Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Check out the book trailer!

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. Jacob's grandfather, Abe, told the most unbelievable stories about his friends at Miss Peregrine's Home after he escaped from the Nazis. Jacob always thought they were just sto

ries, but after his grandfather's mysterious death he's not so sure. 

This book is fitting into my topic library so far because I'm building it around stories, memories, histories of mysterious situations where it may be hard to figure out the truth of the matter.

Highly recommended! Especially if you like a story that blends mystery/fantasy with the past. 

If you love adventure or a quest in your story and several dashes of creepy, check out this book!

Keats

John Keats poetry greatly differs from the other poets that we have read. Keats does not convey political messages in his poetry. He just writes it for the pleasure that he gains from it. Throughout Keats poems, we can see parts of his life being represented through his usage of diction and tone. Keats was not born into an aristocratic family, which led him to experience life in a different form when compared to the other poets. This experience led him to question the contradictions of life, something that the other poets did not clearly focus on. By focusing on the contradictions of life, Keats was able to express good points and raise questions and even inspire people.

Keats died at the age of 25, yet he had many incidents occur in his lifetime that have vastly impacted his writing style, in my opinion. The death of his brother is represented through the gloomy and dark tone that Keats establishes in his poems, such as Ode on a Grecian Urn. This poem seems to purely contain dark imagery as it essentially revolves around death and questioning the meaning of life. This gloominess was clearly expressed and I am pretty sure it stems from the death of his brother. The other component of his poetry, a form of joy, arises from his engagement. Since this is a joyous time occasion for Keats, he expresses this in his poetry. This helps add more the somewhat elegiac feeling at some parts in his poems, such as Ode to a nightingale.

Keats

Keats is certainly the conformist of the Romanticism Era of poetry. Unlike his Romantic counterparts, who write to encompass the true aspects of nature, John Keats chooses to write to truly fulfill his own enjoyment. Keats's main goal is to satisfy the beauty of poetry. Keats's personal life has been affected being that his brother passed away at a young age due to tuberculosis, which made a lasting impact on his life. Keats is known to include some dark imagery and tone in his poem, and it can be assumed that the death in his family is the reason behind his dark inclusions. His gloomy inclusions seem to contrast with the rest of his poems, though, which involve a cheery and happy view of nature. The contrast of tones seem to accomplish the beauty of nature and life itself. This contrast is definitely apparent in is ode Ode to a Nightingale in which he includes sorrowful and dark images of death at the beginning, but follows those descriptions with hopeful thoughts of death. He uses the nightingale as a piece of happiness in death.

Byron and Shelley

Lord Byron and Percy Shelley -- upon seeing the two names together in one poetry packet, I was taken back to the days when we studied Wordsworth and Khan. Together, Byron and Shelley worked to renew the Romanticism Era. While Byron was poorer than Shelley, they both had similar and nearly identical writing styles. The two focused on finding a deeper meaning in nature and the subject served as a focal point for the majority of their poems. Although the two chose to focus on the same subject, they often had different ideas of the ways of nature.

Lord Byron grew up in a relatively poor household for his time, but no matter what sort of rough childhood he endured, he was able to make a living through poetry. Byron perceived nature as a force that was never-ending. Byron successfully produces vivid descriptions of what we see in nature by putting them into words that further epitomize nature as a whole.

Unlike Byron, who approaches nature more realistically, Shelley takes a more imaginative approach. The tone in his poem Ozymandias seems to contradict with his happy life that he has lived up to that point; sounding rather brash and depressed. The point of this dark tone, though, is to truly convey the true darkness of the world and those who inhabit it.

John Keats

Right off the bat, John Keats is different from his other Romantic counterparts. Keats was born into a working-class family as opposed to Shelley, Byron, etc. who were born into noble or rich families. The others wrote about politics or rebellion or radical points of view, using nature and naturalistic beliefs to convey the message. Keats, on the other hand, focuses his writing primarily on the beauty in the simple things, like an urn or the song of a nightingale perched in a tree. He writes mostly on what he sees; the very surface-level emotions or sights. He also has quite the fascination with the word "forlorn" and the color green. Unlike the other Romantics, who used nature as a platform for their political ideals, Keats uses naturalistic imagery as a vehicle to release his pain and grief about his deceased brother. I personally think that it is this deep-rooted (no pun intended) pain that allows him to find such beauty in nature. The frailty of being mortal has smacked him in the face and he has gained a deeper appreciation for the more simplistic things that one stumbles upon throughout the course of their lifetime. Keat's first presented piece, "Ode to a Nightingale," is ripe with emotional diction and powerful images of the nightingale's song and the feelings it creates within Keats. However, I find a foil in Keats's writing. He uses a lot of Biblical and/or Greek allusions, but I personally feel as though they make the flow of his writing a little choppy. The references don't quite fit with the feelings he puts forward in his pieces; it feels as though they're just there to make him sound more deep/intelligent than he actually is. I feel a little bad about saying that, but it really does seem that way to me. Don't get me wrong, the poetry is beautiful. It has a certain...underlying emotion to it that the other Romantics seem to lack.

John Keats

John Keats is unlike the other poets that we have read previously. Keats was not born wealthy, but rather to working-class parents from London. He was not inspired by fantastic views of the lakes in northern England or by his travels abroad - his main travelling consisting of a journey to Italy due to his ill health - but rather what was close to his heart, which is what makes his poetry so riveted with emotion. Also, unlike Byron and Coleridge, and even Wordsworth and Shelley, Keats did not write poetry as a hobby, but instead, poetry was his career, having given up his chosen medical path. So, thus, he supported himself and his wife financially and economically through his writing, which made success necessary for his survival. The two selections of Keats that we have in this packet reflect his rather melacholy lifetime. He was never wealthy, and at first his poetry was scorned, and faced sorrow of the acutest kind: the death of a beloved brother to tuberculosis, soon followed by his own realization that he had contracted the illness as well and his removal to Italy in the hopes of recovering under the influence of warmer weather. Unfortunately, Keats life was cut too short, a tragic story, really. He was so young, had only briefly been married to the love of his life, and had only just begun his promising poetic carerr.

