Percy Bysshe Shelley Was Super-Emo
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.
