ARE WE STILL ROMANTICS? DISCUSSING BRITISH POETRY ...

293 http://ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL • Porto Alegre • v. 10 • nº 1 • 2020

ARE WE STILL ROMANTICS?

DISCUSSING BRITISH POETRY, MODERNITY, AND RE-ENCHANTMENT

Introduction

This class plan was developed for the first year of High School, having as a basis

the analysis of Romanticism made by Michael Löwy and Robert Stayre and focusing,

when it comes to linguistic resources, on the simple present. It was created as part of

the discipline Literatura Inglesa I from the Letras course at Universidade Federal do Rio

Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and it is supposed to add up to around 5 classes of 45 minutes.

The idea is to discuss the phenomenon of Romanticism with students focusing on its

British poetic manifestations, helping them to get in touch with the history and culture

of this country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also relating that to

other temporalities.

In the book Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, Michael Löwy and

Robert Sayre (2001) face the challenge of redefining Romanticism, a phenomenon

which is often considered contradictory or simply reduced to an arbitrary list of

elements, through the lenses of historical materialism. By doing that, they come to the

conclusion that Romanticism may be seen as a worldview that arose as a reaction to

modernity, and that turns to the past in search of a less reified1 world. Even if different

authors might end up in very different, sometimes even antagonical ideas, they are all

starting from the same movement: that of opposing the disenchantment,

quantification, and mechanization of the world that comes with the development of

capitalism.

1 Lukács (1971, p. 83) defines reification as the transformation of human relations into things, or, in other

words, the gradual domination of human life by the logic of the marketplace.

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Objectives

Class plan

Moment 1 (10 minutes):



The teacher will write the word “Romanticism” on the board and ask students

what it reminds them of. After that, they will be shown the following images and asked

to get in pairs to decide which ones they think that illustrate these ideas better:



Before being presented to any concept or contextualization, the group will read

two romantic poems, one by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the other by William Blake.

The teacher may ask the group to pay attention to the imagery created in each poem

and to start thinking about how they relate to the pictures they were presented with

before.



Having done that, the teacher will elicit from the students possible links

between the poems and the pictures.

In the case of the first poem, the teacher will also ask the group to focus on

some sentences in particular and discuss the following questions:



When the group has shared their ideas, the teacher will show them the general

rule of present simple and hand out the chart below. Then, they may practice that by

creating simple sentences based on the images of the first activity, such as “She smells

the flowers.” etc.

Moment 3 (20-30 minutes):

In case students have access to the internet, they will be asked to use it to

search for definitions and contextualization of Romanticism, working in pairs and

writing down the things they think seem more interesting or important. After that, the

teacher will write the word “Romanticism” one more time in the center of the board.

Students should, having their research as a basis, write words that they think are

related to this worldview, creating a mind map of the whole group.



Then, they will be shown a video by The School of Life

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiRWBI0JTYQ). The video presents a concept of

Romanticism which is very much in tune with that proposed by Löwy and Sayre (2001)

and also points to important events and dates related to the development of this

worldview throughout the world in the mid-eighteenth century.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiRWBI0JTYQ


Students may, at this point, be asked to compare the ideas that they collected

from other places to those presented in the video, being able to discuss with their

classmates and possibly make changes to the mind map.

Moment 4 (30-40 minutes):

Now it is time for the group to read two more poems, both by Percy Shelley,

and try to answer some questions using the knowledge they have acquired. A first

reading in the big group is recommended, so that the teacher may help students to

understand what is being said.



Having done the reading, they can discuss about the two following sets of

questions in pairs and write down their answers:



After they have done that, the theme of the simple present will be more

thoroughly discussed. The teacher may help students to see (in case they have not

figured that out) how the simple present is often used to talk about facts (“Two vast

and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desert.”) and things that are always true (here,

sentences from the first poem, such as “Music, when soft voices die,/Vibrates in the

memory”, may be used to show how this is something subjective, being interesting to



discuss what the aim of the poetic persona might be in presenting these things this

way).


Students should divide themselves into groups of four. Each group will choose a

romantic poem from a selection made by the teacher and material to create a poster.

They should read the poem carefully (the teacher may help and they could also use

dictionaries), glue them on their posters and fill the rest of the space with things

related to Romanticism that can be observed or inferred from this particular poem —

characteristics, pictures cut out of magazines etc. They may also highlight passages and

do whatever they think will help to present their ideas. By the end of this activity, they

should glue their posters on the classroom walls and present them to the other

groups.


The last poem to be read will be Samuel Coleridge’s “Pantisocracy”:



The reading process may be the same as that previously established, having

students do the first reading on their own and then read it out loud. Then, the teacher

should explain to the group what the word “pantisocracy” refers to — a utopian,

egalitarian community idealized by Coleridge and other romantic poets — and discuss

the following questions with them:



The study of the simple present here may focus on how it may also be used to

talk about an imagined future: it depends more on what the purpose of the speaker is

and what he/she wants to express than on time itself. Some sentences that could be

used for that are “I seek the cottag’d Dell.” and “The Wizard Passions weave a holy

Spell.”.

After doing that, students will listen to (and read the lyrics from) John Lennon’s

“Imagine” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkgkThdzX-8).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkgkThdzX-8


The teacher should ask them to pay attention to things that may be similar to

those discussed in the poem. Then, the following questions should be answered and

discussed in the big group afterward:



Finally, another song will be played: The Kinks’ “Shangri-La”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hd9ubgFvzw).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hd9ubgFvzw


This song uses the simple present a lot and is also talking about some kind of

utopia, but here the utopia is that created by modernity itself (based mainly on

possessions and personal, not collective, achievements) and it is faced with irony by

the poetic persona. The following questions may be asked:




As a final activity, students will play with the utopian ideas discussed. They

should form small groups and discuss how their own “pantisocracies” would be.

Finally, each group will create a new poster based on this discussion using sentences in

the simple present to talk about an imagined future, images etc., and present it to the

larger group.

Final remarks

Even though it is impossible to fully evaluate the success of a class plan before

it has been applied, we may say the main objectives set up in the beginning could be



accomplished. The classes provide a good introduction to Romanticism from a

materialistic perspective, while also helping students to understand the simple present

in a contextualised way. This does not mean, however, that it can be applied to any

group without changes; each group of students will have different needs and

backgrounds, and these should be taken into consideration. The students evaluation

can also be changed according to the context, but, since almost everything is done

collectively in the class plan, it would probably be interesting to do that in groups as

well, with some time being used to discuss with each group what they think they did

right and where they think they can improve.

References

LÖWY, Michael; SAYRE, Robert. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity.

Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2001.

LUKÁCS, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.

Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: The Mit Press, 1971.



Vinícius de Oliveira Prusch

Licenciando em Letras - Português/Inglês pela Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do

Sul (UFRGS). Tem interesse nas áreas de Literatura, Canção Popular e Ensino.

Atualmente, é bolsista de Iniciação Científica (BIC UFRGS) e pesquisa sobre rap e

neoliberalismo sob orientação do Prof. Dr. Carlos Augusto Bonifácio Leite.


ARE WE STILL ROMANTICS? DISCUSSING BRITISH POETRY ...

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