Recent Posts

Saturday, June 6, 2009

An open letter to Coleridge: please die now



Dear Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

Damn you and your infuriatingly complex poems. Why must there be forty-seven translations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Why is the mariner's journey not a short trip to Ireland? Why does your stupid prose gloss complicate things? WHY ARE YOU A ROMANTIC POET??! Even Google agrees that Romanticism is 'one of the most complex literary movements in history'. WHY?

And, by the way, we all know you were doing illicit drugs, and not anodyne, when you wrote Kubla Khan! HA! Caught in the act! I'm GLAD that person from Porlock interrupted you while you were writing Kubla, otherwise I would have three hundred more lines of unintelligible poetry to dissect whilst trying to write a half-formidable essay of a few thousand words. Didn't you, while you were in one of your moments of 'spontaneity', stop to think of the poor, hassled students later who would potentially write essays on your poems a few centuries later who might be suffering??

You should be ASHAMED! The pain and trouble you are causing us is irreversible. My mind is forever scarred with lines of your poetry. So much so that I will myself, by the force of my uncontrollable primary imagination, erratically shout lines of your poems.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan decree..." NOO!!

No regards and very unsincerely,

~ Hurley Who

4 comments:

jet said...

oh this is hilarious.
but if i still did engx1, i think my brain would be hurting right now.

Louis Tiffon said...

somehow I don't think he'll listen...but even if he does, he would use the power of his imagination and prophetic position as poet to reconcile a solution to this dilemma.

how annoying.

in famous words, ignorance is bliss.
The Romantics reveled in it. (Or am I just Augustan?)

Hurley Who? said...

reason wins!

the romantics are wusses, hiding under a shameful cloak of 'imagination' while they were doing drugs and fantasising about changing the world... no wonder the french revolution failed

d.read said...

harhar. you're just bitter that even though we live in an age of flushing loos (and disappearing poos heehee) and portable music machines, we can't even reproduce a tidbit of that complexity. thus reason fails miserably imo. yes coleridge may have been a sulky bitch he also wrote some damn hot poetry!