Can Today's Top 40 Lyrics Compete with Yesterday's Poetry?

“Read some Byron, Shelley, and Keats
Recited it over a hip hop beat
I’m having trouble saying what I mean
With dead poets and a drum machine.”
~ Natasha Bedingfield

I admit that this is a biased exercise. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for poets – be they The Bard or one of many goateed high school misanthropes. Unfortunately, pop culture doesn’t seem to esteem them as much as I do. For the forty years after the Beat Generation, we’ve turned to singer-songwriters to provide the soundtracks to our lives. The lead singer of Coldplay? Gwyenth’s hubby Chris Martin. The US Poet Laureate? Anyone?

So, do our current chroniclers hold a candle to poets of the past? Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias or Byron’s narrative Don Juan are clever and complex masterpieces. Yet even Keats, whose odes are considered the most perfect poetry in our language, often sounds like Weezer. His Ode to a Grecian Urn captures teen melodrama and immortality like Alphaville did for our proms. 

“More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breAll All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” 

It’s really not that far from The Click Five…

“ She's cold and she's cruel
But she knows what she's doin'
She pushed me in the pool
At our last school reunion
She laughs at my dreams
But I dream about her laughter
Strange as it seems
She's the one I'm after”

If we parse a very unofficial list of last year’s most memorable songs, Keats clobbers Gwen Stefani’s B-A-N-A-N-A-S. And though it may be catchy, it’s hard to see literary merit in “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” which Cee-Lo and Busta Rhymes penned for the Pussycat Dolls. Brandon Flowers (lead singer of The Killers) and Fall Out Boy, however, may give our venerated poets a run for their money when it comes to imagery, metaphor, and original rhymes.