Edited for a bit of elaboration. Romanticism here. So many of us in this thread.
The essay question was surprisingly straightforward, and therefore so was my essay. Not too many variables unlike past questions.
My paragraphs went Keats (Ode on a Grecian Urn) > Blake (Angel of the Revelation) > Shelley (Hymn to Intellectual Beauty) > Keats (La Belle + On the Sea) > Austen (Northanger Abbey).
My significant ideas, in that order, were obviously the pursuit of the ideal for the first one (intellectual: reconsider philosophical paradigms concerning reality/one's tangible existence; emotional: Keats' personal suffering); corrupt religious and political institutions for Blake and Shelley, but for Blake especially his defiance of neoclassical practice, which basically represented cold intellectualism, and then the imagination's adverse effect on Keats, i.e perpetually entrapped within the ideal, reminds readers of implacable desires + there was an intellectual experimentation of form prevalent in each text so that engages the reader's capacity for innovation/to transform their milieu by questioning convention/'authorities' whether these be literary...
On the Sea, more of the same stuff but with materialism, then Austen obv literary convention/trivialised Gothic novel/feminine oppression in Regency England (I'm sure the private schools who actually do Pride and Prej for Mod A would've done this better than me). Intellectual/emotional engagement was a bit iffy for the last paragraph, but I basically went intellectual = experimentation, pertinence of literature to human experience, "realism" and reason, and then emotional = ambition, imagination, and criticism etc. Lots of flowery, wordy shit.
The creative was a gift for my story in particular, though the specificity was initially surprising. Since the questions were pretty easy, I imagine that they'll be marked pretty harshly. Wrote from Mary Shelley's perspective, how listening to Coleridge recite Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Godwin's study made her contemplate who the 'mariners' and the 'albatrosses' (including herself) were in her life, so there was already guilt/hope/hopelessness worked in, just placed the apology neatly in the emotional climax.
Thoughts on whether they will mark harshly? I'm not expecting incredibly high raw.