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The verse of the English Romantic poets is as daunting in its scope and complexity as it is dazzling in its technique and beautiful in its language. Now, Professor Willard Spiegelman illuminates masterpieces of English literature by poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, as well as the women Romantic poets.

As with his first course, How to Read and Understand Poetry, his emphasis is on technique, on how a poem accomplishes its objectives, on "how it means." To this end, he meticulously dissects the poems, directing you to points of interest that deserve close observation.

A much-abused term, Romanticism has at times been shorthand for "wild," "irregular," "gothic," and "modern." It has been associated with: love of the exotic; revolt against reason; vindication and defense of the individual; liberation of the unconscious; reaction against science; worship of the emotions; return to nature and so on.

Not only are these generalizations not considered particularly helpful, but the Romantic poets never even identified themselves as "Romantic."

What we can say is that some common concerns among the poets emerge:

• They wrote about man's relationship to nature, and they regard nature and the universe as an active, dynamic thing. There is, though, a counter-desire to escape from nature and to deny man's connection to it.
• There is a concern with society and politics, and an idealistic notion that humanity can transcend its enslaving traditions.
• The Romantics were conscious of consciousness itself—of the power of the human mind and its active faculties as a force for self-glorification and a seed of self-destruction.

These lectures focus on the poems themselves, and they also tell the story of six great poetic souls and the impact of their personae upon their age.

Lord Byron was a dashing, swashbuckling figure, "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" in the words of a woman who knew and loved him. A man of monstrous appetites and ambitions, his insouciance and supreme self-confidence are reflected in his agile turns of phrase and his audacious, almost cheeky rhymes.

But there is another side to Byron, morose and reclusive, that of the brooding "Byronic hero," and there is his tender, generous, and stoic side. This is the man who would write to his sister, in the twilight of his truncated life:

William Blake never achieved even the limited fame of his Romantic counterparts, but his radical, idiosyncratically Christian vision inspired countless many among the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s.

An advocate of free love who remained happily married for all of his adult life, whose poetry was caustic social and political protest, Blake was an individual in the extreme. Much of his poetry, notably the Songs of Innocence and Experience, seems simple, yet contains layers of complexity and theological sophistication. As Dr. Spiegelman puts it, "difficulty is not the same thing as depth."

Ponder the rumination on the nature of darkness and evil in these lines from "The Tyger":

William Wordsworth was also, like so many of the Romantics, a bundle of contradictions. Beginning his career in the flush of youth, Wordsworth was involved in radical political circles, but some speculate that, when in Germany, he was an agent for the British Foreign Office.

His poetry was marked by guilt, loss, and inward reflection. Dr. Spiegelman puts it this way: "Wordsworth has struck many readers as sane, haughty, and impossible to know. The man who called the poet 'a man speaking to men' in the preface to Lyrical Ballads often seems troublingly opaque."

Later in life, though, Wordsworth found himself comfortably ensconced as something of a celebrity, an elite country gentleman and the Poet Laureate, light years removed from the anxiety of his younger life.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge formed one half of the greatest intellectual friendship in literary history, but, for good and for ill, he stood apart from his protégé Wordsworth, and in several handfuls of poems, 15 at most, he transformed English poetry.

Perhaps no other writer so gifted as Coleridge was ever plagued by so much neurosis and self-doubt. Plastic and vast, his mind contained multitudes, yet, hobbled by an addiction to laudanum and paralyzed by the contradictions of his own self-examining processes of thought, he constantly berated himself for laziness.

Coleridge could never be pigeon-holed, and his output ranged from the somber tale of crime and punishment that is "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to his gentle, expansive conversation poems, like "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison."

Percy Bysshe Shelley similarly resists containment or easy definition, exploding as he did with talent and creativity. Possessed of almost unnatural physical beauty, Shelley wrote poetry that inclined toward the other-worldly, occupying the realms of dense, abstract, philosophical thought.

The lectures that concern Shelley will require some of your most concentrated intellectual exertions but also bring you some of the richest rewards this course has to offer. There is a reason, after all, why the same Oxford University that expelled him for preaching atheism would later erect a statue of the deceased poet as a fallen angel.

John Keats has also been cast as something of a fragile beauty, too tender for this world. His life and his work contradict this characterization. These lectures introduce you to the genial but fierce young man of flaming ambition and terrier courage, the man whose indomitable will kept him going in his final months, long after the resources of his body had abandoned him.

This spirit and drive transformed what was, by all accounts, a pedestrian poet in 1816 into a poet for the ages only four years later. Keats's poetry was alive to the last, whether examining intellectual adventure and wonder in "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" or reflecting on mortality as a form of "ripeness" in "To Autumn."

The women Romantic poets had sunk into obscurity by the middle of the 20th Century, but in their time their volumes were best-sellers. Felicia Dorothea Hemans and Charlotte Turner Smith were as anthologized and admired during their lives as were Wordsworth or Coleridge.

Recently, feminist scholars have revived interest in these neglected poets and critically re-examined their poetry.

Dr. Spiegelman has taught students to love and appreciate poetry for 30 years and has twice been awarded SMU's "Outstanding Teacher" award. The Dallas Morning News said of his first course, How to Read and Understand Poetry, "inspiringDr. Spiegelman never loses sight of the intimate relationships between the poet and the page and between the words and the reader."

Romantic poetry is Professor Spiegelman's specialty, and he has written two books on the subject, Wordsworth's Heroes and Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art. He is also a well-known writer on contemporary poetry and the author of The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry.

"Should I buy Audio or Video?"

Great care has been taken to furnish this course with all the resources necessary to enjoy it to the fullest.  Because the poems themselves are at the crux of the course, virtually all of the poems, either in their entirety or in excerpted form, have been included in the course booklets. The video version displays the poetry on the screen as it is read, allowing you to follow along even more easily. The video version also includes portraits of the poets, artistic renderings of scenes from certain poems, reproductions of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, and other useful illustrations.