The Revolutionary Muse: Form and Theme in Romantic Poetry and Poetics
Summary
This seminar series will explore the irresistibly rich flowering of the British Romantic psyche across
a range of poetic forms. Class time will be devoted largely to close reading of individual poems (and,
where relevant, variant versions thereof). Without apology we will use our sessions together as an
opportunity to slow down and examine these remarkable texts in all their irreducible singularity.
Students will be encouraged to treat each such intensive encounter as an invitation to more
extensive immersion outside of class time, with systematic guidance being offered to that end. We
will experiment from week to week with a variety of reading strategies, as together we try to learn
‘how to read’ Romantic poetry in an alert and critical manner. Our topic will by no means be
reduced to formalist categories however: awareness of historical, philosophical and theoretical
context will inform - and emerge from - our intuitive and analytical response to individual poems
and writers.
Aims
The aim of this course is to cultivate a strong appreciation of poetry and poetics in the Romantic
period. It will examine: theories of poetic inspiration; models of self and society; themes of time,
transience and transcendence; the innovative use of verse-forms; the development of Romantic
aesthetics and its role in the shaping of modern mentality.
Outline of Syllabus
Week 1. Introduction
Focus Texts: To be handed out in class
Week 2. William Wordsworth (I)
Focus Text: ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye
during a tour, 13 July 1798’
Week 3. Wordsworth (II)
Focus Texts: ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, 3 September 1802’, ‘Ode. Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’
Week 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (I)
Focus Texts: ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, ‘Frost at Midnight’
Week 4: Coleridge (II)
Focus Text: ‘Christabel’
Week 5: George Gordon Byron
Focus Text: ‘Prometheus’
Week 6: Other Voices (I)
Focus Texts: Charlotte Smith ‘To a Nightingale’, Robert Southey ‘The Idiot’
Week 7: STUDY WEEK: NO MEETING
Week 8: Other Voices (II)
Focus Texts:, Charles Lamb ‘Living without God in the World’, John Clare ‘Ere I had known the
world and understood’, Felicia Dorothea Hemans ‘Second Sight’
Week 9: John Keats (I)
Focus Texts: ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
Week 11: Keats (II)
Focus Text: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’
Week 10: Percy Bysshe Shelley (I)
Focus Texts: ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’
Week 12: Shelley (II)
Focus Text: ‘Mont Blanc. Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’
Required text:
Students are strongly recommended to acquire a copy of the 3rd edition of Duncan Wu (ed.)
Romanticism: An Anthology (Blackwell).
Dr. Daragh Downes
downesda@tcd.ie