Romantic Poetry: Ecosubjectivity and the Sublime

The English Romantic poets, in exploring the deepest recesses of nature and of consciousness, produced a body of work in the tenor of the sublime. Among them, two poets who made the reciprocal powers of mind and nature a running theme were William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These towering figures of first and second-generation Romanticism, respectively, fundamentally transformed the nature of poetry in English - its capacity for emotional authenticity, its thirst for transcendence, its focus on subjectivity, or what we might now call eco-subjectivity. In odes, autobiographical epic, hymns, sonnets, mythopoeic romance, and blank-verse narrative and lyric, they have left a legacy of verse achievements fundamentally different in style but both focused on what Shelley calls "the everlasting universe of things." Together, they show how voice and identity emerge as the poet half-creates the world he half perceives. We'll also read Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's topographical description in her brief History of a Six Week's Tour, Percy Shelley's letters from that same trip through the Alps describing the glaciers of Mont Blanc and the Arve River Valley, and Lord Byron's closet drama Manfred.