Idealism was my favorite type of literature in school.
I don’t think they teach it any more.
Friedrich Schiller? Goethe’s friend, who died young?
The English panting, on their fervent Italian tour?
The ruins of previous ages decorating the nineteenth century scum
of tumultuous industry, the sheer excitement of everyone?
Science, friend of nature? Prodigies? Limitless oils and violin?
Chastity? Romanticism? Benjamin Franklin?
Sylvia Plath? No. It was “Can do, can do.”
Practicality was also true.
Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.
Byron. English majors were rock stars.
Poets on picnics had the best damn time.
What happened? Where is that conversation?
Where are those poems? That plot?
Aw hell. Don’t tell me the bad real exists
and the fake good does not.