How I Met Your Mother Heaps Pretension on Poetry

Ted Mosby Gives Poetry a Bad Name

PopPoetry is poetry and pop culture Substack written by Caitlin Cowan. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox weekly, subscribe below so you won’t miss a post! Thanks for reading and sharing. It’s gonna be legen… wait for it… dary!

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How I Met Your Mother is rife with poems and poets, some real and others, well—they’re Barney Stinson originals (“The Sexless Innkeeper,” anyone?) I intend to tackle them all eventually, but the Season 5 episode “Robots vs. Wrestlers” offers numerous references packed into the same half-hour. It also takes on one of the most pernicious stereotypes about the art form: “poetry is for snobs.”

Poetry has a long history of cultural association with highfalutin Frasier types (just wait, we’ll get there!), and that association shows only the barest signs of retreating. HIMYM’s epic high-versus-low-culture “Robots vs. Wrestlers” episode’s central conflict is whether the gang should go to a wrestling match where a human wrestles a robot or whether they should go to a fancy party in a beautiful old building full of rich, cultured people. Ted, played by Josh Radnor, is in favor of the latter, as you might imagine.