How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Six

Tip #5: Expire young, or, at least, die in an interesting fashion.

This is self-explanitory, but make sure you do not, like Wordsworth, accidentally live to old age and die at home of a common cold. If you must die of a common cold, take care to die amidst suitable theatrics, such as the Greek War for Independence. Once again, a wasting illness is an invaluable asset to any Romantic Poet, but you could also die whilst seeing visions and drawing pictures of your spouse's soul, or accidentally drown yourself in the Gulf of Spezia, after seeing your doppelganger.

Perhaps the best Romantic Expiration was that of Thomas Love Peacock, who Nobly Perished in a house fire when he refused to abandon his massive library, shouting, "By the immortal gods, I will not move!"

More Fun Times With Blake

Mention has been made of the ecentricities of William Blake, who also took advice from his dead brother, saw angels in a tree outside his home and once saw God outside his window.

A patron came by Blake's home one day to buy a book. Not finding Blake indoors, the patron went around back and found Blake and his wife, sitting completely naked in their garden, reading Milton's Paradise Lost.

"Come join us!" quoth Blake. "We are Adam and Eve."

No record is left of the patron's participation in this Edenic scene, or if said patron ever got his book.

Oh that Crazy Blake!

The Amateur Historian would like to apologize for the lack of updates and blames the demands of a college education. Speaking of education, here are a few Historical Tidbits about a man who recieved very little formal education, the Romantic poet, William Blake.

Blake was an odd character, whom all the other Romantic Poets found bewildering, and whom Wordsworth and Coleridge called "crazy Blake". Coleridge, reviewing Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, found fault with Blake's hand-drawn illustrations, in particular with the "I don't know whatness of the countenance, as if the mouth had been formed by the habit of placing the tongue, not contemptuously, but stupidly, between the lower gums and the lower jaw." Coleridge also diapproved of "the mood of the mind", i.e. the supposed sanity of the poet. Robert Hunt, a critic of the time, was highly upset that "the ebullitions of a distempered brain [were] mistaken for the sallies of genius... [in the] admirers of William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement and, consequently, of whom no public notice would have been taken, if he was not forced on the notice and animadversion of the Examiner, in having been held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs and professors as a genius in some respect original and legitimate."

The Amateur Historian personally thinks that the best line from Hunt's review is as follows:

"The praises which these gentlemen bestowed last year on this unfortunate man's illustrations... have, in feeding his vanity, stimulated him to publish his madnesss more largely."

The fact that Blake amped up the crazy in order to get people who annoyed him to leave him alone probably did not help this impression.