Reading list: Victorian poetry seminar

A couple of people have asked about the syllabus for the Victorian poetry seminar, so here it is, minus the critical texts.  As I said in my earlier post, this is an advanced seminar organized around a theme, not a general introductory survey, so we frequently have canonical poets without their canonical poems, and some famous poems don't appear at all (e.g., there's no Goblin Market).  The readings are arranged topically, not chronologically.

This could be called a "past, present, and future" course, focusing on poems that explicitly think about their own relationship to history, change, and loss.  Thus, the course starts off with some Victorian attempts to think about what made contemporary poetry modern--or, indeed, Victorian.   As we go along, we look at poems set in the past; poems about loss and mourning (the elegy); poems that are about, in some way or another, urgent questions of presentness; and poems that look toward the future, possibly in apocalyptic terms.  Students will be encouraged to work with poets and/or poems not on the syllabus for their final research projects.  The theme allows for a relatively catholic range of theoretical approaches, from the very historicist to the very formalist. 

The class meets once a week; there's virtually no reading on the final day because students are doing research presentations.  Unless otherwise noted, students are using the full Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetics. 

In case you're wondering why Dante is in a Victorian poetry course, Tennyson's "Ulysses" hews very closely to Ulysses' account of his death in The Inferno.  

We'll see how well Aurora Leigh goes down.  I'm also feeling a bit of trepidation about "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which is one of Browning's toughest dramatic monologues outside of The Ring and the Book. 

(ETA: Holiday corrected.  Sheesh.)