Neck and Neck and Not so Neck

Apparently I have seven posts tagged Byron and seven overlapping but not identical posts tagged Shelley. And three tagged Keats. Sorry, Keats! You're beating Blake and Wordsworth! And really beating Coleridge (unsurprisingly - I genuinely don't have much to say about Coleridge, even if I like "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel").

Well, eight and eight and four, now.

You know, I meant for this to be a very short post, but. . . the person directly responsible for the publication of both "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" was Byron? And the motivation for the whole writing competition thing was Byron's recitation of "Christabel"? I swear to God that I wrote those two as the Coleridge poems I really like before learning any of this.

Quick Question-I-Had-at-Work Post

It's kind of a commonplace of discussion about the history of Western thought that we have this religious/Platonic idea running throughout it that consciousness precedes the external world - an idea that has had many permutations of varying levels of interest. However, leaving aside the truth or falsehood of the concepts that consciousness in general precedes the external world or some form of Platonic/Wordsworthian barely-remembered reincarnation exists, surely our actual experience of our individual consciousness that we can actually remember tends to suggest that this one thing does, in fact, come after the external world. Like, there's this big world with a lot of stuff in it that seems to have been around for a while, and, while our experience of consciousness is obviously guided by various mental constraints that allow us to learn, surely every actual experience is new to the individual mind (and it's not like we have memories of some other experiences that are no longer happening to us). So why is the idea that consciousness comes first so prevalent? Does Freud talk about this?