Convincingly Faking It with the Romantics
Brandon g
The Romantic era was the last great era of poetry. What I mean by that is that novels took off right after this and replaced poetry as the most popular published format. So really, the Romantic era was the one that killed poetry. Read a couple of their poems and you'll see why. All you really have to know about the Romantic poets is that they were little sissy boys who whined and talked about nature a lot. Seriously, most of them hadn't even hit puberty before they started publishing these poems (well, it seems like it when you're reading them).
Example: Coleridge. If you like coffee as much as I do, chances are you've burned yourself with it before. If you're really like me, then you likely burned yourself with it at least four times a week in college. But did that stop you from getting to class on time? No, not at all. Coleridge spilled coffee on his foot one day while his friend William Wordsworth had come over to play. Coleridge not only stayed inside all day because of the coffee, but wrote a lengthy poem about it. Admittedly, Coleridge had a few cool poems; but that probably had less to do with his threshold for pain and more to do with his opium addiction.
Now—this is very important to note—Byron is not a Romantic poet. People say he is because he lived and wrote at the same time as the Romantics; but other than the coincidence of time, Byron had nothing in common with the Romantics. Byron slept with over 200 women and was eventually kicked out of England for being too naughty. He wrote poems about the sexual exploits of the unassuming Don Juan. Shelley, by contrast, probably never got any and wrote poems about how he was jealous of birds.
Anyway, back to the Romantics. It's interesting to note that, as much as they wrote about nature, the Romantics weren't all that much closer to nature than the average person. They were much too sissy for that. If you want to score some bonus points at the English major party, you should mention that American Transcendentalism is what happened when British Romantics graduated from Boy Scouts and went out into the woods on their own. The Transcendentalists were pansies too, but they at least lived out in the woods while they wrote about nature. If the Romantics were around today, they would probably download nature videos from the Internet while they listened to nature soundtracks and wrote poems about the great outdoors. They wouldn't be able to leave their houses because they'd get their asses kicked by real men of literature. Stupid pansy Romantics.
