A few nights ago, I sat staring at the physics lab on my desk. I blinked frequently, giving it as many opportunities as possible to magically do itself or disappear, but of course it didn’t.

In my procrastination, I thought about how I’d rather be canoeing in the north woods of Minnesota or hiking through the Appalachians. I wondered if slaying dragons and saving damsels in distress might be my forte. I eventually returned to reality and cursed the oppression of society, school and X-ray diffraction.

It was then that I realized my symptoms. My fascination with the supernatural completion of lab reports, love of nature, attraction to the exotic medieval lifestyle and libertarian spirit pointed toward a career in romantic poetry.

At first I thought this was a rather ridiculous notion. However, upon investigation I found a surprising number of similarities between myself and John Keats, an English romantic poet who lived from 1795-1821.

When Keats was 21, he was licensed to be a apothecary-surgeon but quit to become a poet. I’m 20 right now, taking science classes and would rather write poetry than take finals. Keats suffered emotional trauma from his infatuation with Fanny Brawne, a young woman who would not return his love. I too am strained by my unrequited love for Victoria, the 20-year-old Duchess of V„sterg”tland and crown princess of Sweden.

Having established that the plan was feasible, I decided to find out what this job would entail. The obvious answer is to write poetry. However, the romantic poets often lived romantic lifestyles, so I investigated some methods to achieve this goal.

One thing that I could do would be to leave school without a degree. I could then team up with another romantic on a plan to found a utopian society in Pennsylvania, then give up. Samuel Taylor Coleridge did this with Robert Southey in 1794. A year later, in 1795, they married sisters. It wouldn’t be too much extra effort to become addicted to opium, alienate my family and wander around Europe for years at a time.

Instead of leaving school like Coleridge, it might be more fun to get kicked out, like Percy Shelley. Shelley got the boot from Oxford in 1811 for publishing pamphlets on atheism and burlesque verse.

A walking tour of Switzerland and France is always a possibility. I could top it off by having a kid with a woman in Orleans and leaving shortly thereafter as William Wordsworth did in 1790-91.

I might also consider living the life of the Byronic Hero, a young man with volatile emotions who rejects humanity and stumbles through life bearing the oppressive guilt of mysterious past wrong-doings, that George Gordon Noel, the 6th Baron Byron, created and resembled in his own life.

Perhaps the most disquieting thing about being a romantic poet is the tendency to die young in Southern Europe. Lord Byron died at 36 while leading Greek revolutionaries at Missolonghi. Keats was 25 when illness caught up to him, and Shelley drowned while sailing when he was 30, both in Italy.

Given this information, I was no longer quite as enthused about being a romantic poet. However, I did find some benefits. It would be nice to have fans amongst the British nobility who would float you 500 pounds from time to time to support your work.

Most importantly, though, the romantics had philosophies that would be a breath of fresh air in the 1990s. It seems that the explosion of science in the past century has created a rift through society. The Scopes Trial of 1925, amongst many other things, has led people to mistakenly sell the farm on either science or religion and not allow a lot of room between. As a result, every time a biologist makes a statistical error it incites a media frenzy about some miracle cure. On the same token, differing opinions on translations of Ancient Greek verbs can lead people to despise each other.

The romantics set aside their logic and reason in favor of imagination, freedom of thought and subjectivity of approach. Wordsworth did a good job of capturing this in his poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” in which he drifts through nature spotting “a host of golden daffodils, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze… [He] gazed — and gazed — but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought.”

It may be goofy and melodramatic and lack any real world application, but drawing inspiration from everyday things would bring a much welcome third party to post Vietnam-Cold War pop philosophy. It also encourages a person’s own analysis as opposed to constantly seeking answers from other sources.

I was all ready to become a romantic poet, but then I realized that there aren’t a lot of them today. Upon reflecting upon the lifestyles of romantics of old, I concluded that in 1998 they would all have been cleaned out in divorce court, or have drug convictions and restraining orders. I elected to stick to the math.

At any rate, I should probably return to preparing for the Goliath tests of next week, but maybe I’ll work on improving my Swedish beyond the scope of “The Muppet Show” and write love poems in blank verse to Victoria instead.

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Erik Hoversten is a junior in math from Eagan, Minn.