I feel so ignorant, even from just skimming in this thread.

[Edit: both in popular culture and in the more traditional classic one. The most I can get to is guess which name belongs to which period. I hope.]

Blake and Dante are both keepers for me. But then, I am a Purgatorio and Paradisio-preferring freak, so what do I know.

F/C/M Blake, Dante, Donne--that'd be almost undoable for me; on balance with both Blake and Donne, I could barely, just barely, chuck Dante, but deciding between the other two would be agony. And replace Dante with either of the Brownings, and I'd be completely immobilized.

Young John Dunne.

Older John Dunne.

Sigh. Wild-living crazy young poet, all about the God and the sex and the ecstatic intertwining of all the pleasures. He's like the proto-Prince.

I feel so ignorant, even from just skimming in this thread.

Oh, hush, you, higher-math-loving Physics Girl.

I'd have to go F Donne and M Blake in JZ incredibly painfully difficult scenario -- if only because of Blake's yummy sex-ay marital history above, and the fact that Donne's crazy ecstatic thing peaked early. I'd be all "honey, whatever happened to the astoundingly dirty sonnets? all your astoundingly dirty sonnets are about God, anymore" and that's just no good for a marriage. Still, it wasn't an easy choice.

"honey, whatever happened to the astoundingly dirty sonnets? all your astoundingly dirty sonnets are about God, anymore"

So he's like Prince? Finally, something in this conversation to which I can draw a parallel.

Exactly.

I'd be all "honey, whatever happened to the astoundingly dirty sonnets? all your astoundingly dirty sonnets are about God, anymore" and that's just no good for a marriage.

Although, dude, if you were Donne's wife, he'd have gone to prison for you. How hot is that? He secretly married his boss's daughter and spent some weeks in Fleet Prison for it; when neither he nor she would renounce the marriage, he was released. They spent the next few years poor and semi-desperate (in addition to being a poet and a sailor, he was a lawyer, though not a prosperous one), and her father didn't deign to acknowledge her again until eight years later.

They also apparently had lots and lots of Teh Sex, poor things--she had twelve children in sixteen years and died in childbirth. But he was totally smitten with her, suffered for her and worked like a dog for her, and turned to God after she died because he didn't see much point to worldly pleasures if she wasn't around to share them with him.

So that's the basics of Donne. If you could just throw in some good reliable birth control, you'd have one hell of an M.

I'm with amych-- F Donne, M Blake, C Dante. Although Donne's God Sonnets were still pretty sexy, Blake seems a more steady match.

Aces! I'ma have to bust open a whole new bottle of congratahol.

this was more amusing when I thought that the l on the end was an exclamation point.

have we F,C,Med Mal, Jayne, Wash?

have we F,C,Med Mal, Jayne, Wash?

Hmmmm. No-brainer for me...

F - Mal
C - Jayne
M - Wash

F-Mal (maybe often, is that allowed?), C-Jayne, M-Wash.

Ouch.