Teaching Romantic Poetry: Experiment and Experience.

In this paper, attempt is made to delineate the English teachers’ experiment of teaching romantic poetry and students’ experience of learning. It focuses on the two famous short lyrical poems of the romantic period: William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1804) and Lord Byron’s She Walks in Beauty (1815). These lyrical poems are written in iambic tetrameter. The former celebrates the beauty of the nature, while the latter celebrates the beauty of the unknown maid. The linguistic and literary peculiarities in both the contemporary poems are explored. The advanced learners of the literature are necessarily expected to know these linguistic and literary subtleties for better appreciation of these poems. The analyses of the selected poems are presented in the paper. These analyses are based on the framework of Leech (1969) in which he considers criticism and stylistics as complementary and necessary for literary analysis. The paper concludes that both Wordsworth and Byron succeeded in representing their perceptual experiences through I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and She Walks in Beauty, respectively. We observed their unique style in their poetry despite of the numerous similarities. It is to be noted that a creator of the text (a poet), the process of creation (creativity, imagination, etc.), its representation in a form of the text (a product), and the (linguistic and/or non-linguistic) context are most prominent aspects in poetic composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]