Paper #1: Romantic Plagiarists due 9.13.21

Of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear—both what they half create,

And what perceive (Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey)

Wordsworth and Coleridge did everything together—including writing poems. Wordsworth often took credit for Coleridge’s best ideas (the albatross), and Coleridge did the same (the Lyrical Ballads). Keats was a superfan of the Romantic poets and lived in their shadow, possibly even beating them at their own game. All of them were inspired by each other, borrowed from each other, and if we want to be catty, stole from each other as well. That’s what makes Romantic Poetry such a rich and important movement—it speaks with so many of the same ideas in very similar language.

For your first paper, I want you to choose TWO passages from TWO different poems (each poem a different poet) where one seems to steal from the other. You can look up the dates if you want to see who came first, but even publication dates can be tricky, since poets often sit on works for years. So just determine who you think is the ‘original,’ and who you think copies/cribbed from his ideas. Note that a copy doesn’t mean it’s worse…sometimes the cover version is better than the original, after all!

The passages should be SHORT: just a stanza or two. You should first analyze the original stanza and explain what you think it means and how it uses language to achieve this goal. Then, you should examine the ‘copy,’ and discuss what it borrowed (either literally or figuratively), and how it translates the original into its own language. Do you think the second version is better? More poetic? More interesting? More sublime? And what do we gain from reading these passages side by side? Make sure we can see why you think one work borrow from the other: don’t assume we can see what you do. Show us!

REQUIREMENTS

• Use no more than 2 poems, making sure that each poem is by a different poet
• Short passages—no more than a stanza or two
• QUOTE: you must quote actual lines and discuss them, but DON’T just quote the entire passage and leave it at that. Help us see the small details.
• Use MLA citation throughout with a Works Cited page
• DUE Monday, September 13^th by 5pm