One of the delights of being an English Literature lecturer is that it gives you an excuse to think about sex a lot. Call it desire, or libidinal energy, or an erotics. We lecture about sex; sex is a subject in seminar rooms; we read books about sex and set them for our students. Students, too, think about sex through literature.  Sometimes a student essay will stop me in my tracks. Two examples: the speaker of Charlotte Smith’s sonnet ‘On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic’ is suffering from penis envy and wants not the lunatic’s abjuration of responsibility but the phallic power with which he is still endowed; the vampire baby Renesmee from the Twilight series is strangely akin to the pot of basil in Keats’s Isabella in that she sets up a weird threesome between her mother Bella and father Edward and herself (yuck, and more on this later).^[1] I *wish* I could write essays that were so smart, funny, and provocative—and console myself that maybe I provided for these students a way of happening, a mouth.^[2] Sometimes maybe just a single line or turn of phrase stands out; sometimes it is the unexpected use of a critical quotation.

For “Critical Theories,” a first year introduction to literary criticism and theory, I ask students to write an evaluation of a piece of peer-reviewed academic writing linked to one of the primary texts we study. It’s a difficult assignment which asks them, whether or not they agree with the piece of writing they are evaluating, to use it to develop their own response to the primary text. One of the options students have is Anahid Nersessian’s chapter on “Ode on a Grecian Urn” from her smart, funny, and provocative Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse. Nersessian’s essay argues that Keats wants his readers to realize that he is ventriloquizing a speaker (who is ventriloquizing the urn) who is “singularly abhorrent”[3]: a speaker who “reads like a rapist”[4] in order to wrest aesthetic enjoyment out of a scene of sexual violence, and, in doing so, dismiss the pain and suffering that this particular work of art—and works of art more generally—depict. This year, one of my students quoted Camille Guthrie’s “John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: How to Read the Most Famous Poem ‘For Ever’”: “Is the urn’s slenderness and round opening attractive?”[5] Guthrie’s rhetorical question stopped me in my tracks—I possibly even ejaculated: “Does Keats want to fuck the urn?”

 

Does Keats want to fuck the urn?

 

I looked up the student’s reference, not quite believing that the quotation was real. Guthrie’s essay is actually the Poetry Foundation Study Guide for “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I try to dissuade students from using such sources, encouraging the use of peer-reviewed academic material sourced through our library, instead. However, I clicked through to Guthrie’s Study Guide and there it was: ‘is the urn’s slenderness and round opening attractive?’ On May 21, 2025, I skeeted on Bluesky: “Engaging with Anahid Nersessian’s reading of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ as encoding sexual violence, one of my first year students quoted Poetry Foundation’s study guide: ‘Is the urn’s slenderness and round opening attractive?’ Leading me to ask: does Keats want to *fuck* the urn!?” which led to a fun thread on things Romantic poets wanted to fuck or were afraid of fucking: Wordsworth wants to fuck daffodils but is scared of being fucked by mountains; contrariwise, Anne Radcliffe’s gothic heroine Emily has “got a pash for mountains” (Dr Sam Hirst @romgothsam.bsky.social; May 21, 2025) in The Mysteries of Udolpho; William Beckford wants to fuck and get fucked by Fonthill Abbey. Manu Chander quote posted my original skeet with “The well-rocked urn” (manu chander @profchander.bsky.social; May 21, 2025), a twist on Cleanth Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn I did consider using as a title for this piece as it captures that transgressive sense of the Grecian urn turned into a sex toy for Keats.

