Culture
Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did.
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.
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
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