The raw pork and the opium, plus the beatified Strawberry
I was just slogging through revisions on a paper I wrote last year about Keats and his love of food and wine, when I came across this quote from one of his letters:
"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - good god how fine - It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy - all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry."
Is anybody else mildly grossed out by that, or am I just being a philistine? At least Byron's on my side; he wrote to a friend,
"Mr Keats, whose poetry you enquire after, appears to me what I have already said: such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - frigging his Imagination. I don't mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state, which is neither Poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium ..."
If anybody else wants to start a blog called Raw Pork and Opium with me, please step up.
"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - good god how fine - It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy - all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry."
Is anybody else mildly grossed out by that, or am I just being a philistine? At least Byron's on my side; he wrote to a friend,
"Mr Keats, whose poetry you enquire after, appears to me what I have already said: such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - frigging his Imagination. I don't mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state, which is neither Poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium ..."
If anybody else wants to start a blog called Raw Pork and Opium with me, please step up.
posted by cindym at 9:54 PM
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