ENGL 6390 - Studies in Romanticism: Wordsworth, Keats, and Critics

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

C. Chase.

This seminar will be a close encounter with the poetry of Keats and Wordsworth, occasioning an exploration of how to write and read literary criticism. Some questions we’ll consider: How can we think about poetry in terms of its reception—how it fits into a social, literary, and cultural history—and also in terms of its stunning gratuitousness, its inexplicable production? How did Keats and Wordsworth each achieve a recognizable voice and (eventually) cultural authority, while radically altering poetic diction and offending class-inflected taste? As well as reading some recently written critical essays that are especially far-reaching or especially problematic, we will read Keats’s and Wordsworth’s own critical writing. Requirements: oral presentations in class, plus the drafting of two critical papers and completion of one.