A True Romantic Response

Academics CA Magazine July 25, 2025

To say that English Department Head Sabrina Sadique gives her students creative license would be putting it mildly. Her British Romantic Poetry class calls for degrees of creativity and collaboration that are exceptional even at 91�Թ��.

As part of a collective class project, Gitanjali Belleau-Bhomik ’25 painted these fragments of a shattered vase. In turn, they inspired her classmates’ creative responses to British Romantic poetry.

Through collective projects, CA students connect imagination, the sublime, and their own inimitable experiences

Story by Heidi Koelz

To say that English Department Head Sabrina Sadique gives her students creative license would be putting it mildly. Her British Romantic Poetry class calls for degrees of creativity and collaboration that are exceptional even at 91�Թ��.

For their final project, she assigned her two fall 2024 sections a “collective and co-creative vision” based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Just as Coleridge looked back to a 1613 travelogue, Purchas his Pilgrimage, and Keats to the ancient Greek Elgin Marbles, which he viewed in the British Museum, Sadique asked her students to use the two poems as anchoring points and synthesize the core themes and concerns of Romanticism artistically—and to do it together as a class. Installation or anthology, musical score or short film: The choice of form was theirs.

What they produced in one week exceeded her expectations. Grading each section as a whole, Sadique also assessed students’ individual artist statements. She says her ability to evaluate this way testifies to “the experiential rigor and possibility in our classrooms.”

Close reading forms the backbone of the course, and students also wrote more typical analytical essays earlier in the semester. But Sadique says to fully engage the concepts of Romanticism they needed to create something together—not merely discuss Keats’ notion of negative capability and Coleridge’s theories of imagination, but give them form.

“I knew they actually wouldn’t understand the concepts until they delved into this experimentally,” she says.

A vase made by Isaac Chan ’25; the vase at the moment of shattering, photographed by Libby Brown ’25; the broken pieces that reveal Isaac’s fractured signature, in another of Libby’s photos. Inset: Isaac holds a fragment of the vase, which he both created and destroyed; as part of a triptych Libby created, she explores this as an image of negative capability, in which Isaac’s face, his identity, is inseparable from his art.

The infinite imagination

Sadique calls the first section’s project, a website interlinking a source-derivative chain of creative works, a “graduate-level accomplishment.” We begin with de-creation: A ceramic vase shatters against a rock. Photographs and video of the fracture influence collages and a drum solo. Paintings on the pottery fragments inspire poems, a wire-and-ribbon sculpture, a projection-mapping display, and a burial quilt. The hyperlinks between these creations map processes of derivation and inspiration, much like Keats’ ode calls to mind his tracing of a 19th-century engraving of the Sosibios Vase, a marble urn a Greek artisan made around 50 B.C.E. in the Roman style.

The project, “” invokes the Ouroboros, a snake devouring its tail—an ancient symbol Coleridge used to describe the infinitely cyclical nature of narratives. As Noelle Obenshain ’26 and Gabe Silverman ’25 explained in their curators’ statement, “Much like the original urn before its transformation, the website serves as a vessel for memories and imagination … an ouroboric loop of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” As Noelle and Gabe identified themes, facilitated discussions, and integrated their 13 classmates’ creative works into a cohesive final piece, they discovered their “web of connections transcended simply tracing who inspired whom; it also revealed links between works through shared themes and ideas.”

“If anyone hadn’t done their part, it would have all fallen apart,” says Kefan Cui ’25, who made an experimental 30-second film about the vase, which Isaac Chan ’25 both created and destroyed. Kefan threw himself into editing. Learning about negative capability—what Keats described as the capacity of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and which Kefan interpreted as a state of deep unity with the object of attention—helped him name “an experience I’d already had but had just thought of as being in the zone.” His film incorporates elements of haunting, defamiliarizing the moon and clouds and nighttime woods in a play of images of the vase.

Kefan worked with Jack Ehlinger ’26, who recorded a drum piece, merging straight time and swung time for a jazzy, multilayered film score that incorporated an audio clip of the urn breaking. “What was unique about it was that they overlapped,” Kefan says. “It was like a palimpsest. We layered a lot of different styles and rhythms.”

Initially stymied by the assignment, Jack saw when he began experimenting on his drum set that he didn’t need to prove he understood the material. “I realized this was secondary imagination and negative capability in their purest form,” he wrote in his artist statement. “I didn’t have to think about any movement I had to make—I was in such a frenzied, transcendental state that I could hold the contradicting ringing of the cymbals, booming of the kick drum, and snapping of the snare in balance without any proprioception or even a sense of identity.”

