Besides each writer answering the question “What is it that makes a human life worth living?” I also wanted each writer’s answer to represent a facet of Romanticism in some way while still being true to their character, which proved to be one of my biggest challenges for me throughout this process. Eventually I decided on radicalism for Mary Shelley, the doomed and tragic love story for Keats, the romanticism and awe-inspiring power of nature with sprinkles of Ancient Greek romanticism for Percy Shelley, and the stressed importance of the independence of the individual for Byron, with some overlaps in between. Each piece, I’d like to think, also holds its own separate theme on the writer’s life’s purpose.
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
best known for: “She Walks in Beauty”, Don Juan, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The first and last piece of this collection Selections from the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron is meant to be purely in Lord Byron’s voice and uses no poetic inspiration. The letters and journal entries are purely fictional, but are inspired by his actual letters and journal entries from around the set times with some direct quotations. His story is meant to serve as the driving vessel for the question, as well as the framing narrative.
Lord Byron to this day is the most talked about of the Romantic writers and his short but eventful life continues to confuse, intrigue, and inspire today’s modern historians and literature buffs. By Regency-Era standards, he was tall, dark, and irresistibly handsome. At least on a surface level, he was moody, mysterious, outrageous, and a womanizer to boot. It was his flamboyant personality and magnetic charisma that made people in his time flock to his social circles.
The first story Byron narrates takes place during the famous summer of 1816, where events such as the creation of Frankenstein did happen. During the summer of 1816, Byron was a man on the run. The previous year he’d been married to Lady Annabella Milbanke, a marriage that was quickly followed by a long and messy divorce. Only days after the birth of their daughter, the future Ada Lovelace, Milbanke feld to London to live with family. Byron never saw Milbanke or his only legitamate issue again. When news of the abuse suffered by Milbanke at the hands of Byron, coupled with the rumors of Byron’s affair with his married half-sister Augusta reached the public, they responded with outrage, forcing Byron to leave the country.
He had spent the beginning of 1816 roaming the continent with his personal physician, John Polidori. That summer saw him in Lake Geneva, Switzerland where he found himself neighbor to Percy Shelley and his new love, the 18 year old Mary Shelley (Still Mary Godwin until later that year) also on the run after their recent elopement. Percy Shelley and Byron hit it off immediately and passed the summer in each other’s close company. The only person at the lake who was not mentioned in the story is Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s step-sister and one of Byron’s many ex-flames, he’d thrown himself at during his divorce. That summer, Clairmont was pregnant with his child.
The summer of 1816 had had some famously terrible weather. Horrible rains and storms confined the group inside for a majority of the time. On one of these days, after reading from a collection of ghost stories, Byron proposed that they should each try to write their own scary stories, soon after, Mary Shelley presented a short story that would eventually become Frankenstein which she’d been inspired to write it after a nightmare she’d had from listening to a conversation the previous night between Percy Shelley and Byron about the recent discoveries of Dr. Darwin who’d made dead frog legs jerk via electrification.
The second piece of Byron narration and the last piece of the collection is partially based on his poem “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” which I quote in the beginning and was my original title for this piece. The poem, which reflects on his accumulating years, his role and involvement in a recent plot to overthrow the Greek Monarchy, and what his life has come to at 36. This is the closests any of Byron’s pieces gets to following his poems. You may have also noticed that the last line of the last journal entire is a round-about Byronic way of referencing the vine “We all die, you either kill yourself or get killed- whacha gonna do? Whacha gonna do?” which was my original idea for the collections’s theme on life.
The character of Lukas is in fact based on a real person. Loukas Chalandritsantos was Byron’s 15 year-old page boy during his stay in Greece. Byron (who was bisexual) had fallen in love with his handsome servant. When Loukas did not unsurprisingly return his feelings, Byron fell into a restless state of longing.
As it came to be, Byron’s 36th birthday would be his last. A lifetime of debauchery and extreme dieting to preserve his slender figure had physically aged Byron and made him appear much older than he was. By the end of his life he was rendered weak, thin, and frail. He contracted Malaria a few months after his arrival in Greece and his body was unable to fight the virus after long term damage to his body as a result of his eating disorder and alcohol poisoning.
