Just honest with himself!
I can't agree with you. He was still 19 whene he get married and he eloped with Mary Godwin because he really loved herOriginally Posted by JBI
. He did it according to his belief that love can overcame any social constriction. Love and freedom will defeat shortcomings and evils of the society. He was just self-consistent.
Obviously, Byron is not paragorn of moral behavior if Shelley gets what he deserved... That makes even less sense, Shelley was the kind of person which "moral" is devoted to social themes, not individuals. That was possible his problem. And yes, if Byron composed great dramatic poems Shelly let us Adonais, which is possible the greatest elegy of english language. Not to mention he more than showed his capacity with sonnets and other minor forms.
Keats works with long poems is being exagerated. The Odes are not exactly long and alongside his sonnets they are his best poetry. It is Keats capacity to produce lines that are ephemeral and yet constant that make us seem him a poem so sublime as Dante or Ovid... those wings...
As criticals? They are all worst than Coleridge, so why the argument.
And Shelley ? One of the first to reckon Keats and his Defense of Poetry outranks anything that Arnold wrote. Its influece ? Goes until Jorge Luis Borges that loved to quote a few ideas inside there and Borges's criticism of literature easily replaced T.S.Elliot criticism.
By the way, the outlasting influence of Keats is today bigger than Byron. Keats poems and verses are today more well know, quoted and his themes repeated. Oscar Wilde and Yeats owns more to Keats than to Byron for example and Yeats is the head of the last great poetic movement of lyric poetric language.
I love Keats and my favourite poem by him is "Ode on a Grecian Urn".there are aspects of his poetry that reminds me of Giacomo Leopardi, especially the idea that happiness is a consequence of non fulfillment and the great sensibility.
I like Shelley too mainly because of his social commitment and of his strong ideology and Byron's Don Juan struck me as an extremely witty and ironic work...and I was fascinated by "We'll Go No More a-Roving".
I will repeat my preference:
Keats
Byron
Shelly
My favourite poems:
Adonais
Lines to an Indian Air (sheer lyricism)
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Still Shelley is not the best of the lot in spite of his two poems being my top two favorites! Shelley was very melodic but produced less memorable works than the other two. As far as the sheer grandeur of achievement is concerned, Keats towers above the rest. Byron's long poems, wit and personality makes him a great contender for the second place. I do not consider 'Adonais' to be a 'long' poem (one poem that I re-read quite often and most of the time in one sitting). If T S Eliot had 'anxiety of influence' then why would he rate his immediate predecessor, Mathew Arnold so high?
As far as Mathew Arnold is concerned, he might not be very big across the Pond but here in the Old Blighty, he is rated quite high. He is counted among the trio of the great Older Victorians: Browning, Tennyson and Arnold. Dover Beach is not the only great poem he wrote (he wrote it during his honey moon!!!). You have to read his Sohrab and Rustum , The Scholar Gypsy and obviously his elegy Thyrsis, written on the death of his poet-friend Arthur Hugh Clough.
I'll paste Shelley's Lines to an Indain Air, published posthumously and one of the least well known of his poems, the lyrical beauty of this short poem has aided me a lot in winning nice, cultured female friends
Lines to an Indian Air
1.
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee, 5
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me—who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
2.
The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream— 10
The Champak odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart;—
As I must on thine, 15
Oh, beloved as thou art!
3.
Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale. 20
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;—
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.
Personally I would probably rank Keats over Byron or Shelley... although I am more than certain that a strong argument could be made for any one of the three. I would never begin to think of placing Arnold within the same rank. Admittedly, he may be more appreciated in Britain than in the US... but I have never imagined him as any more than one of many marvelous second-tier poets of the era. I've never heard of him mentioned as standing on par with Tennyson or Browning... indeed I would be far more likely to give Rossetti the nod for a third of that group... if not Hopkins. As for Eliot's "anxiety of influence" I suspect that he had no problem in acknowledging Arnold because he never felt threatened or overwhelmed by his aesthetic achievements. Eliot clearly knew that Whitman cast a huge shadow... just as a writer like Becket knew that Joyce's influence was so huge and obvious that he could only escape it by abandoning the English language.
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Keats appeals to youth - a melodic sensuousness and a wistful nostalgia that engage younger readers..he does however veer from sublimity to bathos more frequently, a pardonable fault at his age.
Knowing his frail physical condition intensifies the tragic fatefulness that underlies the reading of his work. He is terribly aware of mortality. Hyperion is only a fragment, but Keats evokes a sadness in the fall that is as epically grand as Milton's.
The Anxiety of influence is just an expression. They are less anxious than one may think.
I think this thing about long poems is a bit irrelevant. Shelley was very good doing what he did and I think he is more consistent than Byron, but that is not important either.
As the great victorians, that group is pushing a little. Unlike the 6 of romantism, that group was not that "great" and the distance between then is a big far. Even Tennyson is a bit secundary when compared with Browning. One could push Oscar Wilde there, this kind of thing.
