But I wanted to be Shelley:

This was a test for me. My Ph.D. work was on Romantic poetry, so I sat there trying to match response to poet (and still answer honestly, yes), and feeling sorta shocked at how fucking crazy you'd have to be to be Shelley--hear me, you Shelleyans!--though I already knew that having lived with him for the last several years (I will finish my article on The Cenci).

Okay, but Coleridge is pretty awesome. A labyrinthine mind. "Frost at Midnight," without which my life would be missing something necessary. Jake told me recently he was "the last man to have read everything when it was still possible to read everything." And this from the Biographia over at Mike's Sonnetarium on the "faults of our elder poets and the false beauties of the moderns." Go Coleridge. (And will this discussion never end?)

Well, don't get me started on Romantic poetry. I'm a little insane about it.



You are Samuel Taylor Coleridge! The infamous
"archangel a little damaged!" You
took drugs and talked for hours, it's true, but
you also made a conscious choice to cultivate
the image of the deranged poet in a frenzy of
genius. You claimed you wrote "Kubla
Khan" in an afternoon after a laudanum dream,
when you pretty manifestly did no such thing.
You and your flashing eyes and floating hair.
And your brilliant scholarship and obvious
genius.


Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)?