Major English Poets, Evaluated By Whether or Not They Fucked

1. Shakespeare fucked.

2. It’s cliché to say that Byron fucked, but what can you do? He did fuck. Dude’s middle name was “Gordon” and not even that could stop him.

3. Edmund Spenser did NOT fuck, unless you count jerking off to Elizabeth I’s feet.

4. Chaucer fucked and he fucked raw.

5. John Donne fucked and he made sure everyone knew it. He could make a poem about a flea the horniest piece of literature in the English canon. And he wasn’t just about regular old fucking, as chronicled in “Break of Day” or “The Sun Rising,” but, like, metaphysical fucking. John Donne was the Sufjan Stevens of yore, a claim I’m staking mostly based on poems like “Batter My Soul, Three-Personed God,” which is blatantly about having a foursome with the Holy Trinity.

6. Wordsworth did not fuck.

7. T.S. Eliot not only fucked but had the most raging case of SDE ever encountered in English literature.

8. Milton? Don’t make me laugh. Dude did not fuck and he didn’t even care. If there’s an opposite of fucking — maybe sitting in a quiet room contemplating the nature of sin — that’s what Milton did.

9. Christina Rossetti fucked and it got weird soon thereafter.

10. Percy Shelley fucked.

11. Mary Shelley wasn’t a poet but gets a shoutout because a) she fucked and b) she’s the original goth girlfriend.

12. Keats fucked but only missionary.

13. Elizabeth Barrett Browning did not fuck; she just sighed tenderly and then got tired and had to lie down.

14. Coleridge? Incel.