Leslie Hooper

Dr. Harris

Engl 149

8 December 2005

Through out the Fall 2005 semester my class on the Romantic Era has studied many Romantic poets and themes of their poetry. We have studied the elements make up the Romantic tradition: nature, mind, imagination, individual perception, poetic genius, ego, emotion, experiment, lyrical verse, fancy and reason. Many men and women poets composed works containing all or many of these elements. Over the course of the semester we have read poetry that follows the elements closely and some poetry that while it follows the Romantic tradition, the elements are less obvious. Two poets, William Wordsworth and William Blake, use a theme in some of their poetry that is not at all related to the Romantic elements. They use children.

This hypertext project explores two poems for both Wordsworth and Blake and the use of children. The poems use children in various ways, but each one is successful in following the traditional Romantic writing. In this hypertext there is an introduction page that leads to another page which briefly explains the poets and their use of children, as well as give faces to their names. This page contains links to the four selected poems and to the pages I have set up for each poet. This page also is the only page that contains a link to this rationale. I set it up this way so that people reading through my supplied material will not be distracted by links to this on every page. This rationale is the only page that will take you back to the introduction page and contains no other links. I have set it this way so that when the reader is finished reading this, they can start all over and see the project from the very beginning.

The four poems: �The Lamb,� �The Chimney Sweeper,� �The Thorn,� and �We Are Seven,� contain links to the poets� pages. The pages of Blake�s poetry contain pictures drawn by Blake. The titles on all four poems contain links that direct the reader to the page designed for the poem�s author. Most of the links between pages are distinguished by a deep purple color, but I kept the links in the titles of the poems in the deep red color to make it less distracting as the reader reads through the poem. I chose to keep the back ground of all the pages white to minimize distraction and visual influence on the poetry and explanations.

The two pages designed for the poets contain pictures of the poets and in their names are links back to the first explanative page. Through out the explanations of their poems, there are links that connect back to the poems so that the reader can follow up on the explanation.

In total there are 8 pages, not including this one, where the reader can bounce around. I purposefully kept out links from poet to poet and poem to poem. I want each to be view separately so that the reader does not get the ideas or poets confused.

In the time it has taken me to design the pages, find the images and piece everything together, I feel I have learned a lot yet I still have plenty more to learn about creating hypertexts and using computers in general. In my search for images I came across many that I thought I might use but eventually chose to leave out. I decided to keep this hypertext simplistic. I had more images for Blake than Wordsworth. I did not want unbalance between the poets, therefore many images were left out. I also decided to leave out links to actual websites for the same idea of keeping it simple. Once on the web it is easy to lose direction and the general thought of where I am going with the hypertext.