Like most people, my first experience with literature began with those four little words that, despite their cliché, perfectly embody childhood imagination; once upon a time. Even if in my case they only embodied stress and difficulty. Having been diagnosed with dyslexia at an early age, the first chapter of my literary life was very reluctant and it was years before I finally read Once Upon a Time in black and white among the anthropomorphised animals of Kipling's 'Jungle Book' or the strong rhymes of Donaldson's 'The Gruffalo'. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Looking back, that chapter will always be my favorite; dyslexia has forced me to focus on each letter, word, and sentence individually, resulting in an attentive reading style that offers endless gratification in the detailed discovery of each new text I read. Take Beatnik writers for example. Although life thus far has been and continues to be less narcotic and hedonistic than the sheer mania of Jack Kerouac's spontaneous prose novel "On The Road," I was drawn to the frenzy of love and giddy wanderlust of his allegorical characters. I found myself addicted to Kerouac's intimate, breathless style, immediately questioning his hypocritical misogyny and then connecting to his description of the frustration broken by the pace of the world in the character of Karl Marx, whose real-life counterpart is defiant work Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' has become my favorite poem. I felt distant from that small but complicated and impactful literary subculture that existed more than fifty years ago, five thousand miles away, and yet with each new text I read, that distance shrank and I was fascinated by what I could see coming in. in perspective. on the competitive aspects of their movement, the spiritual and economic, the progressive and regressive. I would continue reading Kerouac's early poems in his collection "Atop an Underwood" along with some of Ginsberg's other works to fuel my addiction to the Beatniks, whose subversion of primitive cultural autocracy and radical rebranding of the American dream remain extraordinarily compelling to me . So much so that when I entered and won an essay contest held by my local university on the question of what the American Dream meant in 2017, I considered the Beatniks instrumental in reshaping that meaning for the modern context. Another literary movement, closer to home, that ties me intimately to the Beatniks were the Romantics and the essential William Blake. His rebukes of the oppressive illiberal church and state, as well as the harsh impact of the Industrial Revolution, are closely woven into his ironically complex volumes of lyric poetry, the twee 'Songs of Innocence' and the hostilely thought-out 'Songs of Experience' to be read as nursery rhymes, it profoundly reminded me of Kerouac and Ginsberg's demonstration against materialism. I adored Blake so much that I joined the Blake Society and, when asked to design and deliver a lesson to Year 11 GCSE students on a particular topic, I chose to talk about William Blake and Romanticism, exploring everything from the Enlightenment , to the French and the industrial revolutions, to the Big Six, to Blake's other artistic activities. Reading is something that, by rights, I shouldn't enjoy, but that makes it all the more rewarding when I carefully reflect on a difficult text. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now.