Perfectly Poetic

Tired of people calling 17 syllables “genius”? So am I.

In this brutally honest, occasionally unhinged episode of Perfectly Poetic, Allen Mowery finally unleashes his pent-up frustration about the most overrated poetic form of all time: the haiku. From childhood worksheet trauma to seasonal name-dropping, syllable policing, AI-generated nonsense, and the myth of Bashō's frog — no stone (or smooth river pebble) is left unskipped.

Prepare yourself for frogs, fury, and the poetic equivalent of vending machine sushi.

Spoiler: There’s a haiku at the end. And it’s not about coffee.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• Why your third-grade haiku assignment was emotional sabotage

• The true history of haiku (and how we butchered it)

• Bashō’s frog poem — misunderstood or overhyped?

• The tyranny of 5-7-5 and the myth of morae

• Why “deep” isn’t the same as “short”

• Haikus on dating profiles, bumper stickers, and coffee shop chalkboards

• Allen’s Haiku Manifesto for the modern world

• AI haikus vs. human ones: can you tell the difference?

• A few delightfully petty haikus written out of spite

• Why we should demand more from poetry — and ourselves

Quote from the Episode:

“A haiku is not profound just because it’s small. It’s not a bonsai tree — it’s usually just a dead branch with a filter on it.”

Mentioned or Referenced:

• Matsuo Bashō

• Nick Virgilio

• Jack Kerouac

• 3rd grade teachers everywhere

• Haiku bots (yes, they’re real and yes, they’re terrifying)

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In this final chapter of our Romanticism series, we bring the velvet curtain down with a sharp, necessary reality check. After indulging in the beauty, the yearning, and the drama of Romanticism, it’s time to ask the uncomfortable questions: What happens when feelings become fact? When perception overrides truth? When self-expression becomes a substitute for self-governance?

In this episode, Allen Mowery unpacks the paradox at the heart of Romanticism and explores the cultural consequences of turning emotion into moral authority. From Oscar Wilde’s unexpected transformation to T.S. Eliot’s quiet call to humility, we examine the poets who pushed back — and what their work still demands of us today.

We don’t just critique Romanticism’s legacy; we wrestle with it. And in the process, we offer an alternative: a life rooted not in the whims of feeling, but in the enduring clarity of truth.

Topics Covered:

• Why feelings are not facts (even if they feel really, really factual)

• The paradox of Romanticism’s emotional revolution

• The dangers of moral relativism and cultural narcissism

• Poets who resisted the emotional freefall: Eliot, Auden, Herbert, and more

• The difference between being expressive and being whole

• A call to choose truth — especially when it’s uncomfortable

Featured Poets & Texts:

• T.S. Eliot – Four Quartets, Ash Wednesday

• W.H. Auden – September 1, 1939

• George Herbert – The Elixir

• Oscar Wilde – De Profundis

• Selections from Romantic-era and post-Romantic poets

In this darkly delightful episode, we stop swooning over daffodils and start whispering to ghosts. Welcome to the stormy underworld of Romanticism—the side that’s drenched in moonlight, mourning, madness, and metaphysical despair. We explore what happens when emotion becomes obsession, beauty turns to terror, and the soul starts writing poetry with a quill dipped in melancholy.

From Charlotte Dacre’s guilt-laced internal ruin to Novalis’s cosmic marriage proposal to death itself, we examine poetry that doesn’t just feel—it devours. Along the way, we meet snowbound nihilists, disillusioned philosophers, and poets who would have had thriving TikTok trauma-core accounts.

And yes, we talk about the real monsters—like Matthew Lewis, who made Gothic horror loud, excessive, and weirdly seductive long before horror movies knew how to scream.

In the end, we discover that the Romantics weren’t just dramatic—they were timeless. Their hunger still echoes through our curated sadness, moody playlists, and spiritual search engines.

Featured Poets and Works:

• Charlotte Dacre – “The Confession”

• James Thomson – from Winter

• Friedrich Schiller – from The Gods of Greece

• Novalis – from Hymns to the Night

• Matthew Lewis – “The Fragment”

Themes Explored:

• The Gothic as emotional architecture

• Nature as beautiful annihilation

• Spiritual grief and divine silence

• Death as intimacy, not destruction

• Emotional excess as both truth and performance

• Modern culture's Romantic inheritance: from curated sadness to hashtag despair

Romanticism. The age of passion, poetry... and maybe just a little too much fainting onto chaise lounges. In this episode of Perfectly Poetic, Allen takes a long, emotionally complicated walk through the overly perfumed garden of 19th-century love poems. Featuring full readings of Byron, Hemans, Moore, Landon, and Shelley, this episode explores the syrupy, swoon-heavy side of Romanticism — the poems that confuse longing with love and fantasy with fact.

But it doesn’t stop in the 1800s. We draw the not-so-subtle lines between these melodramatic verses and our modern dating culture — complete with swiping, soft launches, emotional martyrdom, and “u up?” texts disguised as destiny. It’s deeply philosophical, hilariously brutal, and surprisingly poignant.

If you’ve ever projected a full love story onto someone who matched your energy for three days, this one’s for you.

