Early Moderns: Poetry and Politics

Poetry and Politics guides students through a tumultuous period of significant change in Western civilization. Nations and individuals grapple with questions of identity, what it means to be free, and what it means to be human. Enjoy the poetry of Pope, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browing, Arnold, Rossetti, Hopkins, and Poe. Explore the political treatises of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. Learn how these works reflect the period and influenced future generations.

Poetry and Politics is 1/2 High School Credit in either literature or history. As an “integrated humanities” course, Old Western Culture will constantly be incorporating history, literature, theology, philosophy, art, and art history, all through the eyes of the Great Books.

Course Objectives

1. To become proficient in the conversational approach to learning: close readings, interpretive questions, and Socratic discussions of the texts.
2. To gain a grasp of the literary figures and the historical framework of the time period.
3. To develop lateral thinking skills by analyzing and synthesizing themes and motifs.
4. To cultivate an appetite for learning as a way of life (the life of the mind).
5. To cultivate a desire to pursue the highest things.
6. To be able to think Christianly and write persuasively about perennial human questions.

Texts:

POETRY AND POLITICS

• Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man, and Ode on Solitude by Alexander Pope
• Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
• The Rhime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge
• Intimations of Immortality and The Solitary Reaper by Wordsworth
• She Walks in Beauty and The Destruction of Sennacherib by Byron
• In First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer by Keats
• Ode to the West Wind by Shelley
• The Lady of Shallot, In Memorium A.H.H., The Eagle, and Crossing the Bar by Tennyson
• Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, My Last Duchess, and Fra Lippo Lippi by Browning
• Dover Beach by Arnold
• Song, A Better Resurrection, and A Birthday by Rossetti
• God’s Grandeur, Windhover, and Pied Beauty by Hopkins
• The Cask of Omontillado, Anabel Lee, To Helen, The Raven, and The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe
• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Materials for this course will be made available free of charge by the instructor.