Life Mastered

        Talk about the American Romantic movement in literature (1800-1850), and in particular Dark American Romantic poetry, has to start with a brief exploration of what Romanticism in general is about. It is considered by many literary scholars and historians that literary Romanticism started in modern-day Germany. An archetypal German Romantic is the author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the writer of the Gothic (Dark Romantic) tragedy of Faust (1808). From there it moved to the British Isles, thereby making its glorious entry into the English-speaking world.        The British Romantics penned several masterpieces ranging from poems to novels and defined and epitomized what being a Romantic entails. Arguably, the first British Romantic writer was William Blake (1757-1827), a painter, engraver, printer, and poet. He wrote some of the most awe-inspiring and famous poems in the English language. A modern reader can get a taste of the style and depth of his poetry by d

Death, Mortality/Immortality, and the Afterlife in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Demonstrating the Poet’s Belief in an Afterlife. I)                Intr oduction:          Emily Dickinson (1830-86‘) was a poet obsessed with Death, the hard-to-solve mystery of whether there is a life after death, and the fear of the possibility of there being only oblivion after humans die. She embodies the classic and all-too-prevailing tension between reason, scientific learning, and rationality versus faith , trust , and intuition that many well-known and erudite believers have suffered from and still do so to this very day .That tension is very evident in her wavering between certainty and doubt that can be gleaned from a study of her poetic magnum opi .But despite all that, it is very probable from a close reading of her poems that she held a belief in an immortal soul and that she did not view death   as final but rather as a transition point to another kind of existen

The Death Penalty :       There has been a lot of give and take as of late regarding the death penalty so far as its legitimacy and effectiveness are concerned. At the heart of that issue is the question : What is the function of the judicial system ? Namely, whether its function is rehabilitation, retribution, or a mixture of the two. Deciding on the right answer to the previous question is the key to arriving at a satisfactory resolution to the age old debate regarding the death penalty. For my money, the function of the legal system ought to be rehabilitative rather than retributive.          Constitutionally, the prime concern of the government and all of its branches is the well-being of its citizens. That , I believe, includes the medical treatment and re-integration of past offenders into society so that they could contribute their share to its progress and enrichment.         In an age of enlightened thinking and breath-taking technological and medical p

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley : An Analysis.                  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)                           Ozymandias.     I MET a Traveler from an antique land,     Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone     Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,     Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,     And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,     Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,     Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,     The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:     And on the pedestal these words appear:     “My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.     Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!”     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay     Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,     The lone and level sands stretch far away. This poem is about the transient nature of existence. More specifically, it concerns itself with the temporariness of human existence in t