ENG 461 Enlightenment and Romantic British Literature

This survey explores the work of six poets whose names are most closely associated with the Romantic era--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, and Shelley--as well as works by other significant but less widely studied poets. The volume is alert to relevant contexts, and opens up ways of understanding Romantic poetry. In its central section 'Readings' it explores tensions, change, and continuity within the Romantic Movement, and examines a wide range of individual poems and poets through sensitive, attentive and accessible analyses. In addition, the authors provide a full introduction, a detailed historical and cultural timeline, biographies of the poets, and a helpful guide to further reading.

Analyzing Romanticism as a unique cultural phenomenon and a spiritual revolution, Dupré philosophically reflects on its attempts to recapture the past and transform the present in a movement that is partly a return to premodern culture and partly a violent protest against it. Following an introduction on the historical origins of the Romantic Movement, Dupré examines the principal Romantic poets of England (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats), Germany (Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Hölderlin), and France (Lamartine, de Vigny, Hugo), all of whom, from different perspectives, pursued an absolute ideal.