In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, and still in the early days of the worlds first Industrial Revolution, two British poets—William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge--set out to produce another kind of revolution that they hoped could save their readers from a harsh new world of culture and sensibility brought on by “causes unknown to former times.” Their experiments in poetry were informed by a likewise unprecedented analysis of the problems that they saw besetting their own moment. It was an extraordinary exercise in critical media theory very much avant la lettre. Both the experiments and the analysis had far-reaching on poets of their moment—especially Shelley and Keats—and poets beyond it, and have mattered much to the modern understanding of literature and criticism well into the twentieth century and into our own time. This course will take up the challenge of coming to terms with the Romantic “revolution in taste” in close engagements with both familiar and unfamiliar works. We will read other poets of the period, including Blake, Byron, Charlotte Smith, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld—and also come to terms with the massive legacy of Romantic poetry and poetics ever since, not least in the formation of modern practical criticism. There will be a short paper (3-4 pp.) and a longer one (15 pp.). (18th/19th)