Romantic Period Reflections (part 1 of...eh...call it 30)
This is not a column. This is not for my pleasure. This is a university assignment. Once a week I am required to make a journal entry for my Romantic Period Poetry & Prose course. ENG308. I do this for marks. My blog is the best place for it, since I'll actually remember to update. Please, bear with me on this. Ignore it if you will. I should be posting more regularly anyway.
Anyway, we're two weeks into the course. Its not too bad. As I've stated previously, the Romantics are my favourite folks in one of my favourite periods. There's something about their work that really shines a light onto the soul of the time. You just don't see poetry like that these days.
What's really getting me at the moment is the use of sonnets which aren't...I dunno. When I hear sonnets, I think Shakespeare, and I think strict metrical form. These sonnets ain't that. They're mixing things around. They're not sticking to a strict formula, and that's what makes them so good, and frankly that's what makes them BETTER than my namesake's. Its using a structure but altering it to serve your purposes.
Plus...Keats wrote a literary review of Chapman's translation of Homer. In the form of a sonnet. Now THAT is journalism.
Anyway, we're two weeks into the course. Its not too bad. As I've stated previously, the Romantics are my favourite folks in one of my favourite periods. There's something about their work that really shines a light onto the soul of the time. You just don't see poetry like that these days.
What's really getting me at the moment is the use of sonnets which aren't...I dunno. When I hear sonnets, I think Shakespeare, and I think strict metrical form. These sonnets ain't that. They're mixing things around. They're not sticking to a strict formula, and that's what makes them so good, and frankly that's what makes them BETTER than my namesake's. Its using a structure but altering it to serve your purposes.
Plus...Keats wrote a literary review of Chapman's translation of Homer. In the form of a sonnet. Now THAT is journalism.
posted by Derek the Bard at 2:12 a.m.
3 Comments:
If Keats was a Romantic poet, you might want to read the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons. It is a science fiction series that relates in several very strange ways to Keats and his poetry.
In order, those would be Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and Rise of Endymion.
Each pair is linked together to tell a story over the course of two novels, with the divide between where one's plot ends and the next begins being far more clearly delineated in the latter pair.
Really great stuff, even if the temporal physics gets a bit self-contradictory between Moneta's chromium suits and the farcaster network's supplementary processing system...
Oh, and it's not for those with particularly strong notions of a "one true vision" of divinity. But if you can enjoy the Galactica remake's conflicting religious diatribes, give it a shot.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll look into it once I'm done with my gobs of reading at the moment.
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