ENGL 450The Romantics
Writers of the British Romantic period (roughly 1790 to 1832) often made sweeping claims for the power of poetry and imagination. Percy Bysshe Shelley contended that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," while John Keats declared that "beauty is truth, truth beauty." Against the background of political revolution in France, the rise of industrialization and empire, and increasing social instability, Romantic writers turned to nature as a source of the self and looked back to childhood as a site of both innocence and ambivalence. Others turned their efforts to the supernatural and the gothic, hoping to inspire what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." This course is designed to provide an introduction to the richness and diversity of Romantic-era literature. It is not intended to be an exhaustive overview of the entire period, but rather an introduction to the best known Romantic ideas' many of which still influence the way we think about art and literature in the present day as well as an invitation to further study and engagement. In that spirit, we will not work from a predetermined definition of "romanticism," but instead will build a collective, working understanding of the concept.