Romantic Poets

Daily Question for Friday, March 1: Defining Romanticism
Please read each of the seven poems assigned on the syllabus at least twice, watching for major themes and issues that arise in the works. Following that initial double reading, write down and bring with you to Friday's class, three declarations that might be included in a "Romantic Manifesto" defining the dearest-held beliefs of these poets. For each declaration, cite two passages from the assigned poems that imply the poets' dedication to that belief. Keeping in mind that Wordsworth and Keats are two different artists, men of different generations who did not think or write in unison, try to identify essential Romantic ideas and attitudes that they have in common. When composing the declarations, try to take into consideration the Romantics' approach to a variety of different subjects explored in the works you've already read in both semesters of Core (such as Beauty, Nature and Art, the Human and the Divine, Justice, Love, etc.).

Daily Question for Monday, March 4: Wordsworth's Romanticism in relation to Rousseau and Kant
Re-read Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and "My heart leaps up," and be prepared to discuss the following lines (read in the context of the poems in which they appear) in light of the works by Rousseau and Kant that we have studied. How are the ideas expressed by the poets related to the philosophers' explorations of such concepts as nature, human nature, morality, equality, the empirical vs. the purely rational, etc.? (Feel free, of course, to bring into the discussion any other lines from Wordsworth's poems that you find particularly relevant in exploring his relationship to the philosophers.)

From "Tintern Abbey":
lines 4-7: "Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion . . ."

lines 26-35: "I have owed to them / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; / And passing even into my purer mind, / With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too / Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, / As have no slight or trivial influence / On that best portion of a good man's life, / His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love."

lines 83-85: "That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more, / And all its dizzying raptures."

lines 102-111: "Therefore am I still / . . . / . . . well pleased to recognise / In nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being."

From "My heart leaps up"
lines 7-9: "The Child is father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety."

Daily Question for Wednesday, March 6: Keats' Language: Searching for the Essence of Poetry
The works we are reading by Wordsworth and Keats are the only non-dramatic poetry we read in its original language during the entire year of Core. Today, let's get away a bit from merely discussing the content of the works, and try to appreciate what makes the language of poetry different from ordinary language. Let's try to discover how it works. Please prepare for class by doing the following exercise on a small portion of one of the assigned poems by Keats (a line or two, or a stanza):

First, write a response to the portion of the text you have chosen. Express, to the best of your ability, the message it conveys to you, the ideas it embodies, the mood it creates. Don't worry about trying to read the poet's mind, but do read his language in careful, precise terms; explain what it says to you.
Next, write a dry, literal prose translation of the lines to which you have just responded; put them into a new set of words, not attending to meter, rhythm, rhyme, or delicate connotations. Go wild with the thesaurus (or your own vocabulary), substituting synonyms for all the most vivid nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Keep the pronouns (such as "I" and "thou"), articles (such as "an" and "the"), and proper nouns (such as "Arcady," and "Beauty") intact, but alter everything else to achieve an effect as different as possible from the original.
Finally, jot down some notes on what is lost in your "translation." What, in your original response to the text, would be missing in a response to your prose facsimile? Why is it lost? What does the language of the original say or do that the prose translation can't? Is it a matter of sound patterns (such as alliteration and rhyme)? Of interestingly-placed line breaks? Of particular connations associated with a particular word? Explore.