The Keats

So this time, loyal fans (read: people obligated to read this blog for class), I decided for this blog I was going to look more into this "Keats" fellow we've been reading.

From John Keats poems I can tell two things: one, this guy likes nature and nature-y things. This probably has some sort of deep seated urge to become one with the forest or some other poet-problem. Two, this is one seriously depressed dude. "Ode to the Mockingbird" is one long death-wish. A pretty death-wish, but still a death wish. Heck, when I think about it that's probably twenty percent of poems anyway, so maybe he's simply an"ahr-teest."

Well! That's what I'm aiming to find out! To wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats

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Hmm, he was born on Halloween and he died a day after my birthday, that's weird.

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Odes, eh? That sounds right, our two poems were odes.....

Okay, so maybe I should become an expert before enlightening my humble readers with the vastness of my John Keats knowledge. Be right back!

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I'm back! And this time I have several more sources.

BAM!

http://www.john-keats.com/ (Bet you didn't expect that one!)

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/john_keats.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/26/doctors-mistakes-keats

So from this I learned a great deal about his life, and I feel like I understand Keats quite a bit more.

Keat's early life seems to be an equal mixture of sadness and fortune: his parents were well-off and he was taught literature from a young age, yet his father died when he was only eight. Furthermore, after moving to his grandmother's, his mother died of "consumption," or tuberculosis. Then, his grandmother handed him and his siblings to two friends, yet she kept them well-off.

Keat's...middle....life? Middle life started in his search to be in the medical profession. He had a "bit of a row" with his instructor, though, so pursued his studies at a college instead. After awhile he said, and I quote directly, "Nah, screw this," and went into literary pursuits, quickly befriending as many other writers as he could. However, his work wasn't widely appreciated, so he moved off to the Isle of Wight, presumably for inspiration. He wrote a poem up hiking in Ireland and Scotland, but it was widely rejected, again.

Later in Keat's life, he found what was probably his greatest muse in the form of a girl (go figure) named Fanny. Judging by his many quotes and poems on love around this period, he was a bit enamored. It was not to be, however, because he started showing signs of the same disease that took both his mother and brother. He grew quite depressed at this time (who could blame him?) and moved to Italy for his health. His doctor did not treat him well, refusing him pain killers and bleeding him to starvation, and he died in agony. His tombstone reads, per his request, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." (http://www.john-keats.com/)


Six more words are written here.








.....Nah, just kidding, I'm not that bad a word-counter!

So, John Keats had a pretty miserable life, but with some shining moments of happiness, I suppose like us all. He was certainly a romantic poet, and his love for nature is obvious throughout his poetic works. He was a great poet and certainly worth a read. I mean even his last request, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water..." that's pretty.

England in 1819

Well, Blogger just deleted my entire paper. Thanks for me rewrite everything. THANK. YOU. SO. MUCH.

Anyway! This isn't a blog about my blatant hatred for this new-fangled, typey-wipey corkboard, this is a blog about Percy Bysshe Shelley's "England in 1819."

So as starters I had no idea what was happening in 1819 that made this poet so pissed about the government. Sure, I guess I could tell that kings and queens were being inattentive to their subjects, and that said subjects were "in the dregs," but why? What happened that spurred such a lively response?

Well, after the poem had been completed there was a little thing called the "Peterloo Massacre."

See? It's totally a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre

Still not convinced? Okay, so it is wikipedia, I guess I can understand, professor. http://www.peterloomassacre.org/history.html AHA! A sanctioned, official site! Now this event is totally a thing.

Needless to say I was pretty unaware of the history of England around this time. I didn't even know that the Napoleonic Wars had ended around this time. Sure, the idea of a war started by a short, angry Frenchman still existed in what little remains of my elementary school knowledge, but 1819? I was thinking the mid 1700s for sure. However, now armed with the knowledge that a major war had just ended and that England was still super divided, I get why this poem is so important. The message is a cry for the suffering citizens of a war-torn land with poorer paupers and richer monarchs. It's a very topsey-turvey, "something needs to change right the heck now" society. Shelley here could see this, and he knew that within these hardships and deadly, dying upper-class men would be a voice, a "Phantom," a need for change among the people that would bring the nation to a new time.

Looking into the poems structure (and after looking up the different types of rhyme schemes for sonnets) I found that this poem followed a ABABABCDCDCCDD rhyme. This particular rhyme scheme doesn't seem to follow any kind of traditional sonnet form, and in fact it works against other accepted forms as it breaks it's scheme at strange areas. 

What's perhaps more interesting, the poem seems to present its subjects opposite of the traditional presentation. In most poems the poet ends their work with what is seen as the most majestic subject. A punch-at-the-end, if you will. However, this poem begins with a king, and progresses into the dying people, and then finally a phantom.

Such backwards writing seems to mirror the message of the poem itself: that everything is backwards, and that kings are truly lowlier than the poor, and the poor are lowlier than the dead.

Percy Shelley is known for his works on nature, to find a poem based on his own society really speaks to how important the state of his suffering nation is to him. Political poems tend to ask for change, and the positive note he leaves us on speaks directly against the negativity from earlier in his poem:  "a glorious Phantom may/ Burst, to illumine our tempestous day." (13, 14)

I guess it's pretty cool that Shelley still had hope for England, and that he believed in its people so much that he could see a break in their misfortunes.