In this course, we will study poetic mode and literary genre in the Romantic period.  Poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is often considered revolutionary, but this course aims to specify what is revisionary and what is traditional in Romantic poetry.  Our readings are grouped according to poetic modes that are traditional (the lyric, ode, sonnet, epic) as well as innovative (the fragment, the heavily-footnoted poem).  Authors include William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith.  By reading lyric and epic poetry, we will be able to consider the role of narrative in both poetry and fiction when we turn to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel that meditates on many of the same issues – inspiration, imagination, creation, nature – that are central to Romantic poetry.  This course will provide students with an appreciation for the cultural implications of poetic form, a sense of the complexity of literary transition, and a sensitivity to poetic mode and literary genre that will prove useful in studying this and any other literary period.