Write a 2500-3000 word essay (about eight to ten pages in Times Roman 12 point type, double-spaced) that involves a close critical examination of at least one of the works we have studied since the midterm. You may choose your own topic or use one of the following topics to generate ideas. Use stanza and line numbers for citing your primary source (if it’s a poem); use MLA citation style for any information, ideas, or direct quotations from secondary sources. An essay of this size and scale can reasonably be expected to contain several secondary sources, which may include literary history, biography, criticism, or theory. The essay should prove an arguable thesis: a position that a reasonable person could oppose.
The Romantic Aesthetic: What …show more content…
This inspired him to write his poem “Mont Blanc” which is composed of five stanzas in irregular rhymed iambic pentameter. Shelley wrote the ode in apostrophe to depict nature as conscious, alive, and dynamic. In this self-aware manner of constructing nature, Shelley carefully intersperses his abstractions about the external world and the poetic mind, suggesting that each affects the other. In addition, he deliberately changes and conflicts his perceptions of Mont Blanc. This is because Shelley places value in the personal representation of experiencing nature even when such experience appears ambiguous and difficult to understand. Unlike other early Romantic poets, Shelley’s worldview proves to be more objective and independent from religious agenda. Rather than viewing nature as a static object by itself, unaffected by perception, Shelley challenges religion’s narrow construction of nature, suggesting that nature’s power is great but its significance is created by one’s imagination (5.139). Ultimately, Shelley suggests that the sublime is not as grand as it may seem to advocate for humanism and to encourage the use of the poet’s imaginative, independent thinking in the face of
The Romantic Aesthetic: What …show more content…
This inspired him to write his poem “Mont Blanc” which is composed of five stanzas in irregular rhymed iambic pentameter. Shelley wrote the ode in apostrophe to depict nature as conscious, alive, and dynamic. In this self-aware manner of constructing nature, Shelley carefully intersperses his abstractions about the external world and the poetic mind, suggesting that each affects the other. In addition, he deliberately changes and conflicts his perceptions of Mont Blanc. This is because Shelley places value in the personal representation of experiencing nature even when such experience appears ambiguous and difficult to understand. Unlike other early Romantic poets, Shelley’s worldview proves to be more objective and independent from religious agenda. Rather than viewing nature as a static object by itself, unaffected by perception, Shelley challenges religion’s narrow construction of nature, suggesting that nature’s power is great but its significance is created by one’s imagination (5.139). Ultimately, Shelley suggests that the sublime is not as grand as it may seem to advocate for humanism and to encourage the use of the poet’s imaginative, independent thinking in the face of