Can I confess something? Is it significant that as a student I got Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s name wrong, that I thought it was Gabriela Rossetti and that he was a woman? What is certain about Dante Gabriel Rossetti? Was he a British poet even though his Italian parents named him after an Italian poet? Was he even a poet, since he was best known for his paintings? Can we at least say that if it is true that a poet should ask questions, he was one?
What of her glass without her? The blank gray
There where the pool hid blind of the moon’s face,
Her dress without her? The tossed empty space
Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away
Her paths without her?
Don’t poets ask questions? Didn’t John Keats ask why?
Why did I laugh tonight?
Didn’t he ask where?
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
and
WHERE be ye going, you Devon maid?
And what have ye there i’ the basket?
Ye tight little fairy, just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?
And above all, who?
Lo! who dares say, “Do this”? Who dares call down
My will from its high purpose? Who say, “Stand,”
Or, “Go”?
But doesn’t just the act of quoting Keats raise the question of who? Who can quote Keats and be sure it isn’t Shelley? Is it important to be sure because of the certainty that someone will say, “No, that’s Shelley”? Although wouldn’t it be wiser for that person to say, “Isn’t that Shelley?”?
How do we distinguish between two English romantic poets who lived about the same time, and who both died very young? Was Shelley a questioner like Keats? Didn’t he ask how?
How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
And art?
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
But was he really a questioner the way Keats was? Does even Shelley’s poem “The Question”—that’s Shelley, right, not Keats?—ask much, aside from who to give the nosegay to at the end? Couldn’t we say that Keats was the one who really asked questions?
Or was the more essential “who” question asked by Spain’s famous Generation of ’98 poet Antonio Machado, when he said, “Answer my question—Who do I speak to?”? Or did he get even deeper into the matter of “who” later in the poem when he asked, “What does it matter who I am?”? And isn’t this a fitting question for a man whose name was even longer than Tocqueville’s—Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz?