Poets Ranked by Beard Weight

Damien Mulley links to a seminal post at A Journey Round My Skull ('Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature'), about a crucial and under-analysed element of poetry. In the Edwardian leaflet 'Poets Ranked by Beard Weight', the author analyses 'poetic gravity' - an intangible property which results from the aesthetic "charge" of the beard itself rather than from any intrinsic ability or merit attaching to the wearer in question or to his literary productions.

You can look at are some portraits of hirsute versifiers, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Alfred Lord Tennyson (beard type - Maltese) and the phenomenal Walt Whitman. Note that the poet pictured in our post is struggling a long way behind these whiskery bards.