He made two requests on his deathbed, to be buried anywhere but England and to have his memoirs published. Both of his wishes were denied. His memoirs, deemed too scandalous and scalitious to be published, were burned and his body was sent back to England. When his corpse arrived, an outpouring of people from all over Europe turned out to mourn the legendary poet, forgiving any apparent past transgressions. He is buried in the Byron family vault at the Church of St. Magdalene in Hucknall, England.
A Lady Monster
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Best known for: Frankenstein
When writing Mary’s story, I chose to focus on her life through a gender lens and her identity as a female writer. Mary, who was a femminst herself, lived a highly unconventional life. When she was 16, she eloped to France after falling in love with Percy Shelley (who at the time was still married to his estranged first wife) while he was paying a visit to her father, Willam Godwin. She had an unusual amount of independence for a woman in her time; she was able to follow her passions, she was recognized in her own right as a respected writer, and eventually did publish all her novels under her own name, not her husband’s.
I took Mary’s passion for writing to act as this symbol for her liberation and independence which by extension, gives meaning to Mary’s life and her answer to the main question posed by the text. However, what I think separates Mary’s story from the other Romantics in this collections is that she actually has to fight for her place among her contemporaries to get regonignition for what gives life purpose.
For Mary’s story, I chose a narrative structure as opposed to a poem like I did for Keats or Shelley for the simple fact that Mary was not a poet. She did occasionally write poetry but is not primarily known for it. Her poetry was not published in her lifetime as much of it was deeply personal and meant to only be read by her eyes. I infused her story with elements of horror (a genre she helped to pioneer) and included allusions and direct quotes from Frankenstein, her most recognized novel. After all, what’s scarier than the patriarchy?
Many of Mary’s femminst ideas drew from her mother’s. As I mentioned in Lord Byron’s section, Mary was from a family of great literary renown. Her father, William Godwin, was the founder of Anarchism, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, is considered to be England’s first proto-femminist. She wrote A Vindication on the Rights of Women, which advocated for women’s rights to education. She argued that women only appeared inferior to men because education was not made accessible to them.
Frankenstein experienced tremendous fame in Mary Shelley’s lifetime. By 1823, only 5 years after Frankenstein was published, there had already been 6 different stage adaptations of her novel, one of which Mary did get to see herself. Frankenstein had skyrocketed Mary into sudden fame, making her an overnight success. She would go on to publish more successful novels such as Valperga and The Last Man.
After Percy’s early death in 1822, Mary was made a young widow at only 24 years old, with their young son, Percy Florence, left to her care. She saw a chance to capitalize on her late husband’s legacy and worked to publish his unfinished works and cement his place in literary history. It is in large thanks to Mary that Percy Shelley’s name is even remembered among the Romantics. Mary never remarried, and spent the rest of her life writing, traveling Europe, and continuing her charity work with the poor lower classes of “fallen” women as her mother before her had done. She died in 1851 of brain cancer at the age of 54, she had lived just long enough to see her son get married.
Mary Shelley, who was quite humble about her life and success as a writer, has a legacy that has stuck for hundreds of years. For a male-dominated movement, Mary Shelley stands out as one of a small handful of female Romantics, and one of an even smaller few to fully commit herself to writing. She is remembered for pioneering the genres of Science Fiction, which she invented, and horror. The questions and topics discussed in Frankenstein still finds relevance today when discussing the ethics of things like GMOs and the altering human DNA, should humans attempt to play god? Mary Shelley stands as the founding mother of Science Fiction, helping to pave the way for the many generations of writers who would come after her.
The Three Days Existence of the Butterfly Poet
John Keats (1795-1821)
Best known for: Endymion, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, and “Bright Star”
In the third piece of this collection, I chose to focus on the last four years of John Keat’s life. A time that from 1818-1821 proved to be some of the most interesting and tumultuous times in his life. 1818 began after the death of Keats’s younger brother, Tom, from consumption (tuberculosis), his epic poem, Endymion, was published and received famously terrible reviews, and later that year while he and his friend Charles Brown were staying in Hampstead he met the love of his life, the literal girl next door.
