Keats, or any other great work of fiction, is not to be read by e-mail. Well, not by me, anyway.
Althought I spend my entire day in front of a computer (and sometimes my night, too, if the muse ties me down), I am, at heart, old-school. I love holding a book in my hand, curling up in a comfy chair with a cup of tea or a glass of wine. I like the smell and feel of paper under my fingertips. I like turning the pages, and needing a bookmark.
Readng online is just not the same. Studies have proven this, so I know it’s not just me. People scan. They look for bullets and numbers and headlines. Short paragraphs. Something to click. I break a lot of the rules in here because, hell, I can, but I spend most of my day cutting things into chunks that follow “best practices” and looking for ways to work a call-to-action into a paragraph.
Guys like Keats? No call to action. No chunking. He’d probably spin in hs grave at the thought of bullet points in his poetry (did they even have bullet points back then?). I’m pretty sure his skin, if he had any, would crawl at the idea of a Yahoo! ad appearing at the bottom of one of his poems. I mean, I’m assuming. If I were a Great Poet, mine probably would.
This is a long-winded way of saying that, after reaching e-mail 7 of 21 of Keats Poems via dailylit.com, that it is not working for me. I get these messages every day, and I end up scanning them the same way I scan meeting requests or e-newsletters. So I’ve come to the conclusion that in the end, I’m not really broadening my literary horizons at all by reading him this way. And that there are some things that should not involve a mouse, a screen, or an inbox.
It was a nice try, but I’m going back to good old-fashioned paper for this one, thanks.