I teach Victorian poetry and have some theories about William. I think he was a Victorian Romantic, much like Rossetti, Swinburne, and (occasionally) Matthew Arnold. Having heard the brief snippet of his poetry twice now, I would NOT say it was "bloody awful" but actually quite good for a rather young man. My husband concurs, and he has a great ear for poetry. The problem with William was that he was in with a BAD GROUP of people at the party that we saw: Cecily was a vapid young woman who could not appreciate his intellectual strengths. He was with what Matthew Arnold called the "Philistines" of the upper class or the upper middle class of 1880.

William's "role models" are likely to have been Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats: he was probably feeling the "poetrylessness" of the Victorian period as Matthew Arnold called it. He possibly was trying to model himself (as in Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence") on some of his predecessors: Keats, who believed in love, both fleshly and transcendent, as his luminous star. Keats, too, was in love with a young woman who seems to have been unworthy of him.

William probably was also influenced by Byron ("mad, bad, and dangerous to know") and Swinburne the Priapic Leader of a Band of Satyrs---as a wanna-be. Spike's character is very Byronic and Swinburnean.

What I am getting at is that William was a relatively young man who was still forming his character and was heavily influenced by the poets of his day and the poets of the Romantic period. He would have had an excellent classical education; he would have been taught to venerate women as The Angel in the House.

Angel, Parker, and Riley had none of those qualities: I think that all three of them were much less deeply textured and nuanced than Spike in that Spike as William was probably as concerned with love, literature, character, and the whole concept of Chivalry as a Victorian gentleman.

Think of the many times we have seen him be "chivalrous" around Buffy and others.

OK: So now he's a vampire, but does that remove the poet from the man? Do poets love and brood and grieve with more intensity than others? I think probably so: they can also be egomaniacal and overly concerned about their reputation.

I will be mightily interested to see if Spike returns to writing poetry at all. Perhaps the crushing words he heard in 1880 determined him that he would not expose himself in such a way ever again....until he fell in love with Buffy.