CURRICULUM GUIDE

British Romantic Poetry

Hugh Roberts, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Irvine

This curriculum guide explores some ways into thinking about themes and
developments in British Romantic Poetry through images. I use images in teaching
Romantic poetry both as a way of giving students alternative cognitive routes into
the conceptual arguments I’m making and to help them visualize the worlds—both
historical and geographical—in which the poetry they’re reading was written and
set. This guide is not organized to follow the actual sequence of a particular course,
but to provide instructors with some starting points for deploying images related to
major themes and writers in the period.

C A SPA R DAV I D FR I ED R I C H , T R EE W I T H R AV EN S A N D PR EH I STO R I C

T U M U LUS O N T H E BA LT I C COA ST, C . 1822 .
I m a g e a n d o r i g i n a l d at a p rov i d e d by Er i ch Lessi n g Cu l tu re a n d Fi n e A r t s
A rch i ves/A RT R E SO U RC E , N .Y. ; a r t res .co m

1. The French Revolution

No historical event in our period is so important for understanding the emergence
of Romanticism and the ideas which animated it. These images help to convey
both the original liberatory promise of the Revolution and the descent into brutal
violence and regicide that spurred a generation to question the ideals of Enlighten-
ment rationality which they had thought the Revolution embodied. A revolutionary
playing card with a figure of a sans-culottes replacing the traditional (royalist) face
cards shows the profound sweep of the Revolution’s cultural changes. The “Bal de la
Bastille” shows the Parisian crowds dancing atop the ruins of the Bastille one year
after its fall signaled the start of the Revolution. A Gillray caricature of 1793 shows
the horror that swept Europe in the wake of the September Massacres. 

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2. Napoleon
Napoleon is the “world historical figure” who bestrides our period like a colossus,
both as hero and as bogeyman. He is a useful figure for thinking about Romantic
conceptions of genius and the power (and danger) of the individual will. He is also
a figure whose artistic representations capture both the emerging artistic language
of Romanticism (as in David’s famous portrait of the crossing of the alps) and the
persistence of neoclassical imagery and aesthetics through the Romantic period.
The English war, first with Revolutionary France and then with Napoleon’s Imperial
France, is a constant backdrop to the poetry of our period. That war also produces
other “Great Men” such as Admiral Nelson and the Duke of Wellington.

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3. Regency England
In this section I have gathered some images which convey some sense of ordinary
life in our period. Fashions, architecture, furniture: These all help students con-
jure up some sense of the material culture of the world in which our authors moved
and wrote.

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4. The Gothic
The taste for “Gothic” art, design, and literature precedes the emergence of Roman-
ticism but is also one of the hallmarks of the Romantic period. From Coleridge’s
“Christabel” to Byron’s “Manfred” to Shelley’s “The Cenci,” it profoundly marks
British Romantic Poetry. This period overlap from the mid-eighteenth century into
the early nineteenth century makes the Gothic particularly useful for thinking about
the continuities and discontinuities from the age of the Enlightenment into the Ro-
mantic era. How does the “unreason” of the Gothic function in an age of Reason and
how does that change in an era that is calling into question the value of Enlighten-
ment rationality?

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5. Romanticism in Art
In this group of images we offer students a chance to explore the emergence of Ro-
manticism in the visual arts. We begin with Joseph Wright’s “Experiment on a Bird
in the Air Pump,” in which the scientist is at once the hero of rationality, bringing
the light of reason into darkness, and a Gothic villain, torturing a helpless animal
whose fate wrings tears from the young girl, wiser than the adults around her. Works
by J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Caspar David Friedrich, and Eugene Delacroix
allow students to explore the Europe-wide spread of Romantic ideas to which they
will find ready analogues in the poetry they’re reading: Compare Turner’s Venice
with Shelley’s in “Julian and Maddalo”; Wordsworth on top of Mt. Snowdon in
his “Prelude” with Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above the Sea of Mist;
Delacroix’s Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missalonghi with Byron’s “The Isles of
Greece.” Above all, we see the common fascination with nature’s sublime power and
the promise of a spiritual reward in a proper appreciation of nature.

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6. Neoclassicism
As with the Gothic, it is important to consider the aesthetic continuities with the past
as well as the innovations of the period. That “Romantic Art” embraces such appar-
ent extremes as, say, Delacroix and Ingres can help students understand some of the
profound aesthetic differences among British Romantic writers. When Wordsworth
famously dismissed Keats’s “Hymn to Pan” as a “pretty piece of paganism,” or when
Byron lashed out at the “Lakers” for undervaluing Pope and Dryden we see the same
tensions at play.

