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ROMANTICON: Romantic Poets
Taught by Matthew Gasda, Anthony Galluzzo, Sam Willman, and Paul Franz
April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 & May 7 (Thursdays)
7:00 pm to 8:30 pm
Remote (over Zoom)
The editors of Romanticon (Matthew Gasda, Anthony Galluzzo, Sam Willman, and Paul Franz) invite you to spend six weeks reading and discussing four of the essential poets of the Romantic tradition: Keats, Byron, Shelley, and Rilke:
Week 1 — Whole Team — Overview & Meet and Greet
All four editors introduce the course, lay out the arc from English Romanticism through its continental afterlife, and get to know the group. We'll discuss what "Romantic" means to us now and what we hope to recover through the reading of select poems.
Week 2 — Sam Willman — Rilke
”Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.” Rilke can teach us how to see one’s life, the experience of it, the objects and people around us, as omens on a path through the contradictions of thought. We will focus on Rilke’s later thing-poems, written in French, at the end of his life “relieved of the burden of his life’s work.” and trace a movement from the complicated spirals of German, to the simple oscillations of the French poems: from transcendence to immanence. A “counter-Adamic” preparation for death.
Week 3 — Anthony Galluzzo — The Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge)
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads–which include Coleridge’s “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”--arguably represent the high point of 1790s-era English “Jacobin” writing even as this coauthored collection inaugurates the English romantic tradition in a very self-conscious way if we attend to the 1798 edition’s “Advertisement.” As Wordsworth announces: “The majority of the following poems are to be considered experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” Revolutionary poetry and literature encode radicalism in their language and form; yet this radical break paradoxically consists–for both Wordsworth and Coleridge–in the reinvention of vernacular traditions such as the ballad. Here is one of the many paradoxes of first-generation romanticism that we will explore as we examine various poems from both editions of the Lyrical Ballads.
Week 4 — Matt Gasda — Keats
The poet of negative capability, of being "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." We'll close read some of the major Keats, and look at the technical, lexical way Keats turns sensation into thought and thought back into sensation... and why that matters for anyone trying to write or live honestly today... something about the odes as a cognitive technology (if memorized).
Week 5 — Paul Franz — Shelley
The most philosophical of the Romantic poets, Shelley is also (with the possible exception of Byron) that with the greatest tonal range (where tone and philosophy are always strangely conjoined). For this seminar, we will read his meditation on a possible world-spirit in “Mont Blanc,” as well as glimpses at his range of tones and moods, including selections from Prometheus Unbound and shorter lyrics.
Week 6 — Whole Team — Wrap-Up & Conclusions
We reconvene as a group to draw the threads together. What do these four poets share? Where do they diverge? What does a living Romanticism look like now... not as nostalgia (we hope) but as practice? Open discussion, final reflections, and whatever arguments remain unresolved.
——————
About Romanticon
Romanticon is an online journal of Romantic letters, "an imaginative and discursive space for the release and fulfillment of the truth which lies in human souls and in nature." Founded in 2025, it publishes essays, criticism, and creative work at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the life of the soul. Subscribe at romanticon.substack.com.
Taught by Matthew Gasda, Anthony Galluzzo, Sam Willman, and Paul Franz
April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 & May 7 (Thursdays)
7:00 pm to 8:30 pm
Remote (over Zoom)
The editors of Romanticon (Matthew Gasda, Anthony Galluzzo, Sam Willman, and Paul Franz) invite you to spend six weeks reading and discussing four of the essential poets of the Romantic tradition: Keats, Byron, Shelley, and Rilke:
Week 1 — Whole Team — Overview & Meet and Greet
All four editors introduce the course, lay out the arc from English Romanticism through its continental afterlife, and get to know the group. We'll discuss what "Romantic" means to us now and what we hope to recover through the reading of select poems.
Week 2 — Sam Willman — Rilke
”Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.” Rilke can teach us how to see one’s life, the experience of it, the objects and people around us, as omens on a path through the contradictions of thought. We will focus on Rilke’s later thing-poems, written in French, at the end of his life “relieved of the burden of his life’s work.” and trace a movement from the complicated spirals of German, to the simple oscillations of the French poems: from transcendence to immanence. A “counter-Adamic” preparation for death.
Week 3 — Anthony Galluzzo — The Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge)
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads–which include Coleridge’s “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”--arguably represent the high point of 1790s-era English “Jacobin” writing even as this coauthored collection inaugurates the English romantic tradition in a very self-conscious way if we attend to the 1798 edition’s “Advertisement.” As Wordsworth announces: “The majority of the following poems are to be considered experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” Revolutionary poetry and literature encode radicalism in their language and form; yet this radical break paradoxically consists–for both Wordsworth and Coleridge–in the reinvention of vernacular traditions such as the ballad. Here is one of the many paradoxes of first-generation romanticism that we will explore as we examine various poems from both editions of the Lyrical Ballads.
Week 4 — Matt Gasda — Keats
The poet of negative capability, of being "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." We'll close read some of the major Keats, and look at the technical, lexical way Keats turns sensation into thought and thought back into sensation... and why that matters for anyone trying to write or live honestly today... something about the odes as a cognitive technology (if memorized).
Week 5 — Paul Franz — Shelley
The most philosophical of the Romantic poets, Shelley is also (with the possible exception of Byron) that with the greatest tonal range (where tone and philosophy are always strangely conjoined). For this seminar, we will read his meditation on a possible world-spirit in “Mont Blanc,” as well as glimpses at his range of tones and moods, including selections from Prometheus Unbound and shorter lyrics.
Week 6 — Whole Team — Wrap-Up & Conclusions
We reconvene as a group to draw the threads together. What do these four poets share? Where do they diverge? What does a living Romanticism look like now... not as nostalgia (we hope) but as practice? Open discussion, final reflections, and whatever arguments remain unresolved.
——————
About Romanticon
Romanticon is an online journal of Romantic letters, "an imaginative and discursive space for the release and fulfillment of the truth which lies in human souls and in nature." Founded in 2025, it publishes essays, criticism, and creative work at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the life of the soul. Subscribe at romanticon.substack.com.