On Several Students Discussing J. Keats after Reading A. Pope

Brennan Columbia-Walsh

How swift comments by peers went mimetic

Once verse appeared in classes poetic

Penn’d by poets seduced by aesthetics

Who thus donned esoteric cosmetics?

Sans exegesis, swiftly pathetic?

Swift, to mimesis! — fine paresthetic

To fretted minds severed by ascetic

False prophets who in ages hermetic

Busied themselves with miming romantics

But skipp’d o’er neoclassic pedantics.

Brennan Columbia-Walsh is a senior from Montclair, New Jersey, studying Political Science and English in the Creative Writing Concentration. An essayist and playwright, his work has appeared and won prizes throughout the North East. He recently directed his play Fear and Trembling at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival after a sold-out run at the Yale Schwarzman Center, and he directed his tragedy The Butcher of Mauthausen at Montclair's Deetjen Theatre and Yale's Davenport Theatre. Twice the winner of the New Jersey Young Playwrights Competition, his newest play will premiere at Yale's Off Broadway Theatre in February. 

ABOUT THE ART | Beinecke Collage by Alina Susani, 2025. Alina Susani is a student at Yale University.