In which I am kind of an enormous geek
Whee! Is there any better feeling than having sent a fic off for beta? Well, okay, there is, but the list is SHORT. Of course, the fic could suck, but hey, it's greensilver's problem now. MUAHAHAHAHA.
Anyway. FRTDNNEATJ, I have been thinking about Romantic literature recently.
No, really!
See, aside from Shakespeare, the (British) Romantics are my primary literary interest--the Victorians, too, to a lesser extent (the 19th century was a great one for literature in Britain), especially the early ones like Tennyson and Matthew Arnold who were straddling that line as the spirit of the age shifted, but the Romantics are really my guys. I somewhat randomly took a 19th-century British lit class my freshman year at college (possibly because rogairedubh was taking it, IIRC) and never looked back. The idea of fleeting contact with the transcendent, which can't be put into words yet must be put into words... I am all over that.
Fast-forward a bit to when I was doing my semester abroad at the University of St. Andrews my junior year. I took a class there on the Younger Romantics, Byron and Shelley(s) and Keats and their contemporaries. It was a wonderful class; my professors were good, and I'd never really had the chance to focus on such a specific segment of literature before, and we used to have our tutorials (small discussion groups; many of the classes at St. Andrews were broken up like that--one day a week would be lecture, and then the other day tutorials) in the office of one of my profs, which was this tiny room at the top of this fabulous 19th-century stone building. We'd all crowd in there with our tea and talk about poetry with the wind whistling outside and it was really kind of utterly amazing, and I adored it.
Anyway, my friend N. and I decided to do the whirlwind tour of Europe over spring break. And as it happened, we were following a similar path to the one that a lot of British Romantic poets took when they decided to do their much more leisurely tours of Europe. And it also happened that I wrote an essay on Keats not long before the break, and I ended up picking it up from my prof on the way to catch the bus out of town to the airport (the essay hadn't been graded before then, and my dorm was about a 20-minute walk from town, so I didn't really have time to go back and drop it off). Therefore my Keats essay accompanied us on our whole trip, and it was sort of a running joke with me and N., and I now have a whole bunch of pictures of me holding this essay in front of various historical monuments. \o/ But there was a part of me that was oddly touched by the idea, too, because due to his health, Keats never got to do that whole European tour that many of his contemporaries did. He died in Rome, without ever having traveled much of anywhere. So I liked the idea that I could bring him with me, in my own little dorky way.
It was also while I was at St. Andrews that I really started thinking of myself as a Writer, and the responsibility and sensibility that goes along with that (which I'm thinking about again these days, though unfortunately with much less focus). I was studying these great poets and thinking a lot about literature--frankly, in St. Andrews, there is not a lot to do besides golf and drink and think, and I don't golf and I eventually ran out of money for drinking, so--and a play I'd written had just won our one-act contest back at Whitman, and I'd actually gotten paid for it, which was a total trip, so I was feeling... well, self-important, I guess, in retrospect *g*, but focused, too, and conscious of writing in a way I hadn't been before.
So ANYWAY. With all of that going on in the background, what follows is my journal entry from the day we visited the place in Rome where Keats died. Warning for amateur poetry. ;)
Rome, 26 March 1999, 8:55 pm
What an amazing--and exhausting--day. The Vatican, a few sites we missed yesterday, and I stood in the room where Keats died. Overwhelming, and I stood there crying, looking at the picture Severn drew of Keats on his deathbed. I missed seeing his grave*, which I terribly wanted to see, but maybe there was some reason for me not to see it. Maybe I'm doing him an injustice, over-sentimentalizing, over-romanticizing. I don't know. But it just seems so sad... was so sad, all the genius of Hyperion lost and unfinished. A little strange, that standing there in that tiny room moved me to tears when the Sistine Chapel didn't. But I suppose not very surprising.
Poet of youthful majesty and strength,
I stood today where you in losing battle
Lay with eyes unnaturally bright
And coughed away Hyperion and more.
Your hair, on faded paper curling gold,
Thrilled me as you were fired by Milton's once,
And I resolved to seek the laurel burden
Too, and teach my pen its work.
I compose in your honor; your bright spirit
Joins me through these lands you never knew.
*We actually went to find the graveyard, but got lost on the way--like we got lost almost EVERYWHERE on that trip--so by the time we got there, it was closed. We did find a lovely deli on the way back, though, and bought some amazing dried Italian sausage which I proceeded to schlep around in my backpack for the next couple of weeks (with the intent of shipping it to my parents eventually) and then accidentally leave in a hostel in Galway. Good times. I hope the very nice Canadian guys who ran that hostel enjoyed it.