Natasha Simonova asked “Do we think William Cowper had a JD Vance moment” (@philstella.bsky.social; May 21, 2025), riffing on Cowper’s The Task which begins “I sing the sofa” (“I fuck the futon?” I replied) and the furore around the current US Vice President’s potential object-oriented proclivities. I apologize for bringing the great Romantic poet John Keats into unfortunate proximity with a fascist opportunist like Vance. However, imagining Vance fucking a couch and Keats desiring the Grecian urn is funny. The couch-fucking story about Vance launched from a now deleted Twitter/X post which jokingly claimed that Vance had written about “fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions” in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, even giving page numbers.[6] The anecdote took off at least in part because Vance looks like the kind of person who might fuck a couch. It is funny because it has explanatory force about a man who seems uncomfortable in his own skin and about the situations in which he finds himself, from being married to holding political office. My question, “Does Keats want to fuck the urn?,” is similarly funny, I think, because it hints at something we sense when we read Keats: his horniness. Suddenly, Keats seems horny for autumn, melancholy, indolence, Psyche. Let’s not think about the poor nightingale.

 

Does Keats want to fuck the urn?

 

One of the funny things about Guthrie’s question about Keats and the urn—”is the urn’s slenderness and round opening attractive?”—is that it’s so excessive in relation to the Ode itself. As Nersessian makes clear, Keats does not describe the urn itself in the poem: “The poem is an ekphrasis or description of a work of art—in this case, a work of art within a work of art, for Keats give us not the shape or height or build of the urn but rather its design.”[7] Guthrie has imagined the urn’s slenderness and round opening, and has used these imagined aspects of the urn to speculate about its attractiveness (does she want to fuck the urn?). Another funny thing is the juxtaposition between Nersessian’s sophisticated theoretical reading of the Ode (Keats is ventriloquizing a “singularly abhorrent” speaker who is placing his odious desires on the urn, and Keats expects his readers to pick up on this and question the terms of the poem) and Guthrie’s well-intentioned and sincere introductory analysis of the poem, which has accidentally triggered—at least in my dirty mind—an image of Keats defiling the urn. Part of the funniness of the Nersessian-Guthrie juxtaposition is based on anxiety—the anxiety of making a rape joke. Let me be clear that I don’t want to be making a rape joke, here, because I don’t think rape jokes can ever be funny. However, the question “Does Keats want to fuck the urn?” is funny because it raises the stakes of Nersessian’s underlying question: “Is it Keats or his speaker who is reading like a rapist?” In doing so, we get to the heart of a question which continues to exercise literary critics, at least in introductions to literary criticism and theory classes: Who is speaking in a poem?

In our “Critical Theories” class we read a chapter of Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction a week. Culler is very clear that in lyric poetry there is always a division between the poet and the speaker of the poem: “It is crucial to begin with a distinction between the voice that we hear speaking [when we imagine the poem being read aloud or read it aloud ourselves] and the poet who made the poem, thus creating this figure of voice.”[8] Nevertheless, Nersessian is less sure of this traditional divide. She says: “Another thing that distinguishes this poem is that the speaker is not Keats but a character or persona. This is a controversial position but I’m taking it anyway.”[9] For Nersessian, the Ode sets up a distinction between the “singularly abhorrent” speaker who is excited by the sexual violence depicted on the urn and uses it to articulate nauseating propositions about love, life, and art and Keats’s ironizing authorial perspective, available to readers attuned to his critique of the speaker’s pompous pronouncements. On the other side of this critical divide, Guthrie fully collapses speaker into poet, beginning her Study Guide by stating: “It’s hard to be human,” and making it clear in subsequent sentences that it was specifically hard to be Keats, orphaned, under-appreciated in his lifetime, and dead at 25. For Guthrie, it is Keats himself who “in a rush of enthusiasm” personifies the urn: “The poet excitedly asks what is depicted on the urn,” “the poet… tells readers and the urn and its characters what to think and do,” “‘For ever panting, and for ever young’ reminds the poet of how hard human love is: it makes one parched and feels ‘cloy’d’: too much sweetness.’”[10] Whereas Nersessian sets up a tension between the poem’s voice and the poet’s perspective on that voice, Guthrie collapses Keats into his speaker: it is Keats’s enthusiasm, excitement, imperatives, and erotic recollections which prevail. I usually share Culler’s critically normative view that there is always a divide, however minimal, between poet and speaker in poetry; however, it also amuses me to imagine Keats lusting after the urn.  As well as being funny, asking the question “Does Keats want to fuck the urn?” opens up an unexpected space to think about how desire works in Keats’s poetry and how desire is related to the question of voice in lyric poetry.

