#151 - The British Romantic Poets: Adam Potkay on How Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Burns Worshiped Nature, Sought Transcendence, Defied Authority, and created Modern Love

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“Worlds on worlds are rolling ever from creation to decay - Like the bubbles on a river: Sparkling, bursting, borne away.”

Percy Shelley, Hellas, 1822

⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellas_(poem)⁠

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(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:00:35) - What is Romanticism?

(00:33:33) - Folk Culture, the Ballad Tradition, and Robert Burns

(01:11:53) - Wordsworth and Coleridge: Ballads of Nature and the Supernatural

(01:45:19) - Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800: Rustic Life and the Questionable Pleasures of Nature

(02:22:31) - The Descriptive-Meditative Poem and the Divine in Nature

(02:56:32) - Wordsworth and the Invention of Childhood

(03:32:36) - Blake and Infantine Innocence

(04:04:31) - Blake and Satanic Energy

(04:40:58) - The Byronic Hero

(05:17:17) - Byron and Shelley: Darkness and Light

(05:51:15) - Gothic Horrors: Coleridge's “Christabel” and Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein”

(06:23:21) - Keats's (Mock-) Gothic Romances

(06:58:35) - Keats's Great Odes

(07:30:39) - Byron's Comic Epic: Don Juan

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⁠Adam Potkay⁠ is a professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a recipient of a 2009 Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence. In August 2009, he was designated William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities. In 1996, Professor Potkay and his wife and fellow College of William and Mary professor Monica Brzezinski Potkay were jointly honored with the College of William and Mary’s Alumni Fellowship Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Potkay has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University and at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He received his B.A. from Cornell University (1982), an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University (1986), and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University (1990).

A distinguished scholar of eighteenth-century literature and culture, Professor Potkay has published works that include The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Cornell University Press, 2000) and The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Cornell University Press, 1994). He is the coeditor (with Sandra Burr) of a collection of autobiographies and sermons by some of the earliest black writers in English, Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas (St. Martin’s Press, 1995). He has published scholarly articles and more popular essays in a wide variety of journals, from 18th-Century Studies and Studies in Early Modern Philosophy to Philosophy Now and Raritan Quarterly.

Professor Potkay was recently named a co-winner of the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association for his book The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2007). The Story of Joy outlines an intellectual and literary history of joy, especially the treatments of joy in literature, philosophy, and religion, with an emphasis on British and German works from the Reformation through the Romantic period.