Humor

Percy Bysshe Shelley Was Super-Emo

Alice Burton

Staff Writer

Chicagoan and aspiring cryptozoologist Alice Burton has a B.A. in Comparative Literature and is an Archives Assistant with the Frances Willard Historical Society. When not booking or historying, she is singing soprano wherever people will have her. She will watch any documentary on Neanderthals or giant extinct animals, and has a Stockholm Syndrome-like love for Chicago and its winters. Blog: Reading Rambo Twitter: @itsalicetime

percy bysshe shelley portrait

I think we can all agree that the Romantics had some damn talented poets among them. Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of them for sure. But he also suffered from what I have termed Super Emo Poetic Title Syndrome. Below are listed some of his most brooding titles. P.B. Shelley (or PB Jelly, as I have unsuccessfully tried to get everyone to start calling him) did not care what you thought of him, so long as you thought of him as sitting by himself on a hillside in the rain, forever contemplating the eternal mutability of this mortal coil.

Shelley’s Most Emo Titles

A Lament

The Fitful Alternations of the Rain

Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples

My Head Is Wild With Weeping

Cold, Cold Is the Blast When December Is Howling

Ye Hasten to the Grave!

The Drowned Lover

Dirge for the Year

The Death Knell Is Ringing

Sorrow

On An Icicle That Clung to the Grass of a Grave

Invocation to Misery

Death in Life

On a Faded Violet

Death Is Here and Death Is There

Alas! This Is Not What I Thought Life Was

Honorable mention for Super Emo Poetic Title Syndrome goes to Keats for “Ode on Melancholy,” and Coleridge for not only “Dejection: An Ode,” but also the sublime “Thicker than rain-drops on November thorn.” Really A+ work, guys.

For those searching for a Wordsworth mention, he was a giant nerd who titled his poems things like “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg”  and “Influence of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth.” He does not win this award.