The Romantic Period: Romantic Poetry and Poetics

Long Romanticism: a lively era of literary imagination, experiment, testing and adventure across genres--songs and lyrics, hybrid media (Blake's Songs), epic autobiography, modern "romance," odes, narratives, ballads, prose and fiction shaped on "poetic" principles. We sample the excitements (Blake, Wm Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Keats, Hemans, Barbauld, Charlotte Smith), along with critical statements and polemics: on slavery; the French Revolution; the rights of women; the long war, 1793-1815, modern science; modern psychology.