English Romantic Poetry

Periods of aesthetic history rarely exist in isolation. They often emerge in response to what came before. The Romantic era, lasting from roughly 1770 to 1848, exemplifies this trend. The Romantics were self-consciously aware of themselves as parts of a movement, aware that theirs was a period of flux and revolution; a period of organic change and growth, and a movement against the values and practices of their predecessors in the neo-Classical Age of Reason.

We are not speaking of the masses here, but of the intellectuals, artists, and creators. And in this relatively small, but historically determinate world, the Romantics were different. In place of the prevailing allegiance of the previous age to classical fixity, order, rules, rationalism and stability, they revered process, dynamism, flux and change. Above all, they elevated imagination over cold reason as a conduit to and expression of truth.

The emphasis in this course will not be on history, biography, subsidiary trends, movements and the like. Instead, we will work through close, often line-by-line readings to understand individual poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and perhaps Byron, and appreciate their power, depth, and richness.

*Please note - this workshop has been cancelled. 

Guest Instructor:
William Freedman was born in Newark, NJ, took a PhD in English Literature at the University of Chicago in 1964 and taught in the City University of New York system before moving to Israel in 1969. He taught English literature at the University of Haifa until his retirement in 2004 and, since then, he has taught part-time at the Sakhnin College of Teacher Education in the Arab town of Sakhnin. Bill received an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University in 1974 and was a practicing psychotherapist until his retirement in 2010. Bill has published books and a number of essays in literary criticism and theory, an oral history of baseball fans, and four books of poetry.