The course will offer a detailed study of Romanticism to understand its significance in English poetic tradition. By exploring the works of the six major Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and investigating some characteristics that they share, we will try to outline what Hazlitt called the “spirit of the age.” At the same time, we will highlight the distinctiveness of each romantic poet by studying their representative poems as well as their aesthetic ideas and life experience. Our approach will involve close reading, but we will also draw attention to the relationship between text and context, poetry and poet, poetic creation and critical value to ascertain the complexity of the term Romanticism.