J.Alfred Prufrock

What is with these new age poets?

My, my, my. Why must modernist poets talk nonsense? Does it REALLY have to be quite so "out there" for people to understand the deeper meaning? I know that you have an agenda, but does it have to include extremely obscure references and a bunch of nonsensical words? What happening to making poetry rhyme? What happened to beautiful imagery? Why does vomitting seems to be a part of nearly everything these days? I don't want to read about vomit, or feces, or abortion, or any other number of depressing things. No wonder the suicide rate is so gosh darn high.
News flash: You can be a modernist poet and still write about injustice and intolerance and the bleakness of the world in general, if you feel so inclined, but please, please...let's leave the vomit out of it.

Darnit Dickens!

How does the man do it? How does he manage to take a simple sentence and stretch it into a page? Charles Dickens can take even the most basic of descriptions and turn it into a chapter, a mindless, endless chapter. I appreciate his telling of life back in the Victorian days, but really does it HAVE to be so wordy? Thus in the spirit of economy...I end.

Woman's Cause is Man's and Vice Versa

Does this Tennyson work strike anyone else as somewhat unrealistic? Yes, yes, women and men should always support one another in marriage, and yes, the marriage does get better with time. But where is the flip side of marriage represented in this work? Where is the mention of squables and then make-up sex? I think Tennyson's work is romantic, but the reality of marriage is even more romantic. When you have suffered through a tragedy, emotional and physical and you can look up and see your spouse there, aiding you, loving you, that is the true romance in marriage, rather than Tennyson's pretty, clean view of marriage.

Frankenstein was weird, but did he have to ostrecise his creation as well?

So we all know that Victor was a tad eccentric, to say the least. The man was too driven in his scientific pursuits, which was the ultimate reason behind his downfall. He chose to divide himself from his friends and family in lieu of working on his project. But did he really have to turn his own creation against the world? Would Frankenstein's monster have had a decent shot at true humanity if Victor hadn't turned against his creation, but rather embraced him? "The world will never know."

Tragedy Breeds Creativity

Tragedy seems to be the common theme of Romantic and Victorian poets. Keats, dead in his 20's writes about death...ALL about death. And then there are the women. Why are the majority of great literary women from the romantic and victorian period so tragic themselves. Elizabeth Browning, while a worthwhile and meaningful poet, cannot help put let her personal tragedy and desperation seep into her work. Why must you be tragic to be great??

Intellectual Beauty

Beauty of any kind seems rooted in intellect. Physical beauty requires the individualized aestetics of each human being. These aestetics are housed within the mind; therefore, in order to access them, the mind as well as the senses are involved in acknowledging beauty of the body. Spiritual beauty is equally as personal and like intellectual beauty, there is a certain amount of cerebral reasoning involved. "I think, therefore I am"...beautiful, ah, if only more people actually thought.