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.”

Well, that was awkward for us all.

Not only is the title going to be the name of the tell-all autobiography by one of the Amateur Historian's friends, it is also the story of a rather, er... delicate matter concerning an august member (har har) of French history.

When Napoleon died on St. Helena, the Romantic period was in full swing, and with it, the resurgance of the medeval idea of carrying around saints' relics... with one noticable difference. Instead of saints, your average Romantic collected objects and organs of famous writers, artists and other Great Men. Keats went into a swoon over Milton's hair and Mary Shelley traveled around with her husband's powdered heart. It thus comes as no surprise that after Napoleon's death, Vignali, the priest who had given the former Emperor his last rights wanted a keepsake. Instead of cutting off a lock of hair, the priest decided he wanted Napoleon's penis.

Apparently, either after or during the autopsy, Vignali and his valet found themselves alone with Napoleon's corpse and did some very delicate anatomical restructuring. Vignali also inherited a number of Napoleon's personal effects (though the Amateur Historian respectfully doubts that Napoleon ever meant for Vignali's Napoleona to be that personal) and the lot of it was auctioned off in 1916. The collection was continually sold off but, in 1961, failed to sell. This lead to the amusing tabloid headline, "NOT TONIGHT JOSEPHINE" and a considerable blow to the pride of the owners of the collection. Said owner apparently spent eight years recovering fromt he indignity of not being able to sell Napoleon's penis and put said object on the auction block at Christie's in 1977. It sold for $3,000 to John K. Lattimer, professor emeritus and former chairman of urology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He then took it to his home in New Jersey and stored it under his bed for the next thirty years.

It is not entirey clear whether or not it actually is Napoleon's penis or not; Professor Lattimer seems to think it is, and since he's a urologist, the Amateur Historian assumes he is familiar with his, er... subject and, frankly, does not want to personally investigate.

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Five

Tip #5: Cultivate a Deep Love of Nature.

Part of being a Romantic Poet is being constantly moved to the point of epic poetry studied by generations of surly English students to come at the sight of a daffodil. Nature can be the language through which God speaks to you, God itself, the reflection of your own perfections, or merely a great place to escape from your numerous critics and creditors.

Compare your loves to flowers, or at least have the decency to compare them to rocks and mountains. Constantly reflect on the glories of nature, and travel everywhere you can to experience them. Italy is very popular, as it is also a great place to die of a wasting disease. Invoke Nature as your muse and your teacher and be sure to reject classical authors as the promoters of worthless knowledge while still making allusions to the most obscure of Greek tragedies whenever you can. This plays into another aspect of being a Romantic Poet. If you cannot love yourself beyond reason, call yourself the Poet of the Age and see yourself as inherently better than all your contemporaries, it is a good idea to have (or to fake) low self-esteem and constantly despise your verses, your education and your inadequacies. This will endear you to all the ladies of your acquantaince, as long as you really do have the poetic skills and popularity to prove this poor opinion of yourself false. Otherwise you will feel really terrible about yourself, move in with your publisher and accidentally die of heart failure from your opium addiction.

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Four

Tip #4: Have many youthful exploits! These exploits must, however, fall into the categories of dissipation, athletics or expulsion.

For dissipation, try to seduce as many people as you possibly can, from Cambridge choirboys to your Calvanist Bible teacher. Pass your time drinking and flirting with anyone who so much as catches your eye. If you are lucky, they will scorn you later on and thus allow you to develop professionally useful angst and dejection. Attend a good number of rowdy parties so as to later regret your mis-spent youth, to discover your superiority to the rest of the world, or merely to look dashing and melancholy and so cement your place in society.

For athletics, nothing is better than climbing mountains, swimming against the current, or walking a notable distance. Once you have spent a good deal of time in nature, you can reflect on its glories, or your glory in conquering it and wow the ladies by telling them you climbed the Alps (or just a hill, provided you make the hill full of faries or the like). If you are lucky, your midnight wanderings could lead to (you guessed it!) a wasting disease. If not, you could develop arthritis in all your joints and end up addicted to laudenum, which is not a bad booby prize.

For expulsion, try writing something extremely controversial and send it to all your class deans in an attempt to start up a campus-wide conversation about a difficult subject. Not only can you establish yourself as a writer, you can also get to show the unjustness of society and get out of taking your final exams.

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Three

If Tip #2 did not work for you, try following tip #3: Cultivate a good working relationship with Death.

