How to get (creatively) booted from Cambridge

Leave it to Lord Byron to be famously infamously booted from one of the most prestigious schools in the world. Lord Byron, the bad boy of Romantic Poetry, was known for dragging his more “innocent” friends, such as Percey Shelley and his wife Mary into mental hijinks and events of laudanum-induced night-long hallucinatory nightmares (supposedly the origin’s of Mary’s Frankenstein) in his country manor, which he ultimately lost due to his bohemian ways.

Byron would have felt a bit more at home perhaps at the present-day L’Università di Bologna, a rather bohemian hotspot of the time, though probably he would have not indeed like the less-than-pleasing aesthetics of the environs. Byron was a big “fan” of Italy, needless to say, though Rome and the Northwest Coast were more his cup of Espresso. (I wonder if the St. Eustachi coffee was already famous at the time…? It is such a secret recipe that they have screens in front of the bariste so no one can see how it is made.)

But, back to getting expelled. Cambridge has a very rich history of writers, poets and essayists, amongst whom are Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Coleridge (another dabbler in hallucination-inspiration), Sir Isaac Newton, and more recently the poet Ted Hughes and Physicist Stephen Hawking, and on and on. So, one would think that Byron would see that his ticket would be punched if he could just toe the line, but, then he would not be Lord Byron, but merely another Cambridge man who “came down” from the Ivory Tower to the “real world.” Like Bill Gates, isn’t it better to get kicked out and then be taught in that very institution? So, Lord Byron did not come down to the real world, he brought the “real world” to the Tower. Apparently, to get the boot, Byron had a live bear in his room at Trinity College. Now that is what I call being creatively kicked out of Cambridge.

In Byron’s irreverent honor then, here is “Who killed John Keats?”:

Who killed John Keats?

‘I,” says the Quarterly,

So savage and Tartarly;

‘ ‘Twas one of my feats.’

Who shot the arrow?

‘The poet-priest Milman

(So ready to kill man),

Or Southey or Barrow.’