Professor Adam Potkay brings his renowned expertise on the Romantic era to bear on the period’s principal poets. Providing detailed analysis of the lives and works of literary luminaries such as Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats, Professor Potkay examines the nature of Romantic poetry and provides insight on the stylistic flourishes and themes of this remarkable period.
Lecture 1 What Is Romanticism?
Lecture 2 Folk Culture, the Ballad Tradition, and Robert Burns
Lecture 3 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Ballads of Nature and the Supernatural
Lecture 4 Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800: Rustic Life and the Questionable Pleasures of Nature
Lecture 5 The Descriptive-Meditative Poem and the Divine in Nature
Lecture 6 Wordsworth and the Invention of Childhood
Lecture 7 Blake and Infantine Innocence
Lecture 8 Blake and Satanic Energy
Lecture 9 The Byronic Hero
Lecture 10 Byron and Shelley: Darkness and Light
Lecture 11 Gothic Horrors: Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Lecture 12 Keats’s (Mock-)Gothic Romances
Lecture 13 Keats’s Great Odes
Lecture 14 Byron’s Comic Epic: “Don Juan”