Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Charles Harper Webb’s "Byron, Keats, and Shelley" is a riotous collision of Romanticism and slapstick comedy, a farcical reimagining of three of English poetry’s most revered figures as a trio of bumbling clowns. By merging high art with low humor, Webb both satirizes and pays homage to the Romantic ideal, questioning whether poetic grandeur and human absurdity are as separate as literary tradition suggests.

From the outset, Webb undermines the standard depiction of these poets, stripping them of their brooding intensity. "Keats shaves his head; Shelley frizzes out his hair; Byron submits to a bowl cut." This opening image transforms them from tempestuous visionaries into figures of ridicule, evoking the aesthetic of slapstick comedians rather than the archetypal tortured geniuses. The next lines heighten this absurdity by inserting their most famous verses into ludicrous scenarios: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Keats sighs, his head stuck in a cannon." Keats, who in his poetry sought to transcend mortality, is here physically trapped, his melancholy rendered as cartoonish ineptitude.

Webb continues this absurdist contrast with Byron and Shelley, reciting their iconic lines as they unwittingly bumble through calamities. Byron, the revolutionary spirit, "lights the fuse," while Shelley, the impassioned lyricist, "drops a cannonball on Byron’s toe." By placing their most soaring expressions of liberty and nature into Three Stooges-style antics, Webb playfully questions the Romantic notion of the poet as a sublime and untouchable figure. Instead of shaping history with their words, these poets are hapless buffoons, stumbling from one self-inflicted catastrophe to another.

The narrative shifts as the trio embarks on their fictitious comedic career, co-authoring Idiots Deluxe, Half-Wit’s Holiday, and Mummies Dummies. This absurdist alternative history imagines the Romantics not as tragic geniuses but as vaudevillian entertainers, culminating in their magnum opus, where "Byron plays Ozymandias embalmed, / And Keats gets his nose slammed in a sarcophagus." The reference to Shelley’s "Ozymandias"—one of the most celebrated meditations on the impermanence of power—is particularly pointed. Instead of a crumbling statue in the desert, the poet himself becomes the joke, his words punctuated by pratfalls. The scene continues with "Shelley mugs beside / The shattered sphinx and states, / Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away . . . / Then the curtain falls on his chin." The bathos here is masterful: Shelley’s grand elegy to lost empires is immediately undercut by physical comedy, demonstrating how easily the sublime and the ridiculous coexist.

As their imagined tour takes them through the great cities of Europe, Webb escalates the chaos: "Tuba players blowing wigs off heads of state; / Dogcatchers wrapped in their own nets; / Waiters flinging cream pies, / Dumping cauldrons of hot soup in courtly laps." The Romantic poets, once perceived as aristocrats of the imagination, become anarchic jesters, overthrowing decorum with slapstick revolt. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this spectacle, they "die, too young, careening / Into immortality covered with flour, squealing, / Drainpipes on their heads." The irony here is that the actual deaths of Byron, Keats, and Shelley were deeply tragic, their youthful demises fueling their mythic status. Webb’s version retains the untimely end but replaces Romantic grandeur with ridiculous imagery, questioning whether the way we romanticize these poets is any less constructed than the comedic farce he presents.

The final stanza brings the joke full circle, suggesting that this imagined history has left a spectral imprint on Romantic poetry itself. Webb playfully attributes a hidden comic residue to their most famous lines: "For many years, the greatest poems / In English have all ended Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk," an unmistakable reference to The Three Stooges’ signature catchphrase. The closing lines deepen this idea: "She walks in beauty like the night . . . / We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon . . . / Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness . . . / You may feel ghostly pliers tweak your nose, / And ghostly fingers poke the tear ducts in both eyes." The suggestion is that despite their literary stature, these poets still contain an inherent element of the ridiculous, a hidden slapstick quality that, like a ghostly presence, continues to poke at our sense of reverence.

Webb’s "Byron, Keats, and Shelley" is more than just an elaborate joke; it is a commentary on the tension between artistic ambition and human fallibility. The Romantic poets, so often enshrined in myth, are here gleefully deflated, but not without affection. By placing them in a world of comic blunders, Webb suggests that their humanity—clumsy, ridiculous, and prone to accident—was always present beneath the grandeur of their verse. The poem playfully argues that poetry, no matter how exalted, is never too far from the absurd, and perhaps that absurdity is what makes it endure.

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