Welcome!

This is the class website for Mystical Themes in English Romantic Poetry: “To see a world in a grain of sand,” a course at the Osher Lifelong Institute, University of Washington, Dec. 1-10, 2009.

Readings for each class session are listed below and in the syllabus. Leave observations or questions for your fellow students and instructor in the comments section under the individual poems or under the class session.

The frontispiece to Songs of Innocence (1789) by William Blake

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"