In This Episode

• Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” and the art of poetic projection

• Felicia Hemans’ flaming ode to obedience in “Casabianca”

• Thomas Moore and the emotional limbo of unlabeled relationships

• L.E.L.’s glamorized grief in “The Grave of a Suicide”

• Percy Shelley’s overly sensual nature metaphors in “Love’s Philosophy”

• “She Walks in Beauty” – Lord Byron

• “Casabianca” – Felicia Hemans

• “Oh! Call It by Some Better Name” – Thomas Moore

• “The Grave of a Suicide” – Letitia Elizabeth Landon

• “Love’s Philosophy” – Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Before poetry became a Pinterest quote or a cringey greeting card, it was wild. Soulful. Dramatic. Welcome to the world of Romanticism — the literary movement where emotion was a weapon, nature was sacred, and your existential crisis could become a 42-line poem.

In this first episode of the Romanticism series, we dig into what made the Romantics tick (spoiler: feelings), how they turned heartbreak and thunderstorms into high art, and why their unapologetic emotional chaos still hits home today. Featuring poetic heavyweights like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, we explore how Romanticism wasn’t just about writing pretty things — it was about feeling hard, living fully, and refusing to be numb.

This isn’t your high school English class. This is poetry with teeth, rain-soaked revelation, and a little bit of dirt under the fingernails.

Highlights include:

• What Romanticism actually was — and what it was pushing back against

• Nature as temple, therapist, and truth-teller

• Byron’s smoldering ego, Shelley’s political rage, Keats’s gorgeous grief

• Why this 200-year-old movement still describes your most vulnerable self better than your therapist

Some kids are born to play tag. Others sit on the swing set and contemplate mortality. Edgar Allan Poe? Definitely the swing set type.

In this episode, we take a dive (not a dramatic, Gothic plunge—just a tasteful dip) into one of Poe’s lesser-known but deeply revealing poems: Alone. With his signature melancholy flair and all the emotional baggage of a moody Victorian vampire, Poe explores what it means to feel cut off from the rest of humanity, even from childhood.

We break down the lines, the metaphors, and the angsty undercurrents, while also wrestling with bigger questions: Is Poe being honest? Is this performative sadness? Or is it just good branding?

Expect literary analysis, a splash of sarcasm, and a reminder that feeling different has a long poetic pedigree.

• The full reading of Alone (moody candlelight optional)

• How childhood alienation shaped Poe’s poetic voice

• The art of the tortured persona (and whether it’s legit or literary theater)

• Line-by-line breakdown of key images: demons, storms, and that pesky, joyless dawn

• Why this poem still hits home for misfits, introverts, and brooding creatives everywhere

“Alone” by Edgar Allan Poe

You don’t have to wear all black or write with a quill by moonlight to appreciate Poe. Sometimes poetry just knows how to say what you’re too tired or too weirded out to say yourself. And that’s kind of the whole point.

Follow, rate, and leave a review if you enjoy the show—especially if you're the kind of person who also secretly thinks the world is out to get you (poetically, of course).

Podcast: Perfectly Poetic
Episode Length: 15:21
Host: Allen Mowery

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Poetry is often associated with romance, and rightfully so, as some of the most beautiful verses in literature have spawned from the heart in love.  But poetry has also been born of love gone awry.  

Discover the comically-lurid story behind one of England's most-recognized poems along with the mournful and little-known poetic verses written by an imprisoned queen awaiting her execution.  Love is strong, but it doesn't always conquer.

FEATURED POETRY:

"My Darling Wife" — Nathan Roberts
"O, Death, Rock Me Asleep" — Anne Boleyn
"Greensleeves" — Unknown

A man of means, with his wife and four daughters by his side, the life of Horatio Gates Spafford was set to be the idyllic dream for which so many in the Victorian era longed.  But tragedy was beckoning on his doorstep.  Death, heartache, and financial ruin were the reality for this grieving soul who, alongside his wife, faced the deepest of sorrows in what was once a happy life.  Yet, in the midst of his visceral pain, Spafford wrote of hope, of peace, and the humanitarian efforts of he and his children still reverberates today.

Poetry included in this episode:
– "It Is Well With My Soul"
– "A Song in the Night"

His life was fraught with heartache.  Tormented by grief and mental illness, he turned to substance abuse, which likely contributed to his death at the age of 40.  Yet, somehow in the midst of the dysfunctional haze, he penned some of the most iconic verses in American literature.  Join us as we begin to explore the life and poetic works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Poetry included in this episode:
– "Alone"
– "Spirits of the Dead"
– "The Sleeper"

Written only a few short years before his death at age 39, "The Marshes of Glynn" is one of the most well-remembered poems by American poet Sidney Lanier.  Filled with emotion and vibrant literary imagery, Lanier describes the peace and calm he found amongst the marshes as he battled not only the demons haunting his memory but the disease which would soon claim his life.

"The Marshes of Glynn" by Sidney Lanier, 1878

The epilogue of Tennyson's In Memoriam was written for his sister Cecilia's wedding day in 1842 and brings a closure to one of his most notable works.  Written partly as a memorial after the death of a close friend in 1833, In Memoriam deals with the struggle of loss and existential being and finally finds closure in the uplifting verses about the marriage of his beloved sister.