The poem is written in iambic pentameter (meaning there are 10 syllables per line) and is modeled after a lyrical narrative structure, such as seen in his longer poems like “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” and “The Eve of St. Agnes”. While my own attempt to write in this style is no where near to the level of mastery that Keats was at by the end of his career, I have tried to emulate his general writing tone with an absence of grandeur and a focus on the beauty of nature and human feeling. When writing about Keats and Fanny’s relationship, I chose to look at it through Keat’s own personal philosophy of “Negative Capability” which in Keats’s own words states that the writer is “Capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” and when applied to life could mean that the nature of humanity and all human feeling is flawed and complex, often without reason, and not strictly one thing or the other.
Keats himself was a mercurial man, he had a temper, and was known to regularly get into fights. His emotions were nothing short of explosive, sometimes proving too much for Keat’s himself to handle. Falling in love was no exception. For Keats, love was an all consuming power which he had at first resisted fearing it would distract him from his career and prove ruinous. The opposite proved true, and he quickly succumbed to his desires. His letters to Fanny are tender and passionate, others jealous and paranoid, sometimes both and all in the same paragraph. Keats gave all of himself over to Fanny, never straying away from how he really felt on any given day.
Little it known about Fanny Brawne as most of her being has been lost to history. What we do know about her from contemporaty accounts is that she was a lively, outgoing, and kind young woman. She was known in Hampstead to be deeply interested in fashion, she made her own clothes, and loved society events such as balls. She eventually did marry at 33, 12 years after Keat's death, and had three children. She would go on to live a conventional life, eventually dying of old age. Sadly, we will never know Fanny’s own thoughts on their relationship as her letters to Keats have been lost to time and her later remarks on him reveal little about her true feelings. We can, however, assume she did feel the same. When he died, the effect on her was profound. She wore only black for three years (standard mourning for a widow), she often wandered the Heath where she and Keats had taken many long walks, sometimes late into the night, and wore his engagement ring until the day she died.
My first priority in this poem was to bring out this deep, passionate, and intense love that these two young people felt for each other. Many of the lines in the poem are direct quotes from Keats’s letters and poems, including my favorite Keats quote “I wish we were butterflies...” Which I modified for not just the title, but used as a metaphor for Keats’s life in the last line. When Keats and Fanny have their first kiss, I quoted “On first Looking at Chapman’s Homer” which compares reading new, eye-opening literature to the discovery of the new world. In my case, I used the quote to compare falling in love to discovering a new world of feeling. Some other poems I used include “The Day is Gone, and All it’s Sweets are Gone”, “Of Human Seasons” and “Bright Star”
The last stanza of this poem is also intentional. Besides the last stanza ending early, I also came up with a “Flat line Parameter” which loosely follows Iambic Pentameter. It’s composed of two 2 syllable words and the next part of the line is composed of two 1 syllable words. When the whole thing when “sounded” out, it sounds like a dying heartbeat. The last 4 beats of the petemeter are left blank to signify the “flatline.”
In real life, Keats died a slow and painful death in Rome. He was in physical pain, unable to breathe due to TB, feverish, and denied painkillers like opium for fear he might try to commit suicide. He was heartbroken, believing that he was a failure, missing Fanny, and haunted by the visions of family members both dead and alive. It is reported that towards the end, he would wake up crying when he found that he was still alive. Keats was buried in a nearby protestant cemetery. He was 25.
Keats died thinking his poetry would be left in obscurity, however this proved to be far from truth. By the end of the 19th century, his works had gained an audience and had come to be identified as emblematic of the Romantic movement. His poetry, though never popular in his lifetime, has been rediscovered and picked up again and again after his death. Today, he is recognized to be one of the finest Lyric poets to ever write in the English language.
Ode to a Wicked Storm
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Best known for: “Ode to the West Wind,” Prometheus Unbound, and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
For my last piece, I chose to model the structure after “Ode to a West Wind'' which is written in Terza Rima, meaning there are three lines per stanza that follow a rhyme scheme and are also written in Iambic Pentameter. Shelley’s original choice to write “Ode to a West Wind” in this style was to reflect a breeze like feeling in the poem, I chose to do this as well to reflect the wind during the storm to aid my idea of this poem to read in tone like a Greek epic.
I also used the “Flatline Pentameter” again to signify death during this piece. I drew a lot from “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in that, I chose to use the “Muse” of intellectual beauty as he describes in his poem to be this kind of prophetic force that has come to bless him, much like in Hymn where Shelley claims that the Muse of Intellect (nature) has blessed him and he has sworn to dedicate his poetic powers to her. This poem, I suppose, could be seen as the sequel to the poem.
