Session 2: Love, Beauty, and States of Despair (Dec. 3)

Prepare for class by reading the following:

John Keats

• "Bright star"
• "La belle dame sans merci"
• "A thing of beauty" (excerpt from Endymion)
• Excerpts from letters to Benjamin Bailey (Nov. 22, 1817), to George and Tom Keats (Dec. 21, 1817), and to Fanny Brawne (July 25, 1819)

William Blake

• Excerpts from Marriage of Heaven and Hell and other sources on love, desire, and other human impulses
• "A poison tree"
• "The sick  rose"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• "The pains of sleep"

Other suggested readings:

• Keats' "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode on Melancholy"
• Shelley's "Hymn to intellectual beauty"
• DeQuincy's "The Pains of Opium" from Confessions of an Opium Eater (excerpts)
• Blake's "The mental traveller"
• Coleridge's "Dejection: An ode" and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"