More Keats Converts

I have been fortunate to find some like-minded students in these past few days who seem to find Keats, his complexities, his emotional turmoil, and his penchant for incredible analogies stemming from everyday accidents, quite a fascinating figure to analyze, whether it be his poems or his letters. Whether you are a fan or not, at least you know of his life and his tragic end.

1: We spent the hour looking at our Autumn Diction analysis by emphasizing evidence to support diction adjectives, purposes, and thesis statements. For next class, we will be looking at Gray's "Favourite Cat," Shelley's "Ozymandias," and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and it would behoove you to read these poems to make sure you know what all the words mean or what all of the allusions reference. You can find these poems online through a search, or you can find them through links on earlier blogs from the past week or so - under the classes.

3: When we put our heads together, we certainly can craft one heck of a thesis statement: Gray elucidates naive, karmic diction whilst Shelley epitomizes desolate, tyrannical diction to warn against acting on materialistic, selfish desires. Pretty impressive! After marrying our cat and pharaoh, we spent the rest of class looking at my Keatsy's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and recognizing that the true conception of beauty, the juxtaposition of joy and love to pain and sacrifice, is the only way to understand the truth of the scene or circumstance. We still have a thesis statement to compose for this poem, and then we will be in Keats' world for the next couple of days.

5: We reviewed vocab for the quiz on Monday. Then, we spent the rest of the hour analyzing my Keatsy's words in his letters to Fanny, identifying his multi-layered purposes as the letters move from young love, carefree and tumultuous, to tragic end, pained, impassioned, loss. Amidst this transition throughout the letters, you have the best concept of all: purplue! Oh, Keats! To take something so mundane, the dripping of ink and its variegated shades, and make it into the concept of togetherness, a union of the two, is pure brilliance of a writer's mind. We will finish up the letters on Monday - with his last letter to Fanny - and then you will see what you will be up to with all of your notes with these letters. In the near future, you will have another toolbox quiz, and you will dive into the world of tone, its shifts, and its maps --- yes, maps!