Romantic Poetry and Criticism

This course will begin by posing a series of fundamental questions about romantic poems, beginning with Heidegger’s essay of 1946, “What Are Poets For?” At the outset of that essay Heidegger turns to Holderlin’s question from “Brot and Wein”: “ . . . and what are poets for in a destitute time”? Somewhat later in the meditation Heidegger defines his sense of poetry’s response to destitution: “To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.” All these terms need investigation, to be sure, “destitute,” “trace,” “fugitive gods,” “world’s night,” “the holy.” This class will operate roughly in this fashion. We will try to consider major statements that philosophers and theorists (including the poets themselves) have made about romantic poetry, and we will take the time needed to understand both the manner of address to the poems and the way both poems and address are transformed in the interchange.

Readings in the course will be drawn from five principal romantic careers: Blake, Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, and Keats. The readings may include, as well, some notice of Scott and Coleridge, even (very briefly) Carlyle. Coleridge and Carlyle provide the direct links to German philosophy, and to the interface between early and later 19th-century Romanticism, that is, between what we often think of as “the Romantic period” proper (1798-1832) and the subsequent Victorian age. There will be two competing models of understanding throughout the course, one ontological or existential (as suggested in my note from Heidegger above) and the other historical, concerned to situate the poetry in its time of revolution and world war and to question conventional models of attending to the poems based on an American literary criticism. This criticism has often been either willfully unhistorical and iconic, both in its formalist and de-formalist phases, or constrained by its own form of romantic ideology. Our way of conducting the class, its path, might be called “in quest of the ordinary”—a phrase I’ve taken from the title of Stanley Cavell’s encounter with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

If “being” and “history” are allowed to stand for different congeries of interest in the course, then our third term must be visible “nature.” The romantic imagination and reproduction of nature (literally of landscape) will be an integral concern of the course, and we will study, as time allows, contemporary images, not least by Turner and Constable, of the English and European landscapes which the poems traverse and invoke. Further, our interest in nature will extend to the current engagement of many critics with a romantic ecology, or Green Romanticism. We will also take note of Blake’s own work as a graphic artist of the highest significance, and we will read his work, where possible, in facsimile of his own self-produced “visionary books.” There will be a special unit on romantic cinema, including one or two evening presentations of clips from the long history of film versions of Frankenstein and its “hideous progeny.”

Class requirements: Several shorter writing assignments, including brief responses to poems and to theoretical interventions, and two longer critical essays of 5-7 pages. Final self-scheduled comprehensive examination.

Texts list:
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper
Colophon, 1971).

Blake's Poetry and Designs, ed. Mary L. Johnson and John E. Grant (Norton Critical
Edition, 1979).

William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (Penquin Books, 2004).

Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (Norton Critical Edition, 1977).

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 text), ed. J. Paul Hunter (Norton Critical Edition, 1996).

Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Houghton Mifflin, 1959).

Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and Gene Ruoff (Rutgers UP, 1993).

Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (Oxford UP, 1973); this is the same text as used by 299: Junior Seminar.

Via class packets:

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. McSweeney and Sabor (Oxford UP, 2000); selections via xerox).

Stanley Cavell, “In Quest of the Ordinary,” from Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Eaves and Fischer (Cornell UP, 1986).

Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement” and “Shelley Disfigured” from The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Columbia UP, 1984).

Thomas McFarland, “Fragmented Modalities and the Criteria of Romanticism,” from Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, 1981).

Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago UP, 1985); selected chapters (in brief).

Anne K. Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (Indiana UP, 1988); selected essays/passages.

Arden Reed, ed., Romanticism and Language (Cornell UP, 1984); selected essays/passages.

Classic essays and chapters, excerpted, from M. H. Abrams (from Natural Supernaturalism [1971]), Harold Bloom (Romanticism and Consciousness [1971], The Visionary Company [1971], and The Ringers in the Tower [1971]), Northrop Frye (from Fearful Symmetry [1947, 1969]), and Geoffrey Hartman (from Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 [1971], The Fate of Reading [1975], and The Unremarkable Wordsworth [1987]).
“Green Romanticism,” ed. Jonathan Bate, Studies in Romanticism, 35 (Fall 1996).

*English 252b satisfies the “introductory emphasis” requirement for the English major.