We have spent the last few days on a new set of readings: sections of Paradise Lost, a number of Romantic poems, and excerpts from Burke’s Sublime and the Beautiful and Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Man.”

All of this is leading up to our first novel, Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley’s Frankenstein. I can’t wait! You will receive these tomorrow, so make sure your annotations of the shorter works are solid, because all will be required to contribute to your midterm essay. More on that later.

The Chromebooks were playing nice today and I was happy to see you all making solid progress on your comparisons. If you weren’t able to share your draft in class, please do so tonight.

We will wrap these up on Thursday. If your outline is not nearly finished at this point, it would be a good idea to spend some time on that tonight.

Coming up: Romanticism!

We wrapped up our last poem today, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”!

This weekend, complete the comparisons you’ve been making and turn them into an outline. You should have at least 5 points of comparison and 8 poems included. We will be in the computer lab this coming Monday, so if you’d like to type it up this weekend, go for it!

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

We have read and annotated a total of ten poems from the packet so far:

• For the Foxes
• War has Been Given a Bad Name
• Not Waving but Drowning
• Dulce et Decorum Est
• If—
• We Wear the Mask

Continue making thematic connections on the front page of your packet—these will serve as the main points of the comparative essay we begin later this week.

We wrapped up our short story comparisons last night (nicely done). I’ll have feedback on those Monday.

Today we read four poems: “ALL DISTORTION ALL THE TIME,” “Hazel Tells Laverne,” “Warning to Children,” and “Do not go gentle into that good night.” As we did with the short stories, the goal is to make connections between them, sussing out themes and ideas that they share.

Read back over those four poems this weekend, further annotating and making early connections (the 2nd and 3rd seem to share messages about hope and aspirations, for example, though they are treated very differently). We’ll discuss these connections in class Monday.