Look at this tract of ordinary grass
panting under the sun.
Keats died moments ago.
The Romantics, they say,
afflicted by sentiment and rhyme,
belong to leafy, less modern times.
They were meandering and slow.
They were not.
Take away from Shelley this critical blot.
Time for your ear to have an eye.
“Hyperion” was cinema before cinema,
Keats actor, director, cinematographer.
Today there isn’t anything going on.
The modern experiment, Hart Crane’s superficial brawn,
led nowhere. Heaving dead weights over your head,
saying, “The Moderns are alive! The Romantics are dead!”
It’s time to re-group. I’ll wager Modernism’s lie
was detected by many school boys
(I was one)
in the blink of an eye.