Guest Contributors
My goal when I established this site was not just to afford an outlet for my own writing on various subjects, but also to draw attention to what others have to say. I hope that every week I will be able to offer readers fresh ideas and perspectives not only by poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but also those in his circle: Mary, Claire Clairmont, Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt and others.
Keats’s Ode To Autumn Warns About Mass Surveillance
John Keats’s ode To Autumn is one of the best-loved poems in the English language. Composed during a walk to St Giles’s Hill, Winchester, on September 19 1819, it depicts an apparently idyllic scene of harvest home, where drowsy, contented reapers “spare the next swath” beneath the “maturing sun”. The atmosphere of calm finality and mellow ease has comforted generations of readers, and To Autumn is often anthologised as a poem of acceptance of death. But, until now, we may have been missing one of its most pressing themes: surveillance.