V41.0515
Spring 2006
The Lake School
Magnuson
l9 University Pl. 531
pm1@nyu.edu
Required Texts
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Oxford pb.
Paine, Rights of Man, Oxford pb. (N.B. SIX COPIES IN BOOKSTORE—OUT OF
PRINT)
Wordsworth, Poetry: The Major Works, Oxford pb
Coleridge, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, Norton Critical Edition pb.
Dorothy Wordsworth Journals, Oxford pb.
Written Work. There will be two eight-page papers. The first will be due Mar. 8; the
second, Apr. 26. There will be a final.
Class participation.
Each week students will be responsible for coming to class with two questions or
comments for oral presentation based on the reading.
Websites.
There are some useful sites on the web. I recommend “Romanticism on the Net”
which has scholarly articles, book reviews, and useful links; “Romantic Circles,” mostly
on the second generation Romantics, which also has articles, links, and discussion issues,
and “Voice of the Shuttle,” which has extensive bibliography and links. “The Romantic
Chronology” is useful for historical overview. Of less importance are The Friends of
Coleridge website and The Dove Cottage website (mostly for school children and
tourists—but there’s a tour of Dove Cottage).
In general the web is useful for bibliography from the best libraries in the world
(NYPL, British Library, Library of Congress, etc.) Some are useful for electronic texts,
but copyright laws often prevent the best texts from being presented. The works of
literary interpretation and scholarship, even in some journals that are peer reviewed, are
of uneven quality, since those who post them may be single individuals, whose work is
not accepted elsewhere; commercial firms, whose interest is in selling books; and minor
journals, with a very small circulation. The best critical and historical work is published
in books and articles in scholarly journals, many of which are available for recent years
or longer through Bobst in e-journal form. Of course, the most useful source for
criticism and scholarship is the MLA bibliography, also available from Bobst in
electronic form.
Tentative Schedule
Jan. 18. History and Method
Jan. 23. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1-35, 75-81.
Rights of Man, 89-139, 161-166 (roughly first fifty page and pages on the
Declaration of the Rights)
Jan. 25. CPP: A Moral and Political Lecture; On the Present War; Lectures on Revealed
Religion; The Plot Discovered.
Jan. 30. CPP: The Watchman; On the Slave Trade; Once a Jacobin, Always a Jacobin.
Feb. 1. CPP: Poems 1796.
Feb. 6. CPP: Ode on the Departing Year; Poems 1797; The Visions of the Maid of
Orleans; The Mad Ox; and Fire, Famine, and Slaughter.
WW: Salisbury Plain
The Anti-Jacobin, handout
Feb. 8. CPP: Fears in Solitude, France: An Ode, Frost at Midnight, This Lime-Bower My
Prison.
Feb. 13 and 15: Lyrical Ballads (1798). CPP: Rime of Ancyent Marinere (read the 1834
version and scan the 1798 version), Foster-Mother’s Tale, The Nightingale, The
Dungeon. And also The Wanderings of Cain.
WW: The following from Lyrical Ballads: Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (p. 591);
The Old Cumberland Beggar, Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House, Goody
Blake and Harry Gill, The Thorn, The Idiot Boy, Lines written in Early Spring, Anecdote
for Fathers, We are Seven, Simon Lee, The Last of the Flock, Expostulation and Reply,
The Tables Turned, Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey.
And also A Night-Piece and The Discharged Soldier.
Feb. 20. WW: Home at Grasmere and Appendix D.
Feb. 22. CPP: Christabel, Kubla Khan, The Pains of Sleep.
Feb. 27. CPP: Lyrical Ballads (1800). CPP: Love.
WW: To a Sexton, ‘If Nature, for a favorite Child,’ The Fountain, The Two April
Mornings, “A slumber did my spirit seal,” Song (“She dwelt among th’ untrodden
ways”), “Strange fits of passion I have known,” Lucy Gray, A Poet’s Epitaph, Nutting,
“Three years she grew in sun and shower,” The Brothers, Hart-Leap Well, Poems on the
Naming of Places, Rural Architecture, The Childless Fathers, Inscription: for the Spot
where the Hermitage stood, ‘ ‘Tis said, that some have died for love, Lines: Written with
a Slate-pencil, The Oak and the Broom, The Waterfall and the Eglantine, The Two
Thieves, The Idle Shepherd-boys, A Character, Michael.
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
Mar. 1. WW: The Prelude 1798-1799. (Photocopy)
Mar. 6 WW: The Prelude 1798-1799.
Mar. 13 and 15. Spring Break
Mar. 20. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal. The Grasmere Journal, 22-26, 68-137; The
Alfoxden Journal, 141-153.
Re-read “A Whirl-blast …” and “A Night-piece.”
Also “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” and
“Written in March.”
Mar. 22. WW: Ode (Immortality Ode) 1-4
CPP: A Letter to __, Dejection: An Ode.
Mar. 27. WW: Ode, competed. Resolution and Independence
DWJ: Oct. 3, 1800
Apr. 3. WW: (mostly from Poems in Two Volumes, 1807): I traveled among unknown
men, Beggers, Yarrow Unvisited, “She was a Phantom of delight,” Ode to Duty, “I
wandered lonely as a cloud,” Stepping Westward, The Solitary Reaper, Elegiac Stanzas
from Sonnets: “Nuns fret not,” “With ships the sea was sprinkled,” Composed
upon Westminster Bridge, “The world is too with us,” “It is a beauteous Evening.”
from Sonnets Dedicated To Liberty: “I griev’d for Buonaparte,” Calais, August
15, 1802, On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, To Toussaint L’ouverture,
September 1st, 1802, Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland, London
1802, “Great men have been among us.”
Apr. 5. The Prelude, 3-6
Apr. 10. The Prelude, 7-11
Apr. 12. The Prelude, 12-13.
CPP: To a Gentleman (To William Wordsworth)
Apr. 17. CPP: Shakespeare Criticism
WW: Preface to Poems (1815)
Apr. 19. CPP: Biographia Literaria.
Apr. 24. CPP: Biographia Literaria.
Apr. 26.
May
1.