English Romantic Poetry: Art, Crisis, and the Radical Imagination

Romanticism arrived in England with the publication of The Lyrical Ballads (1798), a radical work of poetry, written “in the real language of men,” which drew impetus from the same egalitarian ideals that spurred the architects of the French Revolution.  Yet, as the Revolution turned to Terror, its anonymous co-authors, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, became badly disillusioned, and with the crisis of political ideals came a crisis of poetic expression: Where, now, does meaning lie? What is the proper subject of poetry? What is poetry supposed to do? Living in the idyllic Lake District, Wordsworth sought consolation in his work—a corpus today often regarded as conservative and escapist. But the “apostasy” of the poet can be seen another way: as the search for the principles of a more just society. How can we understand English Romantic poetry in the wake of the French Revolution, particularly the poetry of its inaugural figure, William Wordsworth? What can it teach us—not simply about the forms, methods, and themes of English Romanticism; but about the interrelation of art and politics, the responsibility of the artist, and the object and purpose of art?

In this course, we will read closely Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a biographical poem composed mostly between 1800 and 1805 describing his youthful enthusiasm for the French Revolution and later disillusionment, alongside the Grasmere Journal of his sister and Lake District companion Dorothy, as we consider their reckoning with political failure and changing conception of poetry and its purposes. And we’ll read some poems by the ingenious, depressive Coleridge, produced in close conversation with the Wordsworth siblings. We’ll consider their work as a document of rising authoritarianism—foreign and domestic—while taking it as an invitation to think creatively about our own times. In what ways does the radical imagination of Romanticism form and deform itself out of the upheaval of the French Revolution? In privileging literature, did the Wordsworths relinquish hope in collective action? Or can the individual produce something useful to people living in later times and places? Could it be useful to us?