I picked this audio course up at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April 2024, and a couple of currents in my life crossed to give me the opportunity to listen to the 12 hours of the course: First, I realized that I was spending a half hour a day in the vehicle on a number of days per week, so I could feasibly listen to a course, albeit slowly, and cross country season was starting which would also give me the chance to listen to a couple of the lectures per weekend. The second intersector was the fact that I finished the complete works of Keats after slogging through it for, what, a decade? Of course, there’s no book report for it since it’s a single book edition which also contains the complete works of Shelley (P.B., not Mary). And since that book looks like this:
| Keats | Shelley |
It might be another decade until I finish the book. If ever.
At any rate, this course focuses really on the poets and some of their works instead of English history around the turn of the nineteenth century, although we get a bit, which is why the course is and Works and not and TImes like the Ben Franklin course.
The lectures include:
- Romantic Beginnings
- Wordsworth and the Lyrical Ballads
- Life and Death, Past and Present
- Epic Ambitions and Autobiography
- Spots of Time and Poetic Growth
- Coleridge and the Art of Conversation
- Hell to Heaven via Purgatory
- Rivals and Friends
- William Blake–Eccentric Genius
- From Innocence to Experience
- Blake’s Prophetic Books
- Women Romantic Poets
- “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know”
- The Byronic Hero
- Don Juan–A Comic Masterpiece
- Shelley and Romantic Lyricism
- Shelley’s Figures of Thought
- Shelley and History
- Shelley and Love
- Keats and the Poetry of Aspiration
- Keats and Eros
- Process, Ripeness, Fulfillment
- The Persistence of Romanticism
With 24 lectures, he really does have time to cover the major poets, their biographies (often, in the case of the second generation, short biographies). And he emphasizes how each influenced the others and how each influenced poets who came later. I mean, I can see it: I can see how my own work was influenced by Wordsworth, and I surely wanted to be a Byronic hero back when I was steeped in this stuff in the university.
So a good course to listen to. But, I have to admit, sometimes my mind drifted during the actual poetry reading, which should have been when I was paying the most attention. And the professor goes into a great deal of analysis and finds meanings deeper probably than the poet probably intended, which again shows me that I was wise to not become a professor myself with that English degree. No matter how much I like poetry, having to teach one or more courses like this every semester for thirty years…. Not gonna lie, I don’t think I’d like it much at all. But the results (like this course)? I like them.
