Here in Texas we see spiderwarts along the edge of fields and along the edge of road shoulders however this year few wildflowers - We are experiencing a history making draught breaking all kinds of heat records for the number of triple didgit days with nights that most often only go down to 95. We can count the number of days it has rained on one hand and here in Central Texas the lakes were only lower two other periods in the history of droughts.
With Shelley's birthday just the other day it can be our excuse to get some of the groups of poets planted in our heads - Shelley was part of the
Big Six - the Six major
English Romantic poets.
William Blake - William Wordsworth - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - George Gordon, Lord Byron - Percy Bysshe Shelley - John Keats It used to be the Big Five but in recent years they have included Blake as part of this group - he was a poet unto his own - steeped in religion to the point of creating his own mythology and religion - He did bring a new art form of poetry and drawings interchangeable.
The early two are Spenser and Milton -
Remember
Spenser for
The Faerie Queene, all about Elizabeth I - he was one of those Englishmen in Ireland who wrote ridicul ing the Irish so that during one of the rebellions his castle was burnt to the ground - he escaped to his second holding in the south.
Spenser influenced the Romantic poets with the Elegy, Spenserian nine line stanza, Pastoral poetry that led, along with the influence of Milton, Pindar and Horace to the eighteenth century Ode, and then his beast fable.
Milton wrote
Paradise Lost - another of those epic poems that I have not tackled considered one of the great poems in the English language.
Many, especially
Blake claimed that
Spenser influenced
Milton and then
Milton influenced
Tennyson who was NOT one of the Romantic
Big Six poets.
Tennyson was a child during the hayday of the second tier Romantic Poets. He was born in the nineteenth century.
Wordsworth and
Coleridge were not only friends but
Coleridge, [
Rime of the Ancient Mariner] was instrumental in grooming
Wordsworth into the recognized poet we know today. For me it is more easy to remember
Wordsworth by his poem about Daffodils then his other major work - he lived with his sister and together they took long long walks - he had a major breakdown in his early twenties however later he was the Poet Laureate for Britian. Upon his death in 1850
Tennyson became the national Poet Laureate.
Back to the
Big Six - we have the early two
Spenser and
Milton who lived 300 years before
Wordsworth and
Tennyson.
Blake a man unto himself born in 1757.
John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
Lord Byron comprised the latter half of the movement.
Shelley was from gentry with a great 'Country House' - [a castle has a keep where as a country house can be as large or larger than many castles] - however the young
Shelley blew it and his sister was helping to support him with her good friend a sixteen year old dropping off the money -
Shelley at age nineteen assumed romance - the girl, Harriet was delighted and they run off the Scotland to be married. One thing and another including the girl having an affair and a sister who gave them no space to work out their marriage
Shelley leaves - later Harriet kills herself by thowing herself in the Serpentine but has her last sting by making it impossible for
Shelley to have custody or visiting rights to his two children.
Shelly had an arrangement living in France and later in Italy with
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin [author of
Frankenstine] they marry after the death of Harriet and after the father relents and
Shelley receives his stipend - again another sister almost ruined their marriage but that is another story because important is that
Shelley liked
Keats and was helping him.
Keats, a young man with TB - Both his mother and brother died from TB - for his health he came to Italy however, he did not accept
Shelley's invitation to stay with them - soon after
Keats died in Italy.
We focused on the work of
Keats for a month back a year or two ago. Remember how we were enchanted with his poem
Ode To A NightingaleAgain,
Shelley is the king pin to this group of three because
Shelley did not like
Byron - he thought he was too loose and fancy free with girls and yet, because they were all Brits in Italy he felt a responsibility to maintain loyalty and fidelity.
Byron served in the House of Lords in 1811 and later spent his own money refitting the Greek fleet as he was engaged with Greece in their war with Turkey.
Byron in Italy - a ladies man, he wanted a women to be met at the train station north and brought to him in Genoa -
Shelley offered - after which he and his two companions sail his new custom made boat from Genoa home. A Storm came up and the boat sank - since the boat sank Mary believed it was murder - everything from
Byron's jealousy to the possibility of British intelligence because of a radical political paper written while he was living in Wales is blamed. There are several other versions of what could have happened - this was 1822 - not a time when science would have helped solve a crime.
And so these three second tier English Romantic poets knew each other as their lives were touched in one way or another by each other.
Byron for me is best known for
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage which influenced
Turner to paint
http://tiny.cc/QPymH and
Berlioz to compose,
Harold in Italy Before an audience estimated at 250,000 to 300,000,
Mick Jagger of
The Rolling Stones read a part of
Shelley's poem
Adonais, An Elegy To The Death of John Keats http://theotherpages.org/poems/shell03.html at the
Brian Jones memorial concert at Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. Jones, founder and guitarist of the Stones, had drowned July 3, 1969 in his swimming pool.
And finally, the Irish poet
Yeats who was influenced by both
Shelley and
Spenser and only died in 1939. His family was part of the Protestant Ascendancy and they moved back to England during
William Yeats early childhood returning to Ireland with the rise of
Parnell and the Home rule movement. His poetry was steeped in Irish myth and folklore and his
Big Six influence was
William Blake.
