http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t5wqrs9hpxt70zjz3bv348pqg1hcxz0r
There's a lot to love about this article. Wilson's insights often ring true, their aspirational qualities and pure romanticism seduce. If you have a poetic nature, Byronesque tendencies, or even cry regularly at movies or love songs, his words will resonate because they speak to those private moments (even in crowded rooms) when you and your emotional life come face to face.
they are a call to action. A way to dredge feeling and romance from lives in cubicles, traffic jams, and birthday parties at Chuckie Cheese.
But there's also a lot in this article that frustrates. Skeptics will roll their eyes. Wilson is an extremely talented writer, but he can be overwrought and dramatic. He may have missed his calling as a speechwriter, although I'm glad he's writing.
Wilson uses Keats to illustrate his point. Here we have a poet who experienced the deaths of his entire family, one after the other, only to face his own impending death from tuberculosis at the age of 25, when he should have been, as Wilson puts it, relishing opportunities for "summer's larks and pretty girls." Keats is, in so many ways, the perfect poster boy of melancholia. Of course, there have been contemporary poster boys and girls: Kurt Cobain, filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, actor-director Sean Penn, filmmaker and performance artist Miranda July.
But the problem with Keats is his age. Melancholy is one's life blood at 25. In art schools across the country, it's the only refuge young artists surrounded by peers who all think they are misunderstood. For anyone at 25 who thinks they are in love, melancholy is their bedfellow. You