How the tone I’d say differs in this one is that we don’t get a lot of Percy Shelley’s personality that comes through. Mainly because this is a poem about the storm and the muse, not to mention he’s in a state of fight or flight for most of the poem. Where I did want elements of Percy Shelley’s voice to come through was with the passion in which he talks about the storm.
Shelley, since his teenage years, had been cemented as a leftist political radical in the public eye after writing “The Necessity of Atheism” A pamphlet that would get him kicked out of Oxford. For the rest of his career, he would write hundreds more political essays and poems, often dedicated to the poor and working class men of Britain and the abolition of the monarchy. If one thing comes through in all these works, it’s passion and fervor. Poems like “England in 1819” or “Song for the Working Man” reads like a rally speech, you can almost hear him yelling. I wanted this same passion to be present in my poem when Shelley talks about the storm.
Percy Shelley died a tragic early death at the age of 29. His body washed up on Pisa’s shores a couple of weeks after his ship, The Don Juan, was captured in a squall and sank. Killing Shelley and his friend, Edward Hunt. They had decided to go boating earlier that day to meet another friend, Leigh Hunt, and his family who had just recently arrived in Italy. Shelley’s corpse was at first unrecognizable, the face and hands had been completely eaten away. His body was only identified by the volume of Keats, who Shelley had been close with, that was in his pocket.
It is said that during the burning of his body, his heart would not burn and had in fact been calcified. When this was realized, it was snached from the fire and preserved. At first, Lord Byron (who was present at the burning) took it as a memento. When Mary Shelley heard about the heart, it was given to her and became one of her most prized and sentimental possessions, she would carry it with her everywhere she went. The remains themselves were buried in the same cemetery where Keats had been buried a year earlier near Keats’s grave.
Percy Shelley today is seen as one of the most accomplished of the Romantic poets. His poetry is one of the finest examples of Romanticism as it encapsulates all that Romanticism has to offer: epic nature, tragedy, radicalism, and more. All his works, rich with imagination, imagery, feeling, and vision makes him stand out from all other contemporaries. Shelley gave voice to some of Romanticism's deepest and most sublime desires.
Once again, I thank anyone and everyone who has stayed with me or read this far in my passion project. I love you all, and a biggest thanks to Mrs. Sullivan for giving me the platform for my vision.
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
best known for: “She Walks in Beauty”, Don Juan, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The first and last piece of this collection Selections from the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron is meant to be purely in Lord Byron’s voice and uses no poetic inspiration. The letters and journal entries are purely fictional, but are inspired by his actual letters and journal entries from around the set times with some direct quotations. His story is meant to serve as the driving vessel for the question, as well as the framing narrative.
Lord Byron to this day is the most talked about of the Romantic writers and his short but eventful life continues to confuse, intrigue, and inspire today’s modern historians and literature buffs. By Regency-Era standards, he was tall, dark, and irresistibly handsome. At least on a surface level, he was moody, mysterious, outrageous, and a womanizer to boot. It was his flamboyant personality and magnetic charisma that made people in his time flock to his social circles.
The first story Byron narrates takes place during the famous summer of 1816, where events such as the creation of Frankenstein did happen. During the summer of 1816, Byron was a man on the run. The previous year he’d been married to Lady Annabella Milbanke, a marriage that was quickly followed by a long and messy divorce. Only days after the birth of their daughter, the future Ada Lovelace, Milbanke feld to London to live with family. Byron never saw Milbanke or his only legitamate issue again. When news of the abuse suffered by Milbanke at the hands of Byron, coupled with the rumors of Byron’s affair with his married half-sister Augusta reached the public, they responded with outrage, forcing Byron to leave the country.
He had spent the beginning of 1816 roaming the continent with his personal physician, John Polidori. That summer saw him in Lake Geneva, Switzerland where he found himself neighbor to Percy Shelley and his new love, the 18 year old Mary Shelley (Still Mary Godwin until later that year) also on the run after their recent elopement. Percy Shelley and Byron hit it off immediately and passed the summer in each other’s close company. The only person at the lake who was not mentioned in the story is Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s step-sister and one of Byron’s many ex-flames, he’d thrown himself at during his divorce. That summer, Clairmont was pregnant with his child.