Anyway. I've been thinking about all of that, and I wanted to write it out so that I can remember, and so that I can keep remembering.
Anyway. FRTDNNEATJ, I have been thinking about Romantic literature recently.
No, really!
See, aside from Shakespeare, the (British) Romantics are my primary literary interest--the Victorians, too, to a lesser extent (the 19th century was a great one for literature in Britain), especially the early ones like Tennyson and Matthew Arnold who were straddling that line as the spirit of the age shifted, but the Romantics are really my guys. I somewhat randomly took a 19th-century British lit class my freshman year at college (possibly because rogairedubh was taking it, IIRC) and never looked back. The idea of fleeting contact with the transcendent, which can't be put into words yet must be put into words... I am all over that.
Fast-forward a bit to when I was doing my semester abroad at the University of St. Andrews my junior year. I took a class there on the Younger Romantics, Byron and Shelley(s) and Keats and their contemporaries. It was a wonderful class; my professors were good, and I'd never really had the chance to focus on such a specific segment of literature before, and we used to have our tutorials (small discussion groups; many of the classes at St. Andrews were broken up like that--one day a week would be lecture, and then the other day tutorials) in the office of one of my profs, which was this tiny room at the top of this fabulous 19th-century stone building. We'd all crowd in there with our tea and talk about poetry with the wind whistling outside and it was really kind of utterly amazing, and I adored it.
Anyway, my friend N. and I decided to do the whirlwind tour of Europe over spring break. And as it happened, we were following a similar path to the one that a lot of British Romantic poets took when they decided to do their much more leisurely tours of Europe. And it also happened that I wrote an essay on Keats not long before the break, and I ended up picking it up from my prof on the way to catch the bus out of town to the airport (the essay hadn't been graded before then, and my dorm was about a 20-minute walk from town, so I didn't really have time to go back and drop it off). Therefore my Keats essay accompanied us on our whole trip, and it was sort of a running joke with me and N., and I now have a whole bunch of pictures of me holding this essay in front of various historical monuments. \o/ But there was a part of me that was oddly touched by the idea, too, because due to his health, Keats never got to do that whole European tour that many of his contemporaries did. He died in Rome, without ever having traveled much of anywhere. So I liked the idea that I could bring him with me, in my own little dorky way.
It was also while I was at St. Andrews that I really started thinking of myself as a Writer, and the responsibility and sensibility that goes along with that (which I'm thinking about again these days, though unfortunately with much less focus). I was studying these great poets and thinking a lot about literature--frankly, in St. Andrews, there is not a lot to do besides golf and drink and think, and I don't golf and I eventually ran out of money for drinking, so--and a play I'd written had just won our one-act contest back at Whitman, and I'd actually gotten paid for it, which was a total trip, so I was feeling... well, self-important, I guess, in retrospect *g*, but focused, too, and conscious of writing in a way I hadn't been before.
So ANYWAY. With all of that going on in the background, what follows is my journal entry from the day we visited the place in Rome where Keats died. Warning for amateur poetry. ;)
Rome, 26 March 1999, 8:55 pm
What an amazing--and exhausting--day. The Vatican, a few sites we missed yesterday, and I stood in the room where Keats died. Overwhelming, and I stood there crying, looking at the picture Severn drew of Keats on his deathbed. I missed seeing his grave*, which I terribly wanted to see, but maybe there was some reason for me not to see it. Maybe I'm doing him an injustice, over-sentimentalizing, over-romanticizing. I don't know. But it just seems so sad... was so sad, all the genius of Hyperion lost and unfinished. A little strange, that standing there in that tiny room moved me to tears when the Sistine Chapel didn't. But I suppose not very surprising.
Poet of youthful majesty and strength,
I stood today where you in losing battle
Lay with eyes unnaturally bright
And coughed away Hyperion and more.
Your hair, on faded paper curling gold,
Thrilled me as you were fired by Milton's once,
And I resolved to seek the laurel burden
Too, and teach my pen its work.
I compose in your honor; your bright spirit
Joins me through these lands you never knew.
*We actually went to find the graveyard, but got lost on the way--like we got lost almost EVERYWHERE on that trip--so by the time we got there, it was closed. We did find a lovely deli on the way back, though, and bought some amazing dried Italian sausage which I proceeded to schlep around in my backpack for the next couple of weeks (with the intent of shipping it to my parents eventually) and then accidentally leave in a hostel in Galway. Good times. I hope the very nice Canadian guys who ran that hostel enjoyed it.
Anyway. I've been thinking about all of that, and I wanted to write it out so that I can remember, and so that I can keep remembering.