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The Romantic Period in English literary history has long been defined by the work of six male poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. We will study their poetry in the context of form, history, and politics, and investigate how their work might be seen to form an ideology or movement. We will also read work by poets such as Barbauld, Clare, Burns, and Hemans, popular in their own day, but thought of as ‘minor’ subsequently, in order to evaluate how questions of gender and literary value inform our sense of what is ‘Romantic.’