tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post4217193664949069527..comments2024-03-04T11:22:53.502-05:00Comments on Fifty Books Project 2023: Modern Love by John KeatsFifty Books Projecthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08640286429668778869noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-934096967055481899.post-78000398489325297142015-06-18T11:22:04.016-04:002015-06-18T11:22:04.016-04:00I think that the reason you don't get the &quo...I think that the reason you don't get the "beaver hats" remark is that you do misunderstand the thrust of the poem, since one doesn't usually expect Keats, the great Romantic poet, to be unromantic, that is, to be satiric about romance--but he was in his letters and in minor poems such as this one. What the poem seems to be saying is that the romantic notion or version of "love" is in fact a luxury for the "great" ones, the Cleopatras, the Antonies, the Romeos, not for ordinary people who wear Wellington boots and who live "at number seven" or "in Brunswick Square." The grand and legendary notion of romantic love is not "more common than the growth of weeds," and there for there is "no reason" to expect and to bear "such agonies" as the Romantic notion of love makes us expect we would need to bear. Instead, we have have more everyday versions of "love, and so, common people "may love in spite of beaver hats." Beaver hats were rather common, and what Keats was saying, I think, is that even common people love but not in the manner of the great romantic legends, with all the "agonies" that that would entail.Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00323248854253819231noreply@blogger.com