English 339: Studies in British Literature: Romantic Literature

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Percy Bysshe Shelley passionately declared at the end of his essay on poetry. His sentiments reflect a larger insistence during the Romantic era that poetry was profoundly meaningful, and could change the world. This class will explore the many ways poets imagined their craft as transformative. We will look at the way the major Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron) reconfigured the poetic forms they inherited to make them more responsive to a host of literary, cultural, and political revolutions. We will contrast their work with the poetry of other late 18th- and early 19th-century writers, including emerging working-class poets, regional poets, women poets, abolitionist poets, and antiquarian and gothic poetry. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between nature and transformation in these poems, viewing poetic production of the period through an eco-critical lens. May be taken for credit toward the Environmental Humanities major.