In terms of this question about voice, Nersessian’s interpretation of the poem relies on readers separating out a speaker who “reads like a rapist” from the poet Keats who wants us to understand how wrong this reading of the urn is. Guthrie’s throwaway question, especially in relation to Nersessian’s discourse, pictures Keats lusting after the urn, perhaps using it as a sex toy, or at least as an unfortunate receptacle. In collapsing Nersessian’s sense of an antagonistic relationship between speaker and Keats back into an image of Keats himself lusting after the urn, there is an available interpretation of the poem that Keats himself is ‘reading like a rapist’ in that the separation between speaker and poet that Nersessian’s analysis depends on might not hold. As Sianne Ngai and Laurent Berlant argue in their introduction to “Comedy Has Issues,” a special issue of Critical Inquiry on humor studies, jokes always raise anxieties about impermissible desires before releasing them. My question, “Does Keats want to fuck the urn?”, releases the tensions raised by the Nersessian-Guthrie juxtaposition of Keats-as-rapist by picturing him instead as Keats-as-masturbator, with the urn as a kind of sex aid.

 

Does Keats want to fuck the urn?

 

This is, of course, exactly how Byron reads Keats: “Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation – he is always f–gg—g [frigging] his imagination – I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam of vision produced by raw pork and opium.”[11] Byron is more careful than I have been to suggest that Keats is not ‘indecent’; however, he and I both read something onanistic in Keats’s verses: my question “Does Keats want to fuck the urn?” deliberately mistakes the urn for a real art object cum sex aid; Byron more realistically depicts Keats imagining the urn (or other idea) as a way to “viciously” excite himself. In her shall we say seminal essay “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Eve Sedgwick opens her analysis of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility as the titular wanker by having fun with the continuing social stigma around masturbation, linking masturbation with writing through what Byron himself describes as “mental masturbation” when criticizing Keats above.[12] Keats’s writing, more obviously than Austen’s, delights in a verbal and imagistic excessiveness which partakes of masturbatory energy: seeking pleasure in and of itself.

Whether or not you agree that Keats is a wanker, Guthrie’s rhetorical question about the urn, “Is the urn’s slenderness and round opening attractive?”, is responding to a sexual charge in the poem, as another of her series of questions about the poem makes clear: “Is sexual anticipation and idealized youth and beauty so much sweeter than love experienced?” Keats’s Ode throbs with desire. The first stanza of the poem ends with a series of questions about what the figures on the urn are up to: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” While Guthrie focuses on the undecidability in the passage (are they men or gods or both? Are they in Tempe or Arcady?), Nersessian emphasizes the mad struggle of the “maidens loth.” With Keats’s (or his speaker’s) sexual excitement in mind, the questions throb with metrical beats indicating the extent to which the poet is bringing to life a static scene.

The second stanza apostrophizes the urn’s “Bold lover”:
 

                             never, never canst thou kiss

Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

 
It is this frozen scene that prompts Guthrie’s question about sexual anticipation. Nersessian offers a bracketed-off challenge to more positive analyses of this moment:

(If you wanted to opt for an even more benign reading of the ‘bold lover’ passage [than Helen Vendler’s argument that the poem offers two contrasting visions of sexuality, one violent and the other idyllic] and take it as a bit of light-hearted consensual lovers’ play, you would still have to ask: Is being left ‘forever panting’, forever held at bay from bliss, actually ideal? Or merely picturesque?).[13]

I don’t think mine is a “benign reading” of the poem, but I do think you can read Keats’s apostrophe here as not sexual frustration in sympathy with the bold lover’s predicament but rather as a bit of foreplay with the urn: John Keats say relax!^[14] He’s taking a leaf out of Sting’s book and going tantric on the urn: “Let us delay our gratification by musing on the erotics of the gap between desire and its fulfilment.”

