It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

Women don't want all that. Women just want a partner who is considerate and attentive, who will spoon with them while reciting Keats, and feed them organic yogurt by candlelight on a seaside cliff at sunset.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and yes read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work I'll leave that for others to decide.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about imagination?

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now the story of Keats can redeem them in their fantasy or imagination in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.

It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me getting close to John Keats and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young and Keats the youngest of them all.