Asked to name a famous rivalry, today’s college students might offer up pop stars Madonna and Lady Gaga or rappers Nas and Jay-Z.
But two hundred years ago, another rivalry brewed between the Romantic poets’ John Keats, a poor and struggling artist who penned “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” and the aristocrat Lord Byron, who dismissed Keats’ work as overly sentimental “piss-a-bed poetry.”
For his part, Keats once wrote about the main difference between himself and Byron: “He describes what he sees — I describe what I imagine — Mine is the hardest task.”
Their rivalry comes alive in the letters written by Byron to his fellow Romantic poet and close friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was also a champion of Keats. They are part of the William Luther Lewis Collection of British and American Literature housed in the TCU library’s Special Collections.
A new online exhibit created by Library Specialist Amy Leslie ’08, highlights letters exchanged between Byron and Shelley while they were vacationing in Europe — Byron in Ravenna and Shelley in Pisa in Italy.
In the letter shown here, Byron is responding to a letter Shelley sent informing him of Keats’ death on February 23, 1821. (Keats had suffered from tuberculosis.) Byron surmises that Keats’ death could have been brought on by a critical review of one of his poems. But Byron says poets should be made of sterner stuff and has little sympathy for artists who fall prey to bad reviews.
“Such inordinate sense of censure is surely incompatible with great exertion — have not all known writers been the subject thereof?”
That wasn’t the last word Byron had on Keats’ death. In his poem “Don Juan” he wrote:
“Tis strange the mind,
that very fiery particle
Should let itself be snuffed out
by an article.”

To see the exhibit, go to magazine.tcu.edu/webextras.