Instr:                 William Halloran
Office:              CRT 909,     229-2420 or Fax:  229-5964
e-mail:              halloran@uwm.edu
Office hours:     by appointment.

Course Information:                      TR  5:00-6:15pm   CRT 321

Course Description

The focus of this course will be a careful and critical reading of selected poems by British poets of the Victorian period, 1830-1900. Poets of this period are responsible for some of the best known and best loved poems in the English language.  Selected poems by the following poets  will be considered: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossettii, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, several poets of the English Decadence (among them, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, and Ernest Dowson), Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, the early W. B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde.

Emphasis will be placed on understanding the poems in their cultural context and as unique works of art.  Secondary emphasis will be placed upon gaining a better understanding of the term “Victorianism,” as it is used to describe a period and a movement in all the arts.  The major Victorian poets were heavily influenced by their great Romantic predecessors, but they were determined to carve out an independent voice for an age of industrialism and empire.  In so doing, they introduced new themes and new forms into English poetry and produced a body of work that stands on its own as a great achievement.

A continuing concern in the course will be the improvement of students’ ability to read and talk about poetry, orally and in writing.

Texts
An anthology of Victorian poetry, perhaps supplemented by paperback selections of Yeats and Wilde.