Romantic Poetry: Nature, Consciousness, and the Sublime

“The everlasting universe of things flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—now lending splendour, where from secret springs the source of human thought its tribute brings…” The sublime opening of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” characterizes much of what the English Romantic poets managed to achieve in language, a blending of the philosophical and the religious, the tranquility of the beautiful and the emotionally intense, the dense materiality of the real and the transcendent.

This course will explore the brilliant verse experiments that have come down to us as classics by William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others.

We’ll read lyric (odes, hymns, sonnets, and conversation poems), closet drama, and narrative verse (ballad, romance sections of autobiographical epic), with an eye toward the hybrid nature of these verse achievements and how voice and identity emerge in them.

We'll also read Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's brief journal in the sublime region of Mont Blanc.

Above all, we’ll learn to see in the confrontation between the poets and “all the mighty world of eye and ear” something reciprocal, as Wordsworth might say, both “what they half-create and what perceive.” This description was updated after registration opened to reflect the finalized reading list.

The full schedule is available in the syllabus.