This course is designed to introduce students to English literature of the Romantic and Victorian periods. While social-cultural milieu of the periods covered will be dealt with in a series of lectures, students are encouraged to concentrate on close reading of major texts. Although important essays (such as those written by Lamb and Hazlitt in the Romantic period and Carlyle and Mill in the Victorian era) will be touched upon, our main attention throughout the course will be focused on the “sound and sense” of the major poems by Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold.