Learning outcomes:
This course has been designed to enable you to:
- Become acquainted with different metrical forms in Shelley’s poetry
- Become aware of aspects of his poetic language
- Be aware of some elements of literary and political history that inform his poetry
Course sessions:
1. Shelley 1816
1816 is the first year that Shelley, at the age of twenty three, publishes a collection under his own name. He has previously published novels and tracts as well as poetry and his interests are now firmly established. The ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ will form the core of this lecture and we will look at aspects of his style and how and what it communicates.
2. Shelley 1819
Shelley is now living in Italy, but his despair over England is as piercing as ever. The Sonnet, ‘England in 1819’, and, of course, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ show the radicalism that created the rupture with his father, but ‘Ode to the West Wind’ shows the complex lyricism which shaped his posthumous reputation in Britain.
3. Shelley 1820
Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ shows the full richness of his style, its hyper-vivid images, its syntactic denseness, its rapid shifting of description, its complex rhyme forms and metrical changes, its refusal to create fixed meanings. Also, again, its ostensible subject matter, ‘Liberty’, shows how Shelley’s interest in philosophy and politics reflects the revolutionary and reactionary times he lived in.
4. Shelley 1821
In 1821 Keats, who along with Byron and Shelley is seen as one of the great writers of this second generation of the Romantic movement, dies in Rome and Shelley writes ‘Adonais’ as a memorial to his fellow poet. It has become a key cultural artefact, which ironically speaks for that whole generation of poets – Shelley was to die the following year and Byron dies two years after that. We will look at what has created this longevity.
5. Shelley 1822
The mysteriousness and beauty of ‘To __’ and ‘The Triumph of Life’ Shelley’s last work, left unfinished at his death, will be the subject of our final lecture. What is it about his writing that still brings readers to it? Is he more honoured than studied or read? We will end the course at the year of his death at the age of twenty nine having covered many aspects of his challenging and rewarding poetry.
Non-credit bearing
Please note that our Virtual Summer Festival of Learning courses are non-credit bearing.
Certificate of Participation
A certificate of participation will be sent to you electronically within a week of your Summer Festival course(s) finishing.