The summer of 1816 had had some famously terrible weather. Horrible rains and storms confined the group inside for a majority of the time. On one of these days, after reading from a collection of ghost stories, Byron proposed that they should each try to write their own scary stories, soon after, Mary Shelley presented a short story that would eventually become Frankenstein which she’d been inspired to write it after a nightmare she’d had from listening to a conversation the previous night between Percy Shelley and Byron about the recent discoveries of Dr. Darwin who’d made dead frog legs jerk via electrification.
The second piece of Byron narration and the last piece of the collection is partially based on his poem “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” which I quote in the beginning and was my original title for this piece. The poem, which reflects on his accumulating years, his role and involvement in a recent plot to overthrow the Greek Monarchy, and what his life has come to at 36. This is the closests any of Byron’s pieces gets to following his poems. You may have also noticed that the last line of the last journal entire is a round-about Byronic way of referencing the vine “We all die, you either kill yourself or get killed- whacha gonna do? Whacha gonna do?” which was my original idea for the collections’s theme on life.
The character of Lukas is in fact based on a real person. Loukas Chalandritsantos was Byron’s 15 year-old page boy during his stay in Greece. Byron (who was bisexual) had fallen in love with his handsome servant. When Loukas did not unsurprisingly return his feelings, Byron fell into a restless state of longing.
As it came to be, Byron’s 36th birthday would be his last. A lifetime of debauchery and extreme dieting to preserve his slender figure had physically aged Byron and made him appear much older than he was. By the end of his life he was rendered weak, thin, and frail. He contracted Malaria a few months after his arrival in Greece and his body was unable to fight the virus after long term damage to his body as a result of his eating disorder and alcohol poisoning.
He made two requests on his deathbed, to be buried anywhere but England and to have his memoirs published. Both of his wishes were denied. His memoirs, deemed too scandalous and scalitious to be published, were burned and his body was sent back to England. When his corpse arrived, an outpouring of people from all over Europe turned out to mourn the legendary poet, forgiving any apparent past transgressions. He is buried in the Byron family vault at the Church of St. Magdalene in Hucknall, England.
A Lady Monster
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Best known for: Frankenstein
When writing Mary’s story, I chose to focus on her life through a gender lens and her identity as a female writer. Mary, who was a femminst herself, lived a highly unconventional life. When she was 16, she eloped to France after falling in love with Percy Shelley (who at the time was still married to his estranged first wife) while he was paying a visit to her father, Willam Godwin. She had an unusual amount of independence for a woman in her time; she was able to follow her passions, she was recognized in her own right as a respected writer, and eventually did publish all her novels under her own name, not her husband’s.
I took Mary’s passion for writing to act as this symbol for her liberation and independence which by extension, gives meaning to Mary’s life and her answer to the main question posed by the text. However, what I think separates Mary’s story from the other Romantics in this collections is that she actually has to fight for her place among her contemporaries to get regonignition for what gives life purpose.
For Mary’s story, I chose a narrative structure as opposed to a poem like I did for Keats or Shelley for the simple fact that Mary was not a poet. She did occasionally write poetry but is not primarily known for it. Her poetry was not published in her lifetime as much of it was deeply personal and meant to only be read by her eyes. I infused her story with elements of horror (a genre she helped to pioneer) and included allusions and direct quotes from Frankenstein, her most recognized novel. After all, what’s scarier than the patriarchy?
Many of Mary’s femminst ideas drew from her mother’s. As I mentioned in Lord Byron’s section, Mary was from a family of great literary renown. Her father, William Godwin, was the founder of Anarchism, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, is considered to be England’s first proto-femminist. She wrote A Vindication on the Rights of Women, which advocated for women’s rights to education. She argued that women only appeared inferior to men because education was not made accessible to them.
Frankenstein experienced tremendous fame in Mary Shelley’s lifetime. By 1823, only 5 years after Frankenstein was published, there had already been 6 different stage adaptations of her novel, one of which Mary did get to see herself. Frankenstein had skyrocketed Mary into sudden fame, making her an overnight success. She would go on to publish more successful novels such as Valperga and The Last Man.