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7. Orientalism
Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and Syria spurred a Europe-wide fascination with the
Near East. Mingling with the Romantic obsession with the “primitive” (and other
states that free us from the trammels of over-rational “civilization”) this fostered the
creation of an imaginary world of dark-eyed beauties and “savage” but proud men.
From Byron’s youthful romances to his crowning achievement, Don Juan, from
Southey’s “The Curse of Kehama,” through Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Shelley’s
“Hellas,” Keats’s “Endymion,” Felicia Hemans’s “The Siege of Valencia,” and beyond,
we see this construction of an imagined “Other” which allows a critical or satiri-
cal distance from Western cultural values, while, unfortunately, often perpetuating
reductive stereotypes of the “Oriental” world.

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8. Slavery
The fight against the slave trade was one of the signature liberal causes in late
eighteenth century England. The massive conservative reaction against all kinds
of “radical” initiatives caused by England’s war with Revolutionary France set that
cause back years longer than would otherwise have been the case. Exploring late
eighteenth century and Romantic responses to slavery and the slave trade is a useful
way, again, to think through continuities and discontinuities between Romantic
period literature and its precursors (especially the late eighteenth century literature
of Sensibility).

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9. Victorian Reinventions
Victorian artists frequently drew on the works of Romantic poets for inspiration.
Just as it is interesting to think about Romanticism’s historical continuities with the
past, it can be useful to think about what it bequeaths to those who came after. It is
also often revealing for students to think about how a visual artist translates a poet’s
language into an image: what visual information does the poet actually give? Where
does the artist follow the poet to the letter and where not? What interpretation of the
poem is the artist working with in creating his or her image?

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10. Blake
In this and the remaining sections I gather together images specifically relating to the
“Big Six” of major British Romantic poets. Blake was a great artist as well as a great
poet, and students should be shown a representative selection of his artwork. I have
chosen a small selection here which allows students to understand how startlingly
different each individual, hand-colored version of any one of the Songs of Innocence
and of Experience was from any other. It also includes some of the great color prints
of 1795 which allow students to see Blake working through the ideas he explores in
his poetry in a purely visual medium.

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11. Wordsworth
Here we find images illustrating aspects of Wordsworth’s life (a portrait, his house at
Rydal Mount, the interior of his beloved Dove Cottage) as well as images relating to
his poetry: Edward Lear’s charming illustrations of the Lake District where so much
of Wordsworth’s poetry was written and set; images from Turner’s Simplon Pass
sketchbook; Tintern Abbey and the Wye River; and Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain.

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12. Coleridge
In this group we have some portraits of the poet; an illustration of a linden or “lime
tree” which helps students picture Coleridge’s famous “bower”; some modern
interpretations of the “eolian harp” which is such a crucial metaphor in Coleridge’s
writing; the first page of an MS version of Coleridge’s “Dejection”; an image of
Kubla Khan; and some of Gustave Dore’s great illustrations of “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner.” 

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13. Byron
Byron is the only British Romantic poet whose reputation and influence was truly
pan-European in the early nineteenth century. The numerous illustrations of his
work by Delacroix help to convey that. More than that, though, the tempestuous
drama of these images, their sublime landscapes and Orientalist costumes and set-
tings help students understand Byron’s centrality to so much of what defined the
Romantic era to those living in it. 

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14. Shelley
In addition to some Shelley portraits, this section includes images which help
students visualize some important scenes and figures in Shelley’s poems. Above all,
we have the portrait of Beatrice Cenci (attributed to Guido Reni), which Shelley de-
scribed as a major influence on his play about her. Turner’s paintings of Venice can be
usefully compared to Shelley’s descriptions in “Julian and Maddalo” and elsewhere.
The image of the tomb of “Ozymandias” (Ramesses II) helps students think about
the relationship of Shelley’s famous sonnet to the Orientalist images which were
flooding into Europe at this time. The maenad figures in Shelley’s “Ode to the West
Wind” (and elsewhere). Scenes of Chamounix and the Mer de Glace glacier help to
place Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” in the context of Romantic tourism and the quest for
sublime landscapes.

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15. Keats
It is always fruitful to approach Keats through images, as it helps students focus on
the richly sensuous nature of his poetry. The many, many Victorian illustrations of
his poems get a varied representation here. In addition, there are artistic approaches
to subjects, like the myth of Cupid and Psyche by artists who are contemporary to
Keats, which help frame his turn to classical mythology as part of a broader neoclas-
sical impulse within Romantic art. Finally, we have some portraits, Keats’s death
mask, and some images of Hampstead Heath, which help students to think about
the kind of “suburban” experience of “nature” which characterizes much of Keats’s
poetry (and which is the focus of many of the early attacks on Keats).

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