Jack’s piece inspired Gitanjali Belleau-Bhowmik ’25 to paint a river on a fragment of the urn—one of many pieces she painted that became part of other artworks. She says she couldn’t have imagined in advance how the collaborative project would take form. “We were definitely skeptical at first—like, there are going to be kids who aren’t going to do anything!” she says. “Sabrina kept telling us, ‘You’re going to have to trust people to the fullest,’ and after a while, we realized we were trusting each other, just trusting no matter what, and it actually worked very well. I feel like it’s common trust in its best form in the classroom.”

Gitanjali says she loved using her hands in an English course. “This showed us that your hobbies can be useful in mastering a concept,” she says. “Making the project hands-on was a more effective way to learn these super-complex concepts than just writing a paper or giving a presentation.”

“I keep teaching this course because of the long echoes.”

— Sabrina Sadique

Coalescence

Sadique’s other section also played with cycles of creation and destruction. Those students used a human knot—a shape-shifting chain of hands—to enact the formation and dissolution of a tree, with allusions to “Kubla Khan.” In the short Charlotte Goltra ’26 edited, shapes form and come undone, fingers and arms intertwine like vines, hands brace across a gap. As curators Drew Michaeli ’25 and Leo Cunningham ’25 wrote, superimposing images of branches and bridges creates a “chain reaction,” “digesting” and “refracting” landscapes and architectural elements.

The project’s emotional heart is by Sophia Peng ’25 and Abbie Deng ’25. The music introduces competing creators who repeat a cycle of imitation that leads to a melodious fall. “We wanted to play with the concept of overstepping—a Khan, a human, trying to assume the place of a creator,” Sophia says.

Her bawu, a Chinese wooden flute, leads, its assertive tone assuming the decreeing voice of Kubla Khan, the emperor. Then Abbie’s piano overtakes the melody, the right hand reproducing it while the left hand harmonizes with its exact opposite, a sort of aural mirror image. Abbie had the idea to reverse the harmony and melody.

The two instruments use different musical notations, so Sophia began writing in the Chinese style, laying down a line of numbers and, below, flipping their order. She played with fifths and thirds to create harmonies. “Then I consciously wrote a melody that would sound good with its opposite note,” she says. “It was a bit difficult, but it came more naturally than I thought it would.”

In addition to uniting aspects of Eastern and Western composition, the piece literalizes a dynamic of conscious competition and subconscious harmony. “Just as Romantic poets have documented their dream states in words, ‘Coalescence’ means to sing the imaginative and (re)creative force into music,” Sophia wrote in her artist statement.

She says the class changed her outlook on literature and her own life. “More than anything, it was just slowing down and taking things step by step, especially during senior fall,” she says. “I had a chance to spend an hour a day appreciating nature and reflecting on personal experiences (one of the assignments), connecting them to these century-old ideas.”

“Immersive” is what Sophia calls Sadique’s classes. “You’re affected by how passionate she is about what she teaches, and she gives you so much information so you can understand something to the fullest extent, then come up with your own interpretations,” she says. “I’ve told her her classes are spiritually exhausting—in a very good way.”

Sophia Peng ’25 and Abbie Deng ’25 wrote an original musical score for their collective class project reflecting on British Romantic poetry. Below: Sophia’s handwritten musical notation in the Chinese numbered style shows the mirroring of melody and harmony.

Taking the form of a burial site, this quilted work by Eliya Ganot ’26 surrounds a vase fragment painted
by Gitanjali Belleau-Bhowmik ’25.

How to read a poem

In 2016, when Sadique joined CA and taught British Romantic Poetry for the first time, she offered it as a broader survey. But as she taught it every other year, she began narrowing her focus to fewer poets so that students could deepen their understanding of Romanticism as a philosophical ideal and more thoroughly explore these literary works as conceptual responses to the revolutions— technological, industrial, and political—that defined their historical context.

“I keep teaching this course because of the long echoes,” Sadique says. “We’re seeing the same thing now—the rise of environmental literature as a reaction to technological advancements, the exponential growth of AI, and the evolution of late-stage capitalism. This evolving course is a response to our collective burnout.”