It is somewhat difficult to do this, since Death is not said to be a terribly communicative fellow, but this will help you in the long run: the Grim Reaper can’t say much, but you can! Wax poetic about your own demise as much as possible. Again, a wasting disease is an invaluable tool, since it gives you plenty of time to compose. If you can, drink out of the skull of a medieval monk, just to prove you're that hard core. Or, if you like kill off a couple of characters in your poems in horrible and agonizing ways. If you are loath to do so, kill off an albatross instead and see what happens (tip 3a: if you do shoot an albatross and your enraged shipmates tie it around your neck, don't be alarmed if your shipmates' relationship with death is much different than your own, to whit, They Become Zombies. This is perfectly normal thing to happen to a Romantic visionary.)

The sight of a graveyard at midnight, or any kind of ruin should send you into a tizzy of poetic feeling. If it doesn’t, fake it and talk about how very inspiring it is to you to be so constantly reminded of your own impermanence and the immortality of your poetry before lapsing into a dreamy melancholy. Remember, suicide must always be an option, even if you are not very serious about following through.

“I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out,” reflected Byron, “but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.”

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Two

Tip #2: Appear to have been spurned in love! It doesn’t really matter if you have or not, just address slightly melodramatic poems about your suffering, emotional, physical and spiritual to ‘------’. No one has to know you jotted down your quatrain because you stubbed your toe. You are in pain because your one true love, ------, who is coincidentally, every romantic poet’s one true love (Ode to ------, To ------, etc.) does not love you, has died, has decided to marry someone else, or has begged you to stop stalking them. Once again, it helps if you have caught some sort of wasting disease (political radicalism counts as a wasting disease, since you probably won’t live long if you catch it), so as to better enable you to lean upon your couch and sigh over the futility of your passion and of your existence in general.

If at all possible, marry someone you do not care for and immediately fall in love with someone else. As a baseline, try to fall in love with someone very close to you. The closer they are, the more Romantic Poet Points you get (say, one point for your neighbor, two points for your best friend’s sister-in-law, and three points for your own half-sibling). In extreme cases, you are allowed to fall in love with the offspring of another famous author, just as long as you shock said author and their spouse and cause everyone in England to snub you and force you on a tour of the Continent.

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part One

Gentle Reader, who among us has not looked at a ruin and been sent into spastic fits of glee that could only be contained in blank verse, been tempted to imitate the ancients, attack the government in rhyming couplets about the wind, reflect constantly on one's impermanence, engage in highly complicated love affairs that would puzzle any future scholar of your life, immortalize your friends as Gentle-Hearted So-and-So, spite the lovers who spurned you by dying of a wasting disease while composing your own epitaph, or found a utopian commune on the banks of the Susquehanna?

If your answer to all these questions is no, then, alas! You are not a Romantic Poet.

What a sad state of affairs, Gentle Reader. The Amateur Historian quite feels your pain and thus introduces yet another series to this blog: "How To Be A Romantic Poet." (There is a fantastic article that does a much better and much more concise job of listing this than the Amateur Historian and, in fact, inspired this series. It was published in a museum magazine once and it was also once passed out in the Amateur Historian's English class and she can no longer recall who wrote it or where it was published. However, credit for this idea goes to whoever wrote it first. The Amateur Historian apologizes for her crappy memory.

Tip 1: Look the part! You must have curls in wild disarray, to prove that your mind is on higher things and that you yourself have been touched by the zeitgeist, the spirit of the era. It cannot be too messy, however, or people will just think you are a hobo. The Amateur Historian suggests folowing Byron's model of sleeping with his hair in curlers. Abandon your cravat as a sign of an oppressive society who would seek to muzzle your voice with its restrictive neckwear and defy it by wearing an open-necked shirt in all weather. This not only makes you look cool, it can make you downright chilly and let you catch a wasting disease. Everyone always takes you more seriously if you are likely to die young after producing your own epitaph.

If you cannot catch a wasting disease despite your best efforts to do so, attempt to look the part by keeping a suitably ethereal figure by, as was Byron's wont, playing cricket while wearing seven waistcoats and a greatcoat. If cricket is not to your liking, try to be relentlessly bullied as a small child, so as to stunt your growth by being kept from your food, writing at all hours of the night and never sleeping, or hiking up mountains to feed your soul on the beauties of rural England and not on, say, the hard-boiled egg your slave, er, that is sister, made for you.

Check back every day this week for new tips on how to prove to all those detractors who claim you have no soul or sentiment that you can, as Wordsworth put it, be:

"A man speaking to men... endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than one supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually compelled to create them where he does not find them."