One thing is however true, Shelley is not vain, ephemeral. That is a huge mistake and misleading because of the kind of popularity Shelley enjoyed at first, focused only in part of his poetry.
As the reputations stand at this point in literary history, Byron is considered the greatest of ALL three (Keats included), his persona, the Byronic hero "tired of living but not of life" appears again and again in modernist and postmodern literature. Being a student of Jerome McGann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_McGann) I am extremely reluctant to accept the inferiority of Byron's genius. Shelley's reputation is yet to recover from the Victorians and the critics who followed them. Modernism, with its emphasis on concreteness and 'objective co-relative' had little sympathy for his hazy and obscure imagery. Like Keats, Shelley also has this personal thing behind his persona, his prediction concerning his own young death at the end of 'Adonais' and elsewhere:
...my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;...
his women and his great wife, the creator of 'Frankenstein', his aristocratic background and radical views, his financial difficulties and his reluctance to address them etc. He tied his reputation with Keats's in Adonais. The legend of three 'young' romantic poets, who died young and left copious amount of work behind and then there is the question of the literary canon. For us foreigners American Literature is Hemingway, Faulkner and Melville. I remember the shock and horror when Marcus Smith refused to teach us Hemingway and 'forced' Walker Percy's 'The Moviegoer' on us which many of us found boring and inconsequential! Although it led me to many interesting novels by Percy himself and the subsequent discovery of that, the most hilarious of American novels, 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by another writer who died young, Toole, still the question was asked about the exclusion of 'Papa' Hemingway. People look at the canon differently according to their geographical location. In England, Shelley's reputation has not been quite high for a long long time whereas everywhere else the 'canon' is revered more and a 'canonical' figure enjoys more respect. The canon is more dynamic in its native country whereas it is more static and 'canonical' in other places. Joyce Carol Oats or Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Alice Welty are big in America, they are part of the 'current' and dynamic canon, they are not appreciated in the same way elsewhere. The way literary reputation stands at this moment in time, Lord Byron is the most admired of the three in his native country.
About Beckett and Joyce (sorry could not overlook that one). Beckett did not write in French, he wrote in French and English. Beckett achieved greatness by going against the Joycean current, he was Joyce's opposite in literary terms. Nobody can write English language like Beckett did, but then who can write our language quite like James Joyce?
"I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck"
Samuel Beckett Molly
You said a whole lot there Mr K, but opinion ain't fact: the English Lit canon is as happy with Shelley as with Byron..perhaps even more so, as Byron requires greater historical sensibility. And as for the dynamics of canon-development, in Britain the canon is utterly ossified, arrested in evolution just as post-structuralism reared its head above the Parisian barricades.
My order would be Keats, Shelley, Byron.
As to that other side argument, Shelley is way, way greater poet than Arnold, not even close. And Shelley isn't ineffectual. He's quite intellectual, certainly the most intellectual of the three poets.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
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which of the three is the only one who can make you LAUGH and can make You CRY..?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6331869.stm
As I said, canon is never ossified in its native country. From here, the American canon seems to be running round the three 'Biggies' I mentioned above. The true dynamics of a culture and its manifestations in art and literature become more and more obvious as you come closer. The TLS does not give the true picture of the English canon, there are old farts who read and admire it and then there are others who read it in British Council libraries and think of it as the last word on English Literature. "Too much water has passed under the butt bridge, in both directions" as Samuel Beckett would put it. Things change. The British may have failed to produce a Derrida or Foucault or Badiou, the influence of these thinkers managed to cross the Chanel and did play havoc with the established notions here and got the things moving in diverse directions. Nothing stays the same.
Well, first of all I dispute that Byron is considered more important than Shelley in the canon. When I went to school, we barely touched Byron while we spent a considerable amount of time on Shelley. Possibly more on Shelley than Keats, since Shelley has so much more work. And this was in a class devoted to the Romantic poets. So I don't know what you're talking about.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
I wasn't taught Byron either but then I was not taught Ben Jonson, Dryden, Tennyson (we had Arnold in our syllabus though!) either and I chose never to read Dickens. I strongly believe that all great art is measured by the effect it has on the subsequent works of art. Keats's 'sensuousness' lives, the Byronic hero lives and Byronic wit lives in subsequent works of art. I studied 'Adonais' and 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty' etc as a student. I taught them as well. I don't see their effect on the subsequent works of literature. Yes Yeats wrote on him but his phantasmal imagery is unique to him, too unique. To me Shelley's 'Complete Poetical Works' is a huge book with very little to offer for its size.
Last edited by Kafka's Crow; 01-10-2008 at 02:02 PM.
Fair enough as your opinion. But when you said it was canonical that Byron is more important than Shelley, well that I believe is inaccurate.
As to Shelley's importance to other poets, yes Yeats, but therre is also Wallace Stevens, and I'm sure some others as well. I think Tennyson admired him too.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
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