Let’s talk about love. That’s what the people in this poem seem to be doing. The author and her friend, a scholar, are debating the crushworthiness of a certain “Romantic Poet.”
Keats was one of the pillars of British Romanticism, and a romantic figure in other ways as well. He was only 25 when he died, in 1821, of tuberculosis and also — according to legend — of the side effects of a brutally negative review.
A portrait of John Keats on his deathbed.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
He is remembered as a paragon of suffering and sensitive creativity, a fragile hothouse flower whose poems are marvels of exquisite lyricism. He wrote intoxicatingly beautiful poems about the intoxicating power of beauty, which was one of his favorite words. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” he wrote. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
“Ode to a Nightingale,” which Keats wrote in 1819, gets at the strange, uncanny effect that art (especially music or poetry) can have on us, deranging our senses and disordering our consciousness. This is how it starts:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, —
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
What’s going on here? The song of the bird induces in the listener a pleasurable, painful, narcotic reverie. The full-throated music of the poem might have a similar effect on the reader. The cascading rhymes and trippy images conjure a kind of aesthetic rapture that’s not so different from falling in love.
With the poem or the poet? Is it always so easy to tell? Diane Seuss’s crush on the actual John Keats is a matter of poetic record. In another of her poems, the similarly titled “Romantic Poetry,” she writes about visiting the house in Rome where Keats died and making out with his death mask, imagining how “auspicious, / rare, lush, / bizarre, kinky, transcendent” it would be “to cradle him / in my arms.”
Keats isn’t the only romantic poet in “Romantic Poet.” The title fits Seuss too.
