Course Code: ELL301
Course Description: This course analyzes representative examples of British poetry of the nineteenth century, that is, from the French Revolution to the first stirrings of modernism in the early 1900s. It comprises the poetry of two eras which came one after each other, namely Romantic and Victorian age. The first half of this module extends from the mid-1770s to the 1830s, a period marked by what Wordsworth referred to as those ‘great national events’ which were ‘almost daily taking place’: the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, imperial expansion, industrialization, and the growth of the political reform movement. The production and consumption of books took on a heightened political significance in these decades and this selection includes selection from the ‘big six’ Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, P.B. Shelley, Byron). The second half of this course includes the poetry of the poets who are called as ‘cunning terminators of Romanticism’ by some critics. This era, marked by the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837, known as Victorian age, spans till her death in 1901. The Victorians saw the virtues attendant upon a strong will as central to themselves and to their culture, and Victorian poetry strove to find an aesthetic form to represent this sense of the human will. Through close study of the metre, rhyme and rhythm of a wide range of poems - including monologue, lyric and elegy - the technical questions of poetics are related, in the work of these poets, to issues of psychology, ethics and social change.