The third stanza constitutes a climax of a sort in my masturbatory reading of the Ode. By the time we get to “More happy love! more happy, happy love,” Keats’s ejaculations resemble exactly that. The last lines of the stanza register the bodily effects of climax: “All breathing passion far above, / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” Pass Keats something to wipe with.^[15] Orrin Wang reads this stanza in particular as Keats engaging with cliché, connecting the term’s sense of literary exhaustion with its original use as an onomatopoeic figure in printing. The THUD THUD THUD of the printer’s cliché becomes Keats’s thudding use of language here, deliberately overwrought, as Nersessian would agree. Audible, unfortunately, in the THUD THUD THUD of the printer’s press is the thrusting of Keats’s verse in masturbatory strokes, leading to, in Wang’s words not mine, an “adolescent gush.”[16]

 

Does Keats want to fuck the urn?

 

I’m not just cheating to find a way to italicize to in these sub-headings, but also asking: what else might Keats want to do with the urn? Does Keats want to collect the urn? To display it in a museum? Unlike Nersessian who sees Keats’s speaker as reading like a rapist, Thora Brylowe, collapsing speaker back into Keats, states: “Gentle Keats will not side with ravishers.”[17] Contextualizing the Ode as a response to Romantic-period collecting practices which often did violence to real Grecian urns, Brylowe argues that this urn’s “still unravished” state presents it as escaping dismemberment and display, with Keats imagining an unmediated encounter with the art object. Sexualized language continues to haunt Brylowe’s interpretation of Keats’s Ode, starting out by stating “He [Keats] has this virgin [the urn] to himself for now”; characterising the urn as “coyly unyielding”; and contrasting Keats’s view of the urn with the “lascivious gaze of the Dilettante.”[18] For Brylowe, Keats is attempting to rescue the urn from the violence done to antiquarian objects by collectors, but finds himself duplicating these processes by pressing her “down on paper.”[19] The flattening process of turning an imagined three-dimensional object into an ekphrastic description of the urn duplicates the violence of representation in antiquarian collecting practices.

This discussion reminds me of Brenda Hillman’s remediation of Keats’s urn in her poem “Styrofoam Cup”[20]:

thou still unravished      thou

thou,                    thou bride

 

thou unstill,

thou unravished            unbride

unthou     unbride

I can imagine, as surely I am encouraged to do by Hillman’s title, these fragmentary lines pressed into the body of a three-dimensional styrofoam cup. Hillman’s focus on Keatsian negatives with unravished spilling over into “unstill,” “unbride,” and “unthou” figures the uncanny emptiness of Keats’s urn, with Keats’s worry over antiquarian collecting practices turning into a more contemporary anxiety about the environmental consequences of littering material, which continues to pollute the environment for years after its initial use. Hillman’s styrofoam cup also differs from the urn in its throwaway nature: our engagement with the cup, even if it had these words imprinted on it, might last realistically for the duration of a coffee, to be consigned to a dustbin and end up in landfill or roll forlornly along a street or crumple in a park, rather than being cradled lovingly by the earth when it is buried, like the urn. Hillman’s use of “unstill,” “unthou,” “unbride” captures the lack of love in our relationship with styrofoam cups: we do not lust for them, and they do not figure in our desires like the Grecian urn.

 

Does Keats want to fuck the urn?

 

Imagining Keats fucking the urn has already led me to imagining Keats wanting to fuck indolence, melancholy, Psyche, and Autumn. Literary nightingales have suffered enough. What else might Keats want to fuck? To ask a slightly different question: where else does this Keatsian horniness exist in his oeuvre? In a Table Talk, an interactive workshop showcasing the work of early career researchers as part of my “Romantic Ridiculous” project, Dana Moss argues that the pot in “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil” can be read as an agential partner in a love triangle between itself, Isabella, and her lover, Lorenzo. Close reading two stanzas from the poem, Moss interprets the pot as feeding on both Isabella’s tears and Lorenzo’s decaying head to flourish organically.^[21] I want to use Moss’s brilliant argument, which inspired Emily’s reading of Renesmee feeding from both Bella and Edward in the Twilight series, to shift attention away from Keats’s more or less unspeakable desires to ask: what does the urn itself want?

