Ode on a political aide

LAST WEEK (''Democrats seek data on Romney," City & Region, Dec. 30) we saw a good example of what happens when literary types, like Governor Romney's communications director, Eric Fehrnstrom, get into the public life. After setting us up for an apt quotation from William Butler Yeats, he mistakenly credits our favorite Irish poet with a line from the English Romantic, John Keats (''all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know").

This sort of misdirection is perhaps fitting for a governor who spent the year before his election pretending to be from Massachusetts and every year since pretending that he's not.

Doubtless, the Yeats passage that Fehrnstrom was groping for to describe the political situation in our Commonwealth is from ''The Second Coming":

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

PHILIP CHAPMAN-BELL, Northampton