Oh my God I’m not sure of the accuracy of this scale but I made one anyways.
1: Jane Austen. Theoretically Romantic, mostly a clever satirist more interested in the novel as the perfect vehicle for social commentary than in poetry for capturing emotion. Very little chance of swooning and/or dramatic death. A very safe spot on the Romanticism scale.
2: Dorothy Wordsworth: Actually a Romantic, though not excessively so! Enjoy your long walks in the country. Keep those diaries. Your brother can mine them for publishable material until people consider them finally worthy of academic interest a century or two later.
3: Wordsworth. May result in later becoming annoyingly conservative but mostly harmless. Go ahead and wander lonely as a cloud. Gaze upon that ruined abbey.
4: Charlotte Turner Smith. Recover that English sonnet and transform it into a medium that mostly expresses sorrow! Help establish Gothic conventions! Have what Wordsworth called a true feeling for rural England! Die in penury and be forgotten by the middle of the nineteenth century!
5: Blake. ?? Who even knows man. Talk to angels. Create your own goddamn religion. Confuse all of your contemporaries.
6: Mary Shelly. Go ahead and run off with that unhappily married poet who took you on dates to your mother’s grave, but this may result in carrying your husband’s calcified heart around in a fragment of his last manuscript the rest of your life. But also, arguably inventing sci-fi as a genre… so that’s some consolation.
7: John Keats: listen to that nightingale but be forewarned: you will die of TB in Rome and everyone will mock you for dying of bad criticism instead of, you know, infectious disease.
8: Coleridge. May result in never finishing a poem and a severe opium addiction.
9: Percy Shelly. May result in being expelled from Oxford and in premonitions of your own death by drowning.
10: Full Byron. Never go full Byron.
14.75: Thomas Chatterton. someone makes a callout post? drink acid. be such a pretty corpse that a painting of your trashed apartment and floppy carcass ends up in the Tate. no one remembers your poetry, but everyone remembers how extra you were. basically this is what happens when you go full byron and nobody stops you.
Tip: This Valentine’s Day, don’t be romantic. Be Romantic! Recite Lord Byron
on the edge of a barren cliff! Feel the gusts of the thunderstorm blow through your hair as you sob! Become a reclusive poet who trusts no one and is only seen at 2 am, wandering half-dressed through the streets and muttering in Old High German! Drown your lonely heart in laudanum and die at age 34 of tuberculosis, martyrdom in a small and ill-fated revolution, or wasting away from a disease that makes you look wan but poetic! Forget “forever alone”: You’ll always have your haunting past, your wasted ambitions, and the melancholy of a life unlived to keep you company!
so i was in a lecture yesterday, on the romantic poets, and my teacher said, “byron and percy shelley and all of them, they want you to think that they’re sexy. don’t believe them”
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