WHAT HAS ATHENS TO DO WITH PARNASSUS?: So Ratty and I were yapping last night (when I should have been asleep, but instead was up bothering her) and she told me about a course she’s taking on the Romantic poets. Now, I actually find Romanticism interesting in theory, but the Romantic poets generally boring; nonetheless our conversation sparked a very small thought, which is that poets typically do poorly when their poetry is unsupported by some kind of underlying philosophical spine. It doesn’t have to be a rigorously worked-out philosophy, or even an especially strongly-held one, but there has to be something there, some set of ideas and beliefs, to prevent the poet from wavering off into gassiness. I think you can see a set of beliefs in Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, and obviously in Emily Dickinson. Keats, on the other hand, strikes me as a talented poet severely weakened by a tendency to lushness in absence of philosophy. (And this weakness of Keats in turn weakened Anne Carson’s interesting mess, The Beauty of the Husband.)

Here are some other poets I do like, but whose work lacked (in my opinion) a philosophical spine–in rough order of how much they overcame this weakness:
Christina Rossetti
Robert Browning
Philip Larkin

Other examples, counterexamples, related thoughts, disputes?