson, Frances, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation
(Routledge, 1992)
Hallberg, Robert von, Lyric Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
Hardy, Barbara, The Advantage of Lyric: essays on Feeling in Poetry (London: Athlone
Press, 1977)
Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998)
Jarvis, Simon, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006)
Kitson, Peter J (ed), New Casebooks: Coleridge, Keats and Shelley (Macmillan, 1996)
Levinson, Marjorie, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge UP,1986)
Lovejoy, Arthur. ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.’ 39 (1924)
McGann, Jerome, The Romantic Ideology : A Critical Investigation (University of Chicago
Press, 1983)
Morton, Timothy, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World
(Cambridge UP, 1994)
Nowottny, Winifred, The Language Poets Use (London, 1964)
Riley, Denise, The words of selves: identification, solidarity, irony (Stanford, 2000)
Roe, Nicholas, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Clarendon, 1997)
Stabler, Jane, Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie (Palgrave, 2002)
Starr, Gabrielle, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore: John Hopkins, 2004)
Simpson, David, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1993).
*Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: the making of modern identity (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1992)
Vendler, Helen, The Odes of Johns Keats (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1983)
Wellek, René, ‘The Concept of 'Romanticism' in Literary History I (1949) 1-23; 14772.
Wood, Nigel, Don Juan (Open University Press, 1993)
Wordsworth, Jonathan, M H Abrams and Stephen Gill (eds), The Prelude, 1799, 1805,
1850 (Norton, 1979)
Wolfson, Susan J, The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge UP, 2001)
Reference works
The New Princeton Encylopaedia of Poetics (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2012))
Eighteenth-Century Poetry: an annotated anthology, eds David Fairer and Christine Gerrard
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003 - second edition)
Romantic Poetry: an annotated anthology, eds Michael O’Neill and Charles Mahoney
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)
Useful websites
Romantic Circles is a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romanticperiod literature and culture. It is the collaborative product of an ever-expanding
community of editors, contributors, and users around the world.
http://www.rc.umd.edu/
Blackwell’s Literature Compass - Romanticism section
Literature Compass publishes peer-reviewed articles on the most important research
and current thinking from across the entire discipline.
http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/
Jack Lynch’s Literary resources pages
Lynch is the Samuel Johnson of our day - comprehensive reference resources for
primary and secondary literature relating to the eighteenth century.
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/%7Ejlynch/Lit/
Voice of the shuttle - Romanticism resources
http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2750
Nines - Nineteenth Century scholarship online. See ‘Romantic Age’ resource
http://www.nines.org/
The Romantic chronology
http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/
British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832
http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/