Will You Fall in Love With This Poem?

A portrait of John Keats on his deathbed.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

 

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.”

"Romantic Poet" by Diane Seuss 

You would not have loved him,

my friend the scholar

decried. He brushed his teeth,

if at all, with salt. He lied,

and rarely washed

his hair. Wiped his ass

with leaves or with his hand.

The top of his head would have barely

reached your tits. His pits

reeked, as did his deathbed.

But the nightingale, I said.

In the scholar’s expert opinion, the guy is emphatically not a suitable object of romantic interest. For one thing, he’s gross. For another, he’s dead.

The author’s response to this list of shortcomings seems to be a non sequitur. What does a bird have to do with anything?

This one has flown in from an entirely different poem. The last words of “Romantic Poet” are a feathery allusion to “Ode to a Nightingale,” which means that the stinky, runty, manifestly unlovable poet we’re talking about is none other than John Keats.

John Keats! A lot of readers of poetry — myself and Diane Seuss included — can say we love John Keats. But there will always be someone like the scholar here — possibly the voice of our own better judgment — to challenge our feelings with inconvenient biographical facts.

Look, the scholar says: The guy was a total dirtbag — literally! He was dishonest, smelly and short. Not your type at all. Get over him.

The rebuttal in the poem’s last line can be taken in a similarly literal spirit: Of course we don’t mean we love Keats that way. It’s the poems we adore, especially the one about succumbing to the song of an elusive nightingale. Surely that poem soars above whatever sordid details a pedant might collect about the poor mortal who made it.

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.

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.”

- Author: A.O. Scott, The New York Times