Call Ralph Lauren-- we have a new spring color!

John Keats is well known for saying that beauty is truth and truth beauty, but he also had some interesting ideas of color, according to this letter to his  fiancée, Fanny Brawne:


I have been writing with a vile old pen the whole week, which is excessively ungallant.  The fault is in the Quill: I have mended it and still it is very much inclin'd to make blind es.  However these last lines are in a much better style of penmanship thof [for though] a little disfigured by the smear of black currant jelly; which has made a little mark on one of the Pages of Brown's Ben Jonson, the very best book he has.  I have lick'd it but it remains very purplue [for purple].  I did not know whether to say purple or blue, so in the mixture of the thought wrote purplue which may be an excellent name for a colourmade up of those two, and would suit well to start next spring. 

Heeeeeeeere's Johnny! Keats!

No one hates an author more than another author, particularly if they are authors in the same time period. (Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses come to mind), but few can be as sneering in prose as Lord Byron:

Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)

“Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”

For those Gentle Readers who found Keats hard going:


(From www.http://betterbooktitles.com/post/4064813893/keats)

Today, the Amateur Historian would like to kick off a week of poetry about poets from the 19th century, or, to be entirely truthful, Gentle Reader, the wonderful wit of Dorothy Parker in her A Pig's Eye View of Literature.

We begin with:

The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.