The good news: I have a job. The additional good news: It doesn't start until next week. Thus I have one golden week of nothingness as a new arrival in a new town before settling into working stiff-dom. I have a few plans - a trip to the monuments to see the cherry blossoms, visiting Kaitlin at the International Spy Museum, getting my suit pants tailored, researching British renters' rights, finding a couch - but nothing too set in stone, which is fine by me. Now that I have at least some hint of a career and an income, I'm perfectly fine with having nothing to do for a few days. You never know what you might discover.
For example, after unpacking most of my things and bidding adieu to the parents, who kindly moved me up here, I decided to paw through some of my essential books. I didn't even attempt to pack up most of the library I've acquired at home because there's just too much, but there are always the essential books that accompany me on any semi-permanent voyage:
Pride and Prejudice, all the
Harry Potters, T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets, The Oxford American Desk Dictionary, The Awakening, My Antonia. One of the other essentials is
The Top 500 Poems, a collection of the 500 most-anthologized poems in the English language, edited by William Harmon. I bought my copy in middle school and have been wading through it ever since. It's certainly not as thorough with some poets as I would like, but it's an amazing overview of "the best of" English poetry from 1250 to the present. Little did I know at age 12 that I would someday take a class with the editor, Dr. Harmon, one of the most eccentric and knowledgable characters I've ever encountered.
In revisiting Dr. Harmon's book I was drawn, as I often am, to the Romantics: so young, so radical, so tragic. Their biographies are at least as interesting to me as their poetry. Blake saw God outside his window as a baby! Coleridge produced "Kubla Khan" is an opium-induced haze! Byron had an affair with his own half-sister!
General Hospital has nothing on these dudes. They were the original rock stars.
Which is sort of what got me thinking about Wordsworth and Coleridge and their collaboration and their friendship and its destruction, which reminded me instantly of another famous artistic duo: John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They, like Coleridge and Wordsworth, discovered their craft together at a very young age, working "nose to nose" as Paul said he and John used to work. Eventually as both pairs grew as poets and songwriters, they developed very different styles, STC and Lennon inhabiting much more otherworldly, philosopical realms ("Kubla Khan"/"Tomorrow Never Knows"), while WW and McCartney investigated the psychology of the everyday ("Resolution and Independence"/"Penny Lane"), causing them to be accused of giving up their initial radicalism to please the status quo. Eventually drugs and women tore apart both duos for many years, though some resolution was achieved before the lives of Coleridge and Lennon ended early. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's a rather nice fit, don't you think?
Then, of course, I had to think of similar counterparts for other Romantic poets. I'm thinking Blake and Bob Dylan have quite a bit in common: both visionaries, both fiercely independent, both completely different from anything that's come before or since. Jim Morrison strikes me as a great parallel to Byron, what with the massive popularity, tragically early deaths, casanova qualities, and poetry/lyrics that have diminished in public esteem over the years. I'm still working on matches for Shelley and Keats. Jimi Hendrix? Tim Buckley?
Anyway. If I started my job this week I'd have no time for such pointless musings. And that would be a real tragedy. Not a Keats-dying-at-age-26-of-the-same-disease-that-killed-his-mom-and-brother-before-getting-any-critical-acclaim calibre of tragedy, but close.