All CA students read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 9th grade, and British Romantic Poetry builds on ideas established in the core English curriculum. Sadique begins the course with the origins of Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s 1798 collection of poems, Lyrical Ballads.

“Wordsworth witnesses the French Revolution,” she says. “He sees all these democratizing ideals animating the political realm that are also animating social realms, and he translates that spirit and vision into his poetry. He brings the stories and passions of ordinary people from the margins to the center, reimagining poetry very spaciously as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’” She helped her students understand the composite form as the melding of the emotion-charged lyric with the story-driven folk ballad—feelings and individuality take center stage in the poems.

The class also discussed the problems of idealization that come with the territory of Romanticism. “Within that infinite capacity of imagination Coleridge is so keen about, students also need to understand the possibility and paradox of exoticization,” Sadique says. Students read the romanticized “pleasure-dome” in “Kubla Khan” alongside the dome in the first creation account of Genesis that separates the waters above and below. And they compared Coleridge’s “Xanadu,” a reimagining of the Yuan dynasty emperor Kublai Khan’s garden in Shangdu, with an account of the biblical Garden of Eden (which means “delight”).

In her syllabus, Sadique prioritized juxtaposition with contemporary work. Students held Wordsworth’s notion of “a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused” in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” alongside the Indigenous concept of the “grammar of animacy”—language that affirms human kinship with the natural world—described in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. After they read Wordsworth’s “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known,” they listened to Rhiannon Giddens’ “Little Margaret,” a reenvisioning of an Appalachian ballad, performed with the daf, a Middle Eastern frame drum. “The echoes are uncanny,” Sadique says.

“Sabrina’s classes always feel like an adventure. Her enthusiasm is energizing and contagious. You know you’re going to unravel a lot of deep ideas together, … but because she’s so keen on leaving nobody behind, anyone can go into her class without fear of difficult concepts.”

— Alex Zhu ’25

By combining original images with photos taken by Libby Brown ’25, Sophia Gruhl ’25 explores in her collage the liminal space of the “caverns measureless to man” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” shaped by her memories of the California coastline.

The class’s relatively narrow focus allows for a pace that enables all students to engage with the material at a high level, regardless of their previous literary exposure. How does Sadique ensure that? “I go extremely slowly for the first three weeks,” she says. “I refuse to compromise intellectual rigor, but I think intellectual rigor can actually be accomplished through incremental scaffolding work. You learn, very quickly, what the literary needs of each student are, and then you modulate instruction.”

In all her classes, Sadique distributes a practical guide she developed: “How to Read a Poem.” On one page, she outlines clear expectations—among them, numbering the lines, reading the poem aloud, and close-reading and annotating the title and first and last words before analyzing patterns, images, and literary devices. Some students say it has helped them understand themselves as literary critics and revolutionized how they approach studying poetry. Alex Zhu ’25 is one of them.

“Sabrina’s classes always feel like an adventure,” Alex says. “Her enthusiasm is energizing and contagious. You know you’re going to unravel a lot of deep ideas together, and Sabrina is like the explorer in the front, holding a torch and leading us through this labyrinth. But because she’s so keen on leaving nobody behind, anyone can go into her class without fear of difficult concepts.”

Alex’s contribution to his section’s website project dovetailed with a departmental study he was completing with CA Latin teacher Benny Abraham. Sadique had asked her colleague if he knew of an English transliteration of the poem “On the Wretched Lot of the Slaves in the Isles of Western India,” which Coleridge wrote in Greek. Unaware of any, Abraham guided Alex as he painstakingly deciphered a scan of Coleridge’s handwritten manuscript to create a new transliteration, whose source-derivative provenance was deftly woven into the website.

“The act of transliteration preserves the poem’s original structure and sound—the ‘truth’ of its form—even as the end project becomes incomprehensible to an English reader,” Alex wrote in his artist statement. “The beauty lies in the paradoxical coexistence of familiarity and mystery, where the viewer confronts the poem as both an artifact of beauty and a fragment of unknowable truth, a sublimity.”

Through this project, Alex says, he realized that in translating, transliterating, or analyzing poetic texts, he is “actively participating in the same creative process that the Romantic poets championed.”

Sadique says it’s only fitting that the final assignment stems from the poets’ philosophical ideals. “Romanticism invites our gaze away from individual profit,” she says. “The way to make a true response to it—a Romantic response—is to look inward and co-create, engage in a way where there is no hierarchy of imagination and everybody’s creation depends on another person’s creation.”