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Note the slightly adjusted reading schedule

Student Presentations on Thursday, November 15

Manuel Sanchez: "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

Liz Lopez: "Bright Star"

Erica Almore: "When I have fears that I may cease to be"

Student Presentations on Tuesday, November 13

Heidi Harris: "Ode to Psyche"

Judith Ahumada: "Fancy"

Beatris Barajas: "To Autumn"

Angie Vargas: "Ode on Melancholy"

Student Presentations on Thursday, October 25

Telona Monette: "How many bards gild the lapses of time"

Arpine Zohrabyan: "To one who has been long in city pent"

John Gordon: "Address to the Same " ("Great spirits now ...")

Craig Newcomer: "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"

Students Presentations on Thursday, October 11

Amanda Jancu: “To the Daisy” (“In youth”)

Azucena Favela: “She was a Phantom of Delight”

Ruben de la Torre: “Ode to Duty”

Gilda Parodi-Swords: “Beggars”

Karla Posada: “Alice Fell”

Brendan Wagner: “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”

Nathan Smith: “The world is too much with us”

Agustina Vasquez: “I grieved for Buonaparte”

Susana Olmos: “The Solitary Reaper”

Ngoc Tran: “To a Butterfly”

Kin Frausto: “The Sparrow’s Nest”

Jacqueline Briseno: “To the Cuckoo”

File Under "Must be seen to be believed":

• Rap Version of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (Cumbria Tourism Board)

Description

: In a now-famous letter (27 October 1818) John Keats offered some reflections on genius and ambition:

As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.

Keats, like virtually all poets who wrote after Wordsworth, attempts to differentiate himself and his poetry from what Harold Bloom would call his “great precursor.” Often ridiculed and parodied, loved and hated, venerated and dismissed, the influence and legacy of Wordsworth was a vexed question to all English poets who followed him. The question of legacy was further complicated by his longevity. Unlike many of his contemporaries who died young, Wordsworth lived long enough to confound those many young poets who made the pilgrimage to Wordsworth’s beloved Lake District (as the twenty-one year old Keats did) expecting to see the revolutionary poet of Lyrical Ballads and encountering instead the respectable and increasingly conservative Sage of Rydal Mount. By focusing solely on the poetry and prose of these two key Romantic figures, this course will examine the complex nature of literary influence and consider what this particular pairing tells us about the literary history and culture of Romanticism.

We will begin with a close reading of Wordsworth’s poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the shaping influence of the French Revolution and the subsequent war with France on the development of Wordsworth’s poetic theories and practices. We will then read Keats’s poetry and letters in the context of Wordsworth, adding some later Wordsworth poems (such as excerpts from The Excursion (1814) to our consideration of the Wordsworth/Keats dynamic.

Reading List

Keats, John. John Keats: A Longman Cultural Edition. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. New York: Longman, 2007. (0-321-23616-5)

Wordsworth, William. Wordsworth: The Major Works. Ed. Steven Gill. New York: Oxford, 2000. (978-0192840448)