Introduction- Imagine losing a fellow artist whose brilliance you deeply admired—someone cut down in the prime of life. This is the heartbreak that drove Percy Bysshe Shelley to write “Adonais” in 1821, one of the most beautiful elegies in English literature. This 495-line poem mourns John Keats, who died at just 25 from tuberculosis. Shelley, […]
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Introduction- William Blake (1757-1827) was an English poet, painter, engraver, and visionary who saw the world differently from most. Born in London to a working-class family with nonconformist religious beliefs, Blake showed remarkable artistic talent from an early age. At fourteen, he became an engraver’s apprentice, later studying at the Royal Academy. During his lifetime,
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Introduction- Imagine taking the most famous seducer in literature and turning him completely upside down. That’s exactly what Lord Byron did in 1819 when he published “Don Juan – Canto I.” Instead of the cunning, predatory Don Juan we know from Spanish legends, Byron gives us a sixteen-year-old boy who’s more seduced than seducer—a naive
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Introduction- “Kubla Khan,” subtitled “Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment,” stands among Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most mysterious and celebrated works. Written in 1797 and published in 1816, this Romantic masterpiece emerged from what Coleridge described as an opium-induced dream vision of Xanadu, the legendary pleasure palace of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. The
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Introduction- William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood“, published in 1807, is a key work of Romantic poetry. It looks at how we lose our childhood’s natural connection to the divine and how memory lasts. People often call it the “Immortality Ode.”. It thinks about how people go from being innocent
Intimations of Immortality: Wordsworth’s Timeless Childhood Vision Read More »