ODE ON MELANCHOLY:
DID YOU KNOW. . . ?

When he was in high school, mean girls used to make the poet cry by calling him “John Teats.”

The United States Consumer Protection Agency has named the Keats’ Kidz Foundation for Juvenile Melancholia one of the country’s top five scams, right after the annual Walk for Homliness.

Keats originally titled this poem “My Melancholy Baby,” but changed it because he was going through an “ode” phase at the time. That title was later given to a popular song, first performed in public by William Frawley (tv’s Fred Mertz) in 1912.

Looks can be deceiving. Keats was actually a skilled assassin who could kill three men at a time with his bare hands. He could do that, if he wanted to, but he chose to slay them with well-phrased verse instead.

The annual symposium of the Keats Society, founded in 1852 for the purpose of “reveling in melancholia,” has devolved into what members describe as “a chance to drink and get laid.” In 2009, the keynote speaker referred to the poet 28 times as “Jim Keats,” and nobody in the audience noticed.