In this essay I relate how a last-minute teaching assignment in an area outside my expertise led to a semester of teaching that was, by necessity, spontaneous and experimental, and how that first exciting semester set the course for a class that made not only poetry, but living itself, an object of critical inquiry. The title of the essay, Living Romanticism, indicates what the two aims of the course became: to suggest to my students that Romanticism is still alive, and second, to offer Romanticism as a way of living. In the essay I describe the evolution of the course, explaining how the various assignments, designed to foster fluency in the aspirations, methods, and ways of being and knowing the Romantics embraced, emerged and changed over time. By telling the story of how encounters with British and American Romantics transformed both me and my students, the essay argues that literary studies is a discipline that should, overtly and explicitly, aspire to more than the conferral of skills, capacities, and historical knowledge.