Michael Hanisch > Recent Status Updates

Been at Anna Karenina for a while now, but it’s time to take a break. The themes of this novel aren’t nearly as ambitious as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and because of that in addition to generally unlikable characters, the book is just becoming lackluster and uninteresting to me.

Let me know if you’ve read it and think I should should keep pushing through.

“Thy dewy looks sink in my breast
Thy gentle words stir poison there.”

Just finished reading the section including poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

My favorite Shelley poems were:

“Alastor” or “Spirit of Solitude”
“Epipsychidion”
“Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”
“To Night”

A good poet, a brilliant man. He’s just outside the top class of poets for me.

This book is painful to read. Gonna take another break from it. Will I come back to it? I would be fine if I didn’t.

Finished the essay on Percy BYSSHE Shelley. Dude got expelled from school for being atheist; his friend named Hogg got expelled for being friends with an atheist; then, after being expelled, Percy starts dating this girl Harriet who then gets bullied by her schoolmates for dating an atheist. She drops out and elopes with him. Then Harriet cheats on him with Hogg. He’s like no worries great content for my poetry.

Just finished reading the section on Wordsworth, who now I feel is overrated, but still brilliant.

My favorite Wordsworth poems were:
“Lines Written in Early Spring”
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
“The Mountain Echo”
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
“Laodamía”
“Ascent of Snowdon”
“The World’s Ravages”
“The Shock of Bereavement”

Just finished reading the selections from Lord Byron, and I was absolutely floored by them.

Here is the beginning of “The Dream,” what was my favorite of Lord Byron’s poems:

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures…

Pretty mid. Super long. A very uncomfortable read, but I think that’s intentional. Will probably move on for now. Might come back.

Did Sylvia Plath write this shit on Wattpad what is this?

“I have no other end in this writing, but only to discover myself, who, also, shall, peradventure, be another thing tomorrow, if I chance to meet any new instruction to change me.”

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:…Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing / A flowery band to bind us to the earth”
-John Keats, “Beauty”

“For to see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and Keats knew it. ‘What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth,’ he says in prose; and in immortal verse he has said the same thing—
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
No, it is not all; but it is true, deeply true, and we have a deep need to know it.”