English 151JD
The Younger Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron

Instructor: James Donelan
Monday, Wednesday 12:30- 1:45 BSIF 1217
Enroll: 54866
Office: 1523 South Hall
Office Hours: Monday, 11-12; Tuesday, 9:30-10:30, or by appointment.

Thanks for a great quarter!
Yours,

Mr. D.

Description: The course will examine the works and lives of three major English Romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and George Gordon, Lord Byron, with attention to their political, social, and intellectual contexts. All were younger than the other major Romantics; all died young; all created enduring Romantic metaphors through extraordinary poetry. A wide range of critical approaches, from the ideological to the textual, will reveal how these poets came to represent various forms of the Romantic artist-hero, the Promethean rebel, and the aesthete, as well as how their poetry continues to affect our conception of the aesthetic.

Requirements: A five-page essay; a midterm; an eight-page essay; an oral presentation, and a final examination, as well as in-class critical response assignments.

Texts:

Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics) Jerome J. McGann, Ed.
Oxford: Oxford UP
ISBN: 0192840401

John Keats: The Complete Poems
London: Penguin
0140422102

Shelley's Poetry and Prose, Second Edition (Norton Critical Edition)
New York: Norton
0393977528

Syllabus:

I.                   George Gordon, Lord Byron: Romantic Anti-Hero

4/3       Introduction to the course; excerpt from “Lara” (handout)
4/5       “A Fragment,” “The Farewell to a Lady,” 1; excerpts from English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 3; “Written Beneath a Picture,” “To Thyzra,” 16; Letters to Augusta Leigh, 990-991; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto I, 19.

4/10     Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos II and III, 53.
4/12     Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, 145; “She Walks in Beauty,” 258; “Stanzas for Music,” 259; “Prometheus,” 264; “Darkness,” 272; “Beppo,” 316.

4/17     Don Juan, “Dedication” and Cantos I-VIII, 373.
4/19     Don Juan, Cantos IX-XVII, 678.

II.                Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poetic Prometheus

4/24     “Queen Mab,” 15; “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 92; “Mont Blanc,” 96; The Sensitive Plant,” 286.
4/26     “The Cenci,” 138; “Ode to the West Wind,” 298; “To a Skylark,” 304
4/28     First Essay Due.

5/1       “The Mask of Anarchy,” 315; A Defence of Poetry, 509.
5/3       “Prometheus Unbound,” 202.

5/8       Midterm

III.             John Keats: Romantic Aesthete

5/10     “To Lord Byron,” 39; “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem,” 56; “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 72; “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 334; “Lamia,” 414.
5/15     “Ode to Psyche,” 340; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 344; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 346; “Ode on Melancholy,” 348; “Ode on Indolence,” 349; “To Autumn,” 434.

5/17     “Endymion: A Poetic Romance,” Book I, 107; “Hyperion: A Fragment,” 283; “The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream,” 435.

IV.              The Death of Romanticism

5/22     Shelley, “Adonais,” 409; Byron, “Who kill’d John Keats?”  “So We’ll Go No More A’Roving,” 315.
5/24     Byron, “Manfred,” 274; “The Vision of Judgment,” 939.

5/29     Memorial Day—no class.
5/31     Shelley, “The Triumph of Life,” 481; “On Life,” 507.
6/1       Second Essay Due.

6/5       Byron, “On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year,” 969; Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes," 312. Oral presentations.
6/7       Final class. Oral presentations, continued, and conclusions.

6/13     Final Exam, 12-3