#sorry again for carrying on abt this hsdfghj i've been out of uni for too long

[lesamis]

So, like, was byron hot for keats, or

anon. thank you for asking the real & pressing questions on this fine day. genuinely, i’ve been waiting for this ask my whole life. short answer first: byron’s boiling hatred for keats was indeed, for lack of a better term, kind of horny!   

the longer & more meandering answer: 

byron and keats had no personal relationship at all, never met each other nor wrote to one another, and kept their remarks about one another almost completely about the other’s writing. they had friends in common - hunt and the shelleys - but they didn’t know each other at all. 

that didn’t keep byron from making things weirdly personal. he was offended by keats’s aesthetic principles: himself trying to veer more towards neoclassicism, he thought keats’s writing was overly sensuous and florid; himself admiring and emulating pope, he hated keats’s dismissiveness of any of the 18th century Greats. he found keats’s writing to be immature, indulgent, overeager, and inordinately sensual. it’s not difficult to make a leap from there to the sexualised language byron uses when talking about keats. his greatest hits: 

“The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever his names are: why, his is the Onanism of poetry- something like the pleasure an Italian fiddler extracted out of being suspended daily by a Street Walker in Drury Lane.”

“Mr. Keats whose poetry you enquire after - appears to me what I have already said; - such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - he is always frigging his imagination.”

“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.” 

byron didn’t invent the idea of giving his criticism of keats sexual overtones - the press was on that, too - but he took it further than anyone else. he did this because he was byron, lord of impropriety, and because he took rather classist offense at keats’s lack of wealth and education, which to him lended itself to vulgarity. but i think he also pulled all this to such a personal level because he was annoyed by shelley’s fondness of keats, jealous of the one (1) favourable review keats received, and uncomfortable with such pronounced sensuality as keats’s being found in the writing of a male poet. in hating keats, he was being his usual bastard self, yes, but if we were being fanciful, it’s not too far-fetched to say that he was also having a bit of a sexual crisis. 

(keats, meanwhile, moved from genuine admiration of byron as a teenager to being mostly unimpressed with him as an adult. “Lord Byron cuts a figure, but he is not figurative” - scathing stuff, john. i would have paid to see them have it out.)