Beyond Romanticism: Green Lanes & Byways (an Online Reading Group)
What are the contours of Romanticism beyond the ‘big six’ poets? There is no doubting the achievements of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, or Byron, Shelley and Keats: but their poetry sprang from a culture as infinitely rich and various as their verse itself, marked by social ferment and the radical ideas of revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas. On this reading course, poet and academic Dan Eltringham leads you down some of the green lanes and byways of British Romanticism, from its roots in 18th century loco-descriptive, agrarian, pastoral and georgic poetry, through its lesser-known poets, thinkers and artists. Setting the familiar Romantic poets in their broader social and artistic contexts, we will encounter on the road the rural cadences of William Cowper and the botanical precision of Charlotte Smith (both great influences on Wordsworth), the neglected Lake Poet Robert Southey, the mysterious Scottish Bard ‘Ossian’, John Clare’s anti-enclosure poetry, and the work of marginalized female poets such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Dorothy Wordsworth. The course also glances ahead to the legacy of Romanticism in British and American poetry and aesthetics, and will consider Romantic visual art from Constable and Turner onwards.
This is a private group. To join you must be a registered site member and request group membership.