Patricia Lockwood’s “The Ode on a Grecian Urn”  imagines the Ode itself turned into an old lady-killer:

the Ode is pushing nanas off bridges,

detonating them with dynamite,

tying them to railroad tracks with

squeaky young rope, pouring big glugs

into them out of the skull-and-crossbones

bottle…[22]

Lockwood is responding to William Faulkner’s claim that “the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies”[23] by hyperbolizing the significance placed on Keats’s poetry to turn the Ode into a literal old lady killer. In Lockwood’s poem, the urn itself turns into a weapon or perhaps another killer in its own right: “the urn is approaching to scatter me / over a landscape that is heaven on earth.” Lockwood’s lines imagine the urn as a receptacle for ashes before nightmarishly switching to picture the speaker herself as ashes to be scattered by the urn. Later, Lockwood imagines Keats resisting the urge to “sexually harass / huge curvy vases” to instead write the Ode itself (which goes on in the nightmare logic of Lockwood’s pastiche to harass instead old ladies to death). The Ode as old lady killer and the urn as huge curvy weapon turn the violent scenes depicted on the urn into reflections of its own temperament: it is invested in the sexually charged scenes of chase and sacrifice depicted on its surface. Perhaps the urn wants to kill old ladies because they are so mortifyingly different—in their peppermint-smelling, hopelessly crumpled, sickening liveliness—from the ‘maidens loth’ captured forever in their unchanging youthfulness on its surface? In this reading of the urn, it combines contempt for the living with jealousy for old ladies’ ability to change.

Are there other ways to think of the urn thinking for itself? We might think of the urn wanting to remain unravished, undisturbed, undefiled. Described by Keats as a “bride of quietness,” “a foster child of silence and slow time,” and a “Sylvan historian,” the urn exudes a peacefulness that      belies the violent scenes depicted on it. Guthrie worries that a person would struggle in Keats’s time or in the classical past to be a bride, a child, and a historian, but I can picture the urn as a shy and retiring student. A bride of quietness is not necessarily married to another person, but is someone who appreciates silence and being silent. A foster child who is thousands of years old has grown up even if they have been separated from their biological parents. A way of understanding these lines is that the urn has been nurtured by being left underground for centuries: the silence of the earth and slow time passing have kept their foster child unharmed even as it grows old, while the figures on it remain forever young. It is a sylvan historian because of the scenes it depicts: a nerdy child fascinated by social and spiritual rituals. When the urn finally articulates something to say—”Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—there is a bathos in the childish vacuity of the statement, its failure to engage with the complexity of its surface, its falling away from anything like all we know on earth and all we need to know. The urn as sleeping beauty: pretty but oh so pretty vacant.[24]

*

Let me finish with two more anecdotes from my teaching experience. Early in a first year introductory module to literary history, one of my joint literature and history students ejaculated, “Why are English lecturers obsessed with sex and death?” I laughed and replied, “What else is there?” Later in the term, analyzing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (in my opinion a terrible book that tells you more about a certain type of English school boy than it comments on humanity at large), the same student enthusiastically interpreted the boys’ killing of the female pig as representing the rape of the feminine. At a different institution, a student in my eighteenth-century module coolly turned to me and told me “my boyfriend says lecturers who are always talking about sex aren’t getting any.” Do I want to fuck Keats? In the original Bluesky thread inspired by the Poetry Foundation study guide to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Evan Hayles Gledhill wondered about the relationship between Keats’s desire for the poetic objects he describes and readers’ desires for Keats himself: “Im so in! I get the fandom angle – turning that around, is this why so many people wanted to fuck a Romantic poet? We made them sex symbols because of their horny gaze at the quotidian” (@gothicbodies.bsky.social; May 21, 2025) Just the title of Hera Lindsey Bird’s poem is enough to end on, appearing in all caps in her self-titled collection: “KEATS IS DEAD SO FUCK ME FROM BEHIND.”[25]

