English 441B
Professor Laura Mandell
Fall, 1997

PAPER 1 or WEB BIBLIOGRAPHY

Due Dates:
Groups 1 and 2, October 6, 1997
Group 3, October 13, 1997

You have your choice in this class of writing two 3- to 5-page papers or making a web page. The web page is more like a research project: you will have to do some research in the library and, if you can, on the internet; you will also learn how to do the markup language for making a web page. The bibliography for your page is due with paper 1; the text of your page is due with paper 2. Because of the extra research involved, the text of the web page needs to be only 3- to 5- pages long.

Web Bibliography:

Please see the instructions attached or on line at: http://www.muohio.edu/~mandellc/eng441b/head.htm

Possible Topics:
"Christabel" and fantasy literature
Religious imagery in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rise of Domestic Ideology and its effects on poetry
Revolutionary effects of the Lyrical Ballads

(You may also derive web-page topics from the questions below.)

Please email me if you would like suggestions for reading material.

Paper 1:

  1. While William Wordsworth refuses to use personifications in his poetry, Anna Barbauld uses them frequently. Argue that her use of them does not just have to do with style but rather has to do with her belief that poetry should stimulate imaginative responses to political problems.
  2. Argue that the Mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the poet--not Coleridge personally, but rather the ideal poet (according to Coleridge). What is the poem telling us about how poetic genius works and what effects it should have on readers (represented in the poem by the Wedding Guest) or society in general?
  3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells us that the Albatross loved the Mariner who shot him (lines 408-9); it also tells us that the Mariner is caught in "Life-in-Death" (line 193), until he has finally looked at the "slimy things" in the ocean (line 242) and "blessed them unaware" (line 289). If you read these things--not as "creatures" in nature, but as if they were human beings or parts of human beings--what might this poem be telling us about spiritual "dryness," life-in-death, and how it affects the way we love other people and ourselves?
  4. In chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria (Biography of a Literary Life), Samuel Taylor Coleridge says that the "excellence" at which he aims in writing "supernatural poetry" "was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations supposing them real" (Mellor and Matlak, 750). What does that tell you about the "truth" portrayed in his poem "Christabel"? That is, what natural emotions is Coleridge describing and evoking (and perhaps analyzing) by giving us this supernatural tale?
  5. William Wordsworth begins a stanza midway through the poem "Tintern Abbey" with the clause, "If this / Be but a vain belief . . ." (lines 50-1). What does the "this" refer to? That is, in what particular belief is Wordsworth trying to establish faith by writing this poem?
  6. According to William Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, what kind of truth does poetry contain, and how and why exactly does poetic genius have access to such truth?
  7. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth attacks aristocratic views of poetry by insisting that "the real language of men" is much more poetic than learned languages are. He seems to be arguing that the poet needs to have access to ordinary life and ordinary feelings. However, Wordsworth also seems to say that the poet has greater sensitivity than other people. Is Wordsworth erecting another aristocracy, an aristocracy based on one's ability to feel deeply, or does his Preface genuinely attack aristocracies of any kind?
  8. Argue that any one of the poems you have read so far is connected to some of the ideas, hopes, and fears stimulated by the French Revolution. For greater accuracy in your claims about the French Revolution, you may wish to look at Section I of Mellor and Matlak (pp. 9-31), as well as the Romantic Chronology on line: http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/projects/pack/rom-chrono/chrono.htm