Romanticism

Key Reading Paths

1. Blake: The Tyger

   Read the questions as part of the poem’s structure rather than replacing them with one answer.

2. Shelley: creation and responsibility

   Track the distance between imaginative ambition and responsibility to another being.

3. Wollstonecraft: education and sexual character

   Ask how habits of feeling are produced by social expectations.

Questions for comparison

Imagination can open possibilities, disturb familiar judgments, and magnify a creator’s power. Ask how feeling and vision become answerable to the lives they affect.

• What kind of answer does a poem’s question seek? Follow the questions and repeated language in “The Tyger.” Does the poem lead toward an explanation of its creature, or make the act of imagining a creator increasingly difficult?
• Does creation establish responsibility? Compare the maker imagined in Blake’s poem with Victor Frankenstein. What changes when the question concerns a creator’s care as well as a creator’s power?
• Are feelings natural or educated? Read Wollstonecraft’s argument about education beside the desires and expectations of a literary character. Which feelings are cultivated by the social arrangements that claim merely to recognize them?
• Can sympathy become a form of power? When a narrator asks us to feel for someone, whose account organizes that feeling? Identify a voice or perspective that would change the terms of our sympathy.
• When does revolt reproduce what it opposes? Choose an act of imaginative independence or resistance. Does it create room for others to act, or repeat a demand for mastery in another form?

Teaching with these readings

Begin with the question that persists. Read “The Tyger” aloud and ask students which question becomes harder rather than easier to answer. Examine how sound, repetition, and imagery produce that difficulty.

Carry creation into an ethical encounter. Place a passage from Frankenstein beside the poem. Students develop a question that turns on the difference between imagining a creator and hearing a created being speak.

Bring education into the account of feeling. Use Wollstonecraft to test a claim about a character’s supposedly natural desires. Ask what the argument makes visible and what the literary scene adds that the argument cannot fully contain.

Keep the comparison open to difference. Students argue about the relation between imagination and responsibility through two texts. Have them revise after a reader identifies a detail that resists their claim. Treat Wollstonecraft’s argument as a historically situated interlocutor, not evidence that every work here shares one Romantic doctrine.

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