All poetry does not stink.

As much as I love English and reading, my downfall since I was ever introduced to it has been poetry. I'm more of a literal person, so when I read a poem the metaphysical imagery is not easy for me to pick up. My first reaction when the poetry unit was announced was "great, now I’m going to fail". But somehow my grade right now is exceptionally good for the quarter. For my third quarter paper, I decided to choose Percy Bysshe Shelley as my poet to learn more about. One of the reasons that I chose him was because he is one of the few poets that I actually enjoyed reading in Brit Lit and then again this year in AP. The research I have done has given me hope that maybe ALL poetry is not as horrible as I thought it was. Percy Shelley is noted for being one of the most major Romantic poets and lyric poets. This is an added bonus for me because I prefer the lyric poems to the more unstructured ones. One thing about Shelley that has really stood out to me is that he wrote what he felt; he did not conform to what others were thinking. In fact, most publishers and journals declined to publish his work for being arrested and charged of blasphemy. To me, that is just so cool. It makes me feel like his poetry really did have a message and even though people didn't agree with him it did not discourage him from continuing to write. Shelley has many well-known published works, including one of my favorites- Ozymandias. I chose this poem to use in my paper because I have read and analyzed this poem several times and my understanding of the sonnet is very clear. The central theme of this poem is about the decline of all leaders and the empires that they strive so hard to form, no matter how big and powerful they are. After doing some research, I found out that this poem represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses' throne name. Ozymandias is a fourteen line poem, metered in iambic pentameter. Something that I definitely think Shelley did on purpose was that he used an unusual rhyme scheme. This poem is Shelley's way of trying to get a message across, not just to sound good. I know I said above that I enjoy lyric poetry (and I do) but I enjoy this poem simply because it is different. And who doesn't like when things are different. This blog post is probably the most unorganized thing I have ever written but that is how Ozymandias is supposed to be looked at. And that's really all I have to say about that! So thanks Mrs. Healey for helping me see that all poetry does not stink.