Session 1: Nature (Dec. 1)

We will read the following poems in class:

William Wordsworth

• "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
• "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1798" (e.g., "Tintern Abbey")
• "The world is too much with us"

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• "Ode to the west wind"

William Blake

• "Auguries of innocence"

Other suggested readingss:

• Keats' "To Autumn"
• Shelley's "Mont Blanc"
• Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight"
• Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (excerpt)

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"

Session 3: Religion, Politics, and Spirituality (Dec. 8)

Prepare for class by reading the following:

William Wordsworth

• "Ode: Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood"

William Blake

• Infant joy
• Infant sorrow
• The garden of love
• Holy Thursday
• London
• The tyger

John Keats

• Excerpt of letter to George and Georgiana Keats (Feb. 14, 1819)

Other suggested poems:

• Blake's "The clod and the pebble," "The chimney sweeper," and "The garden of love"
• Shelley's "Ozymandias"
• Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be"

Session 4: Art and Death (Dec. 10)

Prepare for class by reading the following poems:

William Wordsworth

• "A slumber did my spirit seal"

Lord Byron

• "Darkness"

John Keats

• "Ode on a Grecian urn"
• "Ode to a Nightingale"

Other suggested poems:

• Keats' "This living hand"
• Byron's "The dream"