Keats

John Keats, one of the greatest English poets and a major figure in the Romantic movement. Keats was known especially for his love of the country and sensuous descriptions of the beauty of nature, and his poetry reflected this. All of the Romantic poets in these past passages seem to have a lot in common with friendships and early death. Like everyone else Keats was friends with other romantic poets like Shelley, but he was different in that he was not an aristocrat. One of his most famous works 'Ode to a nightingale' is a meditation on the purity of the bird's song. Its relentless pathos reminds Keats, still haunted by the painful death of his brother, of the inevitable sadness of man's mortality. Even though Keats was not rich, and he experienced death throughout his life he still continued to work on poems that focused on the beauty of things such as song, or ancient urns in this case. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" describes a perfect scene of beauty and peace dotted with logical facts regarding truth, beauty, and eternity. The scenes on the urn are frozen in time or in their perfect form, as only an artist, or a poet, could depict them. Keats asserts, "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter". Music exists in perfection only in art. Any attempt to replicate it lessens its beauty. He writes of "happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu". In the perfect world, youth, equal with beauty, can only exist in the artist's mind. As it progresses, it loses its perfection. The final stanza concludes the poet's thoughts with an eternal suggestion that perfection exists, Beauty exists and "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". In other words, learn that perfection exists and don't worry about figuring out the rest.

Byron and Shelley

Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley are among the most respected and admired of the second generation of English Romantic poets, after Worswoth and Coleridge. Best known for his extended visionary poems, such as Queen Mab, and his short verse poems like Ozymandias. Shelley is also famous for his once controversial and radical political ideals and his often-proclaimed social idealism like his radical tract “ The Necessity of Athiesm.” He is perhaps best known, though, as the husband of the novelist Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein, which kind of sucks to be known as the husband of someone. While Shelley’s childhood was decidedly happy and rustic, his atheism and radical politics led to his expulsion from college and estrangement from family at an early age. His personal life was considered rather radical and controversial for his time, especially given his pronounced leftist political ideals and the abandonment of his first wife in favor of a woman named Mary Goodwin, who would become his second wife. Though he began composing and publishing poetry at a young age, Shelley’s career as poet did not truly get underway until he met the English poet Lord Byron. This meeting resulted in a life-long friendship between the two that served to inspire and influence some of Shelley’s finest poetry. It seems like all of these great romantic poets have relied on friendships with other poets of the same degree to get different perspectives on their work. Shelley died at an early age comparative to back then Today, Shelley and Byron are considered by critics and readers to be among the greatest of English Romantic poets. Unlike Lord Byron, Shelley did not receive full critical and popular recognition until after his death. Shelley is also much admired for his lyrical and psychologically powerful poetry, which seem like they’re striking, instinctive style as well as strong messages on behalf of social justice, liberty, and non-violence.

Young Keats

Unlike the other poets we have studied, John Keats does not write to express political ideals or personify rebellion. Instead, Keats wrote about beauty and the deep contradictions that life entails – “the sadness of every joy.” Unfortunately with his early death, Keats only had a two year time frame where he wrote his masterpieces.

The first presented poem, “Ode to a Nightingale,” portrays the narrator’s yearning to be able to escape life and join the nightingale and its song. The poem has a very melancholy tone given the speaker’s wants of escaping his life. Although borderline depressing, the ode offers vivid imagery of the outdoors and celebrations of the nightingale’s song. This expression of beauty fits well with the Romanticist movement. The resolution of the poem that the narrator no longer knew whether this was a dream or reality, offers the meaning of the poem: That everything in this world is temporary.

The second poem, “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” is an amazing poem. The narrator comes upon a couple urns that all have pictures on them. He thinks to himself that these pictures never grow old but on the other hand never get to experience anything. For example, the lovers in the woods are stopped in time and they always get to be together but on the sad side of things, they never really get to experience their love. This poem epitomizes Keat’s writing about the deep contradictions in life. On one hand, these beautiful paintings on the urns are joyful for what they portray, but sad because they are really only paintings.

Hodgy Keats

Dude J-Dawg this guy is really [expletive delelted]ing emo and I have to say that I am kind of digging him. Now while the other romantic poets were all like “ohh flowers is so purdy” this guy is all like “ dude were all going to die and that suck like a bunch”. Now moving beyond my Totally Kyle inspired representations of exceedingly profound masters of the English language I do rather enjoy this dude’s take on the concepts of romanticism. One thing that seems to pop up with this guy more than any of the other romantic poets is that he utilizes significantly more sensual imagery particularly in "Ode to a Nightingale”, and well since I mentioned it might as well talk about it (mostly because I am entirely too lazy to go look up the names of the other poems. One thing I notice is that in this ode, Keats focuses on immediate, concrete sensations and emotions such as frequent use of the image of the color green. But another thing I find intriqing about this poem is how seemingly melancholic it is especially in the Eighth stanza were it repeats the word “forlorn” eight hundred trillion billion times. Also the way in which he tries to separate himself the pain of reality, the poet begins to move into a world of imagination or fantasy. His purpose is clearly not to get drunk. Rather he associates wine with some quality or state he is seeking