 

---

 
[1] Credit where credit is due: Joan Passey penned the penis envy essay for the “From Romanticism to Decadence” module down at the University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus in the before times, and Emily Calleja connected Keats’s basil to Twilight’s vampire baby for my MA Nineteenth-Century Studies module, “Romantic Movements” in 2021.

[2] W. H. Auden claims that poetry makes nothing happen in his elegy for W B Yeats, but goes on to suggest that poetry is a way of happening, a mouth. As suggested by my use of these lines, this is what I sometimes hope for my own teaching.

[3] Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of Chicago Press: 2020), 43.

[4] Nersessian, 50.

[5] Camille Guthrie, “John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: How to Read the Most Famous Poem ‘For Ever,’” Poetry Foundation, December 20, 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/145240/john-keats-ode-on-a-grecian-urn

[6] The deleted X/Twitter post has been widely discussed. See, for example, Nikke McCann Ramirez, “So… What’s with This Rumour that J D Vance Had Sex with a Couch?” Rolling Stone, July 25, 2024 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance-couch-sex-rumor-explained-1235068142/ The super title of this article, “Sexy Settee”, is the real killer.

[7] Nersessian, 45.

[8] Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press: 2011), 75.

[9] Nersessian, 43.

[10] Guthrie, emphases mine.

[11] Lord Byron, Letter to John Murray, November 9, 1820.

[12] As this essay is framed by student work, I want to celebrate the student who came to the Romanticism seminar after my lecture on ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ and told me ‘my mum says I should say “your lecture’s WANK and I’m not COMING any more!” As well as being a great response to Sedgwick, I also enjoy how it was a close relative and not the student who supposedly came up with this retort. See: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 818–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343745.

[13] Nersessian, 46.

[14] “Relax” was the debut single by Frankie Goes to Hollywood from the 1983 album Welcome to the Pleasuredome. “Frankie say Relax” was a popular slogan on T-shirts. Although the song’s obvious sexual content got it banned on the BBC, the band used to claim it was about motivation. Sting (in the next line) is another musician from the 80s, though less cool now and then, who was famous for wanting to extend his sexual stamina.

[15] This sentence riffs on a line in Scottish indie band Arab Strap’s “Infrared”: “Pass me something to wipe with / … Do you worry that it’s loaded? / Laced with a million little mes.”

[16] Orrin N. C. Wang, Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism (Fordham University Press: 2022), 58, https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823298471.001.0001. 

[17] Thora Brylowe, Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820 (Cambridge University Press: 2018), 174.

[18] Brylowe, 173-75.

[19] Brylowe, 183.

[20] Brenda Hillman, “Styrofoam Cup” in Cascadia (Wesleyan University Press: 2001) 21.

[21] Dana’s Table Talk is available at 45:37 here: https://romanticridiculous.wordpress.com/2020/12/17/table-talks-i-new-approaches-to-romanticism-and-the-natural-world/

[22] Patricia Lockwood, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Poetry, September 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143936/the-ode-on-a-grecian-urn

[23] William Faulkner interviewed by Jean Stein, Paris Review 12, Spring 1956, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner.

[24] The song “Pretty Vacant” by Sex Pistols, like “Relax” banned by the BBC, was pretty much an excuse to say “cunt” over and over again by stressing the last syllable of the title.

[25] Hera Lindsey Bird, “KEATS IS DEAD SO FUCK ME FROM BEHIND” in HERA LINDSEY BIRD (Penguin, 2016), 79. For avid footnote readers, the poem continues: “Slowly and with carnal purpose / Some black midwinter afternoon” Delicious!