Week 5: Shelley's Poem

Mar 28, 2007 21:42


This weeks tutorial was based on Percy Shelley, we discussed the our opinions on numerous things one being...
"poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"

It seems as though shelley doesn't just create meaning from his poems, he is actually creating his ideas into his poems and it sometimes seems that his poetry is more a line of thought and you can see his mind develop as he writes.

I found the lecture interesting, especially moving from romanticism to victorianism and i really liked the first initial photo's that MG put up on the slide show, I love the old style pictures.

It was good how mg introduced the same quote "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" and it was awesome when he explained (something along the lines of) if we didn't have poets/ musicians/ theatre to liven up the issues of life, then the world would seem boring. I also think that people would have such a negative impact on life that people would seep into a state of depression instead of being able to 'laugh about it later' or just deal with the issue in general.

In the tutorial we also went through the poem "Ode to the west wind", we spoke about the poem in relation to nature, it seems in this poem both concepts work hand in hand. The poem is descriptive, in parts it seems blunt and to the point but then again, this may be for the audience to understand each line and read it with the same point of view as the poet "the leaves dead", "driven like ghosts", "cold and low". Its as though we are being woven from a brisk summers day to a cold dead autumn night. I cant expect to be too surprised in the direction the poem takes, after all, it is titled "west wild", which normally implies empty, dead, alone, beyond life.
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