English 458/Romantic Poets
Professor Rosso
Spring 2008

Schedule of Classes

1/22

 Introduction
1/24 “The Romantics and Their Contemporaries” ( Longman Anthology 3-22); “Political and Religious Orders” (1099-1103, especially 1102).
1/29

Longman : “The Romantics and Their Contemporaries” ( Longman 22-29; 112-14); Charlotte Smith “To Melancholy”; Percy Shelley “Ozymandias”; John Clare “I Am.”

1/31

“The Abolition of Slavery” (209-10); Olaudah Equiano The Interesting Narrative (210-19; color plate 4); John Newton “Amazing Grace” (230); Hannah More “The Sorrows of Yamba” (240-44); Phyliss Wheatley “An Hymn to the Morning” (class handout).

See website links “Writings on Slavery” and “Empire and Slavery.”
2/5*

William Blake Songs of Innocence : “The Little Black Boy” (plates 9-10).
Use the Longman Anthology text with the Oxford plates when reading Blake.

Summary of Blake's poem due.
2/7

William Blake Songs of Innocence and of Experience : examine the combined title-page (plate 1) and the frontispieces (plates 2, 28); read both “Introduction” poems (plates 4, 30) and “The Lamb” (plate 8) and “The Tyger” (plate 42)

2/12

Blake's Songs : read both sets of “Holy Thursday”(plates 19, 33) and “The Chimney Sweeper” (plates 12, 37).

2/14 Blake's Songs : “London,” “The Little Vagabond.”
2/19*

Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (plates 1-7)

Short essay due.
2/21 Marriage: “Proverbs of Hell” (plates 7-10)
2/26 Marriage (plates 11-24). Letter “To Dr. John Trusler” (Longman 204-5).
2/28 Marriage: “A Song of Liberty” (plates 25-27).
3/4

William Wordsworth ( Longman 385-7); Lyrical Ballads : “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “We Are Seven,” “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned.”

3/6*

Lyrical Ballads : “Lines Written…above Tintern Abbey.”

Longer essay due
3/11

Lyrical Ballads : “Tintern Abbey,” “There Was a Boy.” Preface to Lyrical Ballads (408-11, 418-19).

3/13

Wordsworth “Resolution and Independence”; “My Heart Leaps Up.” Charlotte Smith “To the Shade of Burns”; Robert Burns ( Longman 371).

3/18

Spring Break

3/20

Spring Break
3/25

Midterm Exam

3/27 Samuel Taylor Coleridge “The Eolian Harp"; “Dejection: An Ode.”
4/1

Coleridge: “Dejection: An Ode”; “Kubla Khan.”

4/3

Coleridge: “Kubla Khan”; Mary Robinson “To the Poet Coleridge” (Longman 616-18); Anna Letitia Barbauld “To Mr. Coleridge” (handout).

4/8

Rights of Women ( Longman 319): Mary Wollstonecraft from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (281, 283-6, 288-96; Barbauld “The Rights of Woman” (315-16).

4/10

Barbauld “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”; J.W. Croker's Review (78-9).

4/15 Felicia Hemans “Casabianca,” “The Graves of a Household”
4/17*

Percy Shelley “To a Skylark,” “Sonnet: England in 1819.”

*Short paper on women writers.
4/22 Shelley “The Mask of Anarchy” ( Longman 824-34).
4/24 Shelley “Ode to the West Wind.”
4/29

John Keats “Sonnet: When I have fears,” “On sitting down to read King Lear once again.”

5/1

Keats “Ode to a Nightingale.”

5/6 Keats “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Letters: “To Reynolds” (996-98).
5/8

Keats “To Autumn.” Letters: “To George and Georgiana Keats” (1001-4).

5/15* Final Exam (12:45-2:45).

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