hi i just spent Quite A While going through your romantic poets tag and i now love them all even more than i did before. those anecdotes were wild. so thank you for helping me discover what the teachers never told me in literature class 🌝
Y’all!!!!! This made me so unbelievably happy, frick my dude I’m so glad I could help introduce you to how all the celebrated romantic poets were also completely ridiculous nerds. :DHere’s a couple more things I love about them!! Because I can’t stop smiling about this ask and I really love talking about these lovable idiots1. I don’t know if you saw the post about it, but here’s a letter from John to Fanny. It’s about how he dumped jam on a really expensive book he had borrowed from a friend and then tried to lick the book clean, resulting in a nice jam stain on both the letter and the book. John then forgot the word indigo. Like a dork. X(Note, the letter I linked to edited his mistake out and just wrote ‘purple’ anyway. Let it be known John wrote ‘purblue’ initially. Like a real wordsmith.)2. I can’t find the letter online, but in a book of Keats’ letters I read one he had written to his sister and it was the single cutest thing ever. He was kept away from her by the family (bc he was considered a bad influence :( ) but he wrote letters to try and stay connected anyway. In this particular one, he went on a tangent of things she could do to try and keep herself occupied as she waited for dinner to be ready. I think if my memory is correct, the list included cutting holes in the pockets of the family’s coats, filling guns with water, and I think there was something about filling their boots with something too? On second thought, maybe he was a bad influence.3. When I was at Byron’s house the tour guide mentioned the fact that his whole front entrance used to be just rubble. He would set up bottles on one side of the “room”, and shoot at them from the other. (Can confirm, I saw the gun in person lmao) Imagine being Shelley rolling up to stay over and having to pick his way through broken glass and rubble to get to the beautiful freshly renovated dining room. NICE.4. On that note, Byron had enough money to fully renovate just two rooms. He picked the dining room and his bedroom. Which, same honestly. Food and sleep- it’s all anyone needs*(*that and a giant monument in your backyard proclaiming dogs are better than humans. which he also had)
The biggest breakthrough I had with English Literature was realizing all these works were made by real honest to god people. Edgar Allen Poe wrote with the family cat jumping up to sit on his shoulder- which, as someone who’s lived with a cat her whole life, I can confirm that Poe in his lifetime had a cat sneeze in his ear. Multiple times. Which probably was the inspiration for The Black Cat. Also, Christopher Marlowe had a death that is still debated, but the version I was taught is that at 29 he got into a fight over paying a bill at a bar and got stabbed in the face bc of it. It really demystifies the field of poetry (and writing as a whole) when you can relate to the authors on a human level- I’m so glad I could help you with that even in a small way. Literally shoot me a message anytime you wanna hear fun poet facts yo, I’ve got you covered <3