After Percy’s early death in 1822, Mary was made a young widow at only 24 years old, with their young son, Percy Florence, left to her care. She saw a chance to capitalize on her late husband’s legacy and worked to publish his unfinished works and cement his place in literary history. It is in large thanks to Mary that Percy Shelley’s name is even remembered among the Romantics. Mary never remarried, and spent the rest of her life writing, traveling Europe, and continuing her charity work with the poor lower classes of “fallen” women as her mother before her had done. She died in 1851 of brain cancer at the age of 54, she had lived just long enough to see her son get married.
Mary Shelley, who was quite humble about her life and success as a writer, has a legacy that has stuck for hundreds of years. For a male-dominated movement, Mary Shelley stands out as one of a small handful of female Romantics, and one of an even smaller few to fully commit herself to writing. She is remembered for pioneering the genres of Science Fiction, which she invented, and horror. The questions and topics discussed in Frankenstein still finds relevance today when discussing the ethics of things like GMOs and the altering human DNA, should humans attempt to play god? Mary Shelley stands as the founding mother of Science Fiction, helping to pave the way for the many generations of writers who would come after her.
The Three Days Existence of the Butterfly Poet
John Keats (1795-1821)
Best known for: Endymion, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, and “Bright Star”
In the third piece of this collection, I chose to focus on the last four years of John Keat’s life. A time that from 1818-1821 proved to be some of the most interesting and tumultuous times in his life. 1818 began after the death of Keats’s younger brother, Tom, from consumption (tuberculosis), his epic poem, Endymion, was published and received famously terrible reviews, and later that year while he and his friend Charles Brown were staying in Hampstead he met the love of his life, the literal girl next door.
The poem is written in iambic pentameter (meaning there are 10 syllables per line) and is modeled after a lyrical narrative structure, such as seen in his longer poems like “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” and “The Eve of St. Agnes”. While my own attempt to write in this style is no where near to the level of mastery that Keats was at by the end of his career, I have tried to emulate his general writing tone with an absence of grandeur and a focus on the beauty of nature and human feeling. When writing about Keats and Fanny’s relationship, I chose to look at it through Keat’s own personal philosophy of “Negative Capability” which in Keats’s own words states that the writer is “Capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” and when applied to life could mean that the nature of humanity and all human feeling is flawed and complex, often without reason, and not strictly one thing or the other.
Keats himself was a mercurial man, he had a temper, and was known to regularly get into fights. His emotions were nothing short of explosive, sometimes proving too much for Keat’s himself to handle. Falling in love was no exception. For Keats, love was an all consuming power which he had at first resisted fearing it would distract him from his career and prove ruinous. The opposite proved true, and he quickly succumbed to his desires. His letters to Fanny are tender and passionate, others jealous and paranoid, sometimes both and all in the same paragraph. Keats gave all of himself over to Fanny, never straying away from how he really felt on any given day.
Little it known about Fanny Brawne as most of her being has been lost to history. What we do know about her from contemporaty accounts is that she was a lively, outgoing, and kind young woman. She was known in Hampstead to be deeply interested in fashion, she made her own clothes, and loved society events such as balls. She eventually did marry at 33, 12 years after Keat's death, and had three children. She would go on to live a conventional life, eventually dying of old age. Sadly, we will never know Fanny’s own thoughts on their relationship as her letters to Keats have been lost to time and her later remarks on him reveal little about her true feelings. We can, however, assume she did feel the same. When he died, the effect on her was profound. She wore only black for three years (standard mourning for a widow), she often wandered the Heath where she and Keats had taken many long walks, sometimes late into the night, and wore his engagement ring until the day she died.
My first priority in this poem was to bring out this deep, passionate, and intense love that these two young people felt for each other. Many of the lines in the poem are direct quotes from Keats’s letters and poems, including my favorite Keats quote “I wish we were butterflies...” Which I modified for not just the title, but used as a metaphor for Keats’s life in the last line. When Keats and Fanny have their first kiss, I quoted “On first Looking at Chapman’s Homer” which compares reading new, eye-opening literature to the discovery of the new world. In my case, I used the quote to compare falling in love to discovering a new world of feeling. Some other poems I used include “The Day is Gone, and All it’s Sweets are Gone”, “Of Human Seasons” and “Bright Star”
The last stanza of this poem is also intentional. Besides the last stanza ending early, I also came up with a “Flat line Parameter” which loosely follows Iambic Pentameter. It’s composed of two 2 syllable words and the next part of the line is composed of two 1 syllable words. When the whole thing when “sounded” out, it sounds like a dying heartbeat. The last 4 beats of the petemeter are left blank to signify the “flatline.”
