Keats and Yeats by his side

Interesting piece in the current Mojo magazine; an interview with Morrissey around his new album "Ringleader of the Tormentors." A photo of him next to Keats' grave, and a side panel comparing his lyrics with poets that have influenced him - Auden, Betjeman, Stevie Smith, Eliot and Larkin. Slightly trite idea, really, (and no Plath? Surely "I know it's Over", or Yeats, "English Blood, Irish Heart"?) I always wonder whether our more literary musicians are that way inclined at all. This, like other interviews has gone on at length about Morrissey being gender specific in a love song for the first time - in a track called "Dear God, Please Help Me." It's alway seemed a little reductionist to me, this. After all, their first single couple "the sun shines out of your behind," with "oh, you, handsome devil," yet his fanatical followers were almost football-crowdishly heterosexual; like Bowie before him, the Smiths were a music for anyone who felt like an outsider, for whatever reason. Perhaps we've lost something of that ambiguity these days.