Quote of the Day (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Urging the People to ‘Rise Like Lions After Slumber’)

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few." —English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), “The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester” (1819)
 
Two hundred years ago today, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy at age 29. His private behavior (including adultery) and open radicalism (most notoriously at the time, his avowed atheism) scandalized the English public, and as with the older poet he admired and befriended, Lord Byron, overshadowed his enormous technical skill and grace with verse.
 
Once the controversies of his lifetime died down, that abundant talent could be better appreciated. At the same time, once that occurred, it also diluted the force of his personal demonstration that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
 
Shelley lived virtually every day of his adult life on the edge. He was skeptical alike in matters of faith and governance, calling, for instance, for his country’s common people to protest the “massacre” alluded to in the above verses at Peterloo, England, in August 1819, when saber-wielding cavalry charged on thousands gathered to demand parliamentary reform.
 
It would take nearly a half century for parliamentary reform to be enacted in full. It would be seven years after Shelley’s decade for another one of his causes, Catholic Emancipation, to be realized. His defiance towards convention remains an abiding impulse shuddered at by the likes of the neoconservative English journalist and historian Paul Johnson, who included him in his rogues’ gallery of leftist Intellectuals (1989).
 
For an interesting consideration of the circumstances surrounding Shelley’s death—including conspiracy theories that inevitably circulated—I urge you to read Madeleine Callaghan’s post from the Liverpool University Press Blog.

This Day in Literary History (Death of John Keats, Romantic Poet Who Influenced Fitzgerald)

Feb. 23, 1821—John Keats, an apothecary student who, in just a few years, switched to writing some of the most heavily anthologized verses of any poet, died at age 25 in Rome, where he had come for relief that winter from the tuberculosis ravaging his lungs.

Keats’ truncated life and his requested epitaph on the tombstone he asked not to bear his name (“Here lies one whose name was writ in water”) fostered a posthumous image of an essential sickly, solitary, and melancholy spirit. That image only hardened with the dissemination of the more famous of his 54 poems, which emphasize deep self-consciousness, as well as the publication of the great elegy by friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais.”

To a large extent, that image was at variance with the facts. The 240 letters of his to family and friends that survive reveal a livelier, more antic—and, I would argue, more attractive—spirit.

Touched by the deaths of, in turn, his father, mother, and younger brother, Keats was all too familiar with the concept of living on borrowed time, and he emerged from these traumatic experiences not just uncoiled but unleashed on the world, with a demonic energy that led him to master, in turn, his literary studies at the boys’ academy at Enfield, medical studies at Guy’s Hospital, and in-depth reading of the likes of Spenser, Drayton, Milton, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and his friend Leigh Hunt that led him to create what recent biographer Lucaster Miller calls his “vertiginous originality.”

His correspondence also demonstrates that, far from being the sensitive “Adonais” envisioned by Shelley, Keats rebounded nicely from negative reviews of his “Hyperion” (1818).

Besides his undoubted wizardry with words, there is another reason why Keats fascinates me: this most intensely lyrical of English poets influenced the most intensely lyrical of American novelists, my literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald. In fact, the title of his second-best novel, Tender is the Night, is drawn from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”

(This YouTube clip has the novelist reading the poem, with considerable feeling.)

In addition to the poet’s lush, sensuous imagery, Fitzgerald may have felt an affinity with his life. As outlined in Jonathan Bate’s braided biography of the two, Bright Star, Green Light, the resemblances include the following:

*Young manhoods reached in convulsive wars: the tail-end of the Napoleonic conflict in Keats’ case, World War I in Fitzgerald’s;

*Youthful exclusion from the privileged classes: for Keats, as a Cockney orphan; for Fitzgerald, as a Roman Catholic son of a father who could not bring his wife the financial security brought by his father, a rich grocer;

*Muses both bewitching and torturing: for Keats, Fanny Brawne, the young woman next door, whom he wanted desperately to wed but couldn’t do so without the money; for Fitzgerald, not one but two: Ginevra King, a pretty socialite believed to be the model for the elusive Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, then Zelda Sayre, whom he did marry, only to become entwined in their mutual tragedy;

* Obsessions with beauty, loss and the evanescent moment: For Keats, brought on by intimations of the mortality of family members and himself; for Fitzgerald, by the striving for wealth and tragic sense that its attainment brought not so much happiness but instead waste and corruption.

(On the Web site “Interesting Literature,” guest blogger Laura Inman offers an unusual take on Keats as a Stoic philosopher who came to believe that this program would, in Inman’s words, offer “a program for achieving a tranquil life that finds value in adversity.”)

Photo of the Day: ‘Rapture on the Lonely Shore’—Hilton Head, SC

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
   There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
   There is society where none intrudes,
   By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
   I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
   From these our interviews, in which I steal
   From all I may be, or have been before,
   To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.” — English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812)

Lord Byron never visited America, let alone the shore of South Carolina. When I took this photo while on vacation in Hilton Head six years, the beach at that point in the day was not “lonely.” But I certainly felt the “rapture” he evoked in this passage as I pedaled my bike on the shoreline.

In these dying days of a year darkened by COVID-19, memory is the only way to experience vistas like this once taken for granted in the era of untrammeled travel. But memory—and the magical verses like these—remain, for all that, enormously powerful.

Let’s hope that, at some point in the new year, we will have once again the opportunity “to mingle with the Universe” without fear.