English 365 - Visions and Visionaries:  William Blake and the Shelleys
Patricia L. Skarda
T 3-4:50 p.m.

This seminar will consider the art and poetry of William Blake as an anticipation of the poetry and prose of both Percy Bysshe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Blake anticipates Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with his daemon in his major prophecies, and Percy Shelley responds to his wife’s Promethean vision with his own Prometheus Unbound.

We will begin with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, looking hard at the illuminations and illustrations to see the visual tropes that are sometimes distinct from and sometimes echoes of the poetry. Then we will go on to see Blake’s longer, more complicated works, including minor and major prophecies such as The Books of Urizen, Ahania, and Los as well as American and Europe: A Prophecy. Some consideration will be given to Blake’s private mythology in Milton, Jerusalem, and Vala. The Blake text is the Norton Critical edition of Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, with supplementary art from William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books and the splendid biography of Blake by Peter Ackroyd. Student presenters will find the slide library collection of Blake essential to their work.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, her short stories, and her journal (all found in Betty Bennett’s The Mary Shelley Reader) will ground us in the part of her canon that continues to endure. Her other novels, Valperga, The Last Man, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, and her essential edition of her husband’s poetry will be considered if still available in paperback. The collection in the Mortimer Rare Book Room will provide ample material for students presenting on the “other” Mary Shelley.
Mary Shelley is far more than the wife of Percy, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the mother of Percy Florence. By hard work, she earned her own reputation as a writer and thinker in the vanguard of her day. The biography most admired is by Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, and Her Monsters.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the tallest and smartest of all the Romantic poets, led a life as interesting and dramatic as his poetry and prose. Richard Holmes’s biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, set a new and high standard for literary biography. Shelley’s lyrics alone (“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Sky-Lark”) would have earned him an enduring place in the canon, but his dramatic works, The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound, reveal both his indebtedness to his wife and to William Blake along with his unique perspective on the power of poets to be “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Students in this seminar will be expected to give an oral presentation and to lead the discussion/response to the presentation at some point in the semester. Three reader responses (not to exceed 2 pages) and a long essay (about 10 pages) will be required in the course of the semester and at its end. With the permission of the class, occasional additional class meetings may be scheduled on Thursday, 3:00-4:50, late in the semester, to accommodate sharing of the research by individual students.

Students wishing to sign up for this seminar should do so by filling out the application in Bobbie Kozash’s office, Pierce Hall 105. A list of accepted students will be posted at the end of the fall registration period.