In real life, Keats died a slow and painful death in Rome. He was in physical pain, unable to breathe due to TB, feverish, and denied painkillers like opium for fear he might try to commit suicide. He was heartbroken, believing that he was a failure, missing Fanny, and haunted by the visions of family members both dead and alive. It is reported that towards the end, he would wake up crying when he found that he was still alive. Keats was buried in a nearby protestant cemetery. He was 25.
Keats died thinking his poetry would be left in obscurity, however this proved to be far from truth. By the end of the 19th century, his works had gained an audience and had come to be identified as emblematic of the Romantic movement. His poetry, though never popular in his lifetime, has been rediscovered and picked up again and again after his death. Today, he is recognized to be one of the finest Lyric poets to ever write in the English language.
Ode to a Wicked Storm
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Best known for: “Ode to the West Wind,” Prometheus Unbound, and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
For my last piece, I chose to model the structure after “Ode to a West Wind'' which is written in Terza Rima, meaning there are three lines per stanza that follow a rhyme scheme and are also written in Iambic Pentameter. Shelley’s original choice to write “Ode to a West Wind” in this style was to reflect a breeze like feeling in the poem, I chose to do this as well to reflect the wind during the storm to aid my idea of this poem to read in tone like a Greek epic.
I also used the “Flatline Pentameter” again to signify death during this piece. I drew a lot from “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in that, I chose to use the “Muse” of intellectual beauty as he describes in his poem to be this kind of prophetic force that has come to bless him, much like in Hymn where Shelley claims that the Muse of Intellect (nature) has blessed him and he has sworn to dedicate his poetic powers to her. This poem, I suppose, could be seen as the sequel to the poem.
How the tone I’d say differs in this one is that we don’t get a lot of Percy Shelley’s personality that comes through. Mainly because this is a poem about the storm and the muse, not to mention he’s in a state of fight or flight for most of the poem. Where I did want elements of Percy Shelley’s voice to come through was with the passion in which he talks about the storm.
Shelley, since his teenage years, had been cemented as a leftist political radical in the public eye after writing “The Necessity of Atheism” A pamphlet that would get him kicked out of Oxford. For the rest of his career, he would write hundreds more political essays and poems, often dedicated to the poor and working class men of Britain and the abolition of the monarchy. If one thing comes through in all these works, it’s passion and fervor. Poems like “England in 1819” or “Song for the Working Man” reads like a rally speech, you can almost hear him yelling. I wanted this same passion to be present in my poem when Shelley talks about the storm.
Percy Shelley died a tragic early death at the age of 29. His body washed up on Pisa’s shores a couple of weeks after his ship, The Don Juan, was captured in a squall and sank. Killing Shelley and his friend, Edward Hunt. They had decided to go boating earlier that day to meet another friend, Leigh Hunt, and his family who had just recently arrived in Italy. Shelley’s corpse was at first unrecognizable, the face and hands had been completely eaten away. His body was only identified by the volume of Keats, who Shelley had been close with, that was in his pocket.
It is said that during the burning of his body, his heart would not burn and had in fact been calcified. When this was realized, it was snached from the fire and preserved. At first, Lord Byron (who was present at the burning) took it as a memento. When Mary Shelley heard about the heart, it was given to her and became one of her most prized and sentimental possessions, she would carry it with her everywhere she went. The remains themselves were buried in the same cemetery where Keats had been buried a year earlier near Keats’s grave.
Percy Shelley today is seen as one of the most accomplished of the Romantic poets. His poetry is one of the finest examples of Romanticism as it encapsulates all that Romanticism has to offer: epic nature, tragedy, radicalism, and more. All his works, rich with imagination, imagery, feeling, and vision makes him stand out from all other contemporaries. Shelley gave voice to some of Romanticism's deepest and most sublime desires.
Once again, I thank anyone and everyone who has stayed with me or read this far in my passion project. I love you all, and a biggest thanks to Mrs. Sullivan for giving me the platform for my vision.
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