by Harold Bloom
And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld—somewhat like thee;
Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously!
Lines 73–110
Yeats in his “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” begins part III with a clear allusion to Asia’s song:
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
The swerve away from Shelley here is characteristic of Yeats, since Asia’s soul is scarcely transitory. Singing is the impetus that kindles Asia’s voyage to the deep ocean of perpetual tonal enhancement. Hart Crane followed Plato and Shelley in his credence that music pertained to love in harmony and system. Asia, seeking Prometheus, sails to an unchartered Elysia where no mortal pinnace ever preceded her. “The boat of my desire is guided” becomes in Hart Crane:
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
“Voyages,” II
Asia, however, moves through death and birth to a diviner day as her apotheosis returns her to a divine infancy: akin to John Bunyan’s “the Shining Ones” and Blake’s children of what he calls Beulah, the married land, and most clearly Wordsworth’s children on the shore in the “Intimations” ode. These are Asia’s “shapes too bright to see” in a primal paradise. In an oblique reference not so much to the Christ of the churches as to the Jesus Shelley accepted as an exemplary sufferer, Asia has her own revelation of those who can walk upon the sea.
Lord Byron, Don Juan
TO PASS FROM Wordsworth and Coleridge to George Gordon, Lord Byron, is to take an immense leap from the two inventors of modern poetry to their self-nominated antagonist. Shelley, who lived in daily proximity to Byron during most of their Italian years, was an extraordinarily gifted literary critic and praised Byron’s Don Juan as being superior even to Goethe and to Wordsworth. For Shelley it was the great poem of the age, whereas for William Hazlitt the poem’s gusto or fierce vitalism was a mask for a total transvaluation of all values and their reduction to absolute nihilism.
Of all poets in the Western tradition, Byron, in his lifetime and beyond, was the most notorious. His celebrity could be calculated in our terms if somehow you could fuse Bobby Dylan, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, and Beyoncé into one composite form with William Butler Yeats and Tyrone Power, who contrived to look like a reincarnation of Byron in the remarkable film Prince of Foxes (also starring a superb Orson Welles as Cesare Borgia).
Everything about Byron was a paradox. He was a man of astonishing personal beauty and yet half lame and endlessly struggling against a tendency to grow fat. He fought against it by horrible spells in which he devoured only rotten greens washed down by a mixture of German white wine and soda water. Though his contemporaries and everyone since regarded him as the High Romantic proper, he despised Romanticism and vociferated that English poetry had scarcely survived the death of Alexander Pope. To this day a synonym for the Great Lover, he nevertheless was mostly passive toward women, sadomasochistic, sodomistic, and early disgusted with all sexual experience anyway.
Byron was a radical in English politics and argued in the House of Lords against punishing the Luddites or “frame breakers,” who were protesting losing their jobs to industrialization. He also demanded Catholic Emancipation, but to no avail at that time. In Italy he was an active revolutionary, yet was privately skeptical that either reform or revolution could do any good. Many in modern Greece worship him as the martyr-hero of the Greek revolution against the Turks, but he loathed the men he financed, trained, and led. He had hoped to die in battle, gallantly urging his patriotic mercenaries on to victory, but died at Missolonghi in April 1824 of a consuming fever.
Though he played at being free of religion, he was shocked by his closest friend Shelley’s continuous polemic against Christianity, and secretly inclined toward Catholicism. Famous as an athlete and a champion swimmer, he had to force his sluggish body to keep up with his restless soul. His rakehell father died when the poet was three years old, and he was left with a bipolar mother, herself descended from the ancient royal family of Scotland, who entrusted him to a sadistic governess, who seduced and whipped him. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he experienced an intense homoerotic love affair, and continued with every variety of sexual experience in a Grand Tour of the Levant. His privately confessed motive was to indulge fully his homoerotic desires, though he also attempted to purchase a twelve-year-old girl for five hundred pounds and was chagrined when his offer was refused.
In 1812, Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and became the darling of London Whig aristocracy. For five years, his social ascendency augmented, but his continued incest with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, upon whom he fathered a daughter, Medora, and his endless passive surrenders to one noblewoman after another, made him seek a sanctuary in marrying Annabella Milbanke, an heiress passionately devoted to mathematics. He fathered a daughter, Ada, upon Annabella, but the marriage ended in exactly a year, for a multiplicity of causes, including his sodomistic demands upon his wife, his affairs with many actresses, his ongoing incest, and his tendency to fall into violent rages bordering on insanity.
Reviled by aristocratic society, the stormy poet abandoned England forever and began his close friendship with Shelley in the summer of 1816 near Lake Geneva. This extremely intricate relationship continued until Shelley’s death by drowning on July 8, 1822, in the Gulf of La Spezia near Lerici. Of all literary friendships—and there have been so many, from ancient Alexandria through Renaissance Italy, France, and Britain, on to Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald—the association of Byron and Shelley was unique in its human and poetic importance for both. During the six years they were together, they passed over 250 days in each other’s company. They exchanged at least fifty letters, most of which I have read, and each read and criticized nearly everything the other composed until Shelley’s death.
Shelley’s effect upon Byron’s poetry was largely beneficial. As Byron remarked, Shelley doused him with Wordsworth, which helped create the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. But Byron became a kind of nightmare for Shelley. Though both were social pariahs in England, Byron was rich and famous and had a huge readership. Unlike Shelley, Byron essentially was conventional in modes of thought and feeling. Shelley, a superb skeptical intellect yet a transcendental visionary in matters of the heart, never fully apprehended how connected to tradition his difficult friend remained. At one point, the two men came close to fighting a duel that doubtless would have ended Shelley.
It is the fashion now among Byron’s scholars to exalt him to equal status with Wordsworth as the great poet of his era. Though increasingly I read Byron with enormous pleasure and profit, I am puzzled by this evaluation. A lifelong brooder on the problems of poetic influence, I have learned that one ultimate canonical test for poetic magnitude is provided by the sublime progeny a poet engenders. By that test, Wordsworth, William Blake, Shelley, and John Keats can be awarded the palm over Byron. Each of them lived on in the cavalcade of Anglo-American poetry, from Tennyson and Browning through Whitman and Emily Dickinson on to Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. I can think only of early Auden as a poet who attempted to carry on Byron’s legacy, with indifferent success.
Shelley
’s acute judgment, that Byron’s Don Juan was the true poem of the age, is in some ways difficult to dispute. The dedication’s continuous demolition of the bad poet Robert Southey is itself hilarious and turns poor Southey into a figure like James Joyce’s Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Mulligan in turn is a palpable portrait of Oliver St. John Gogarty: a medical doctor, Irish Free State politician, dubious poet, friend of Yeats, and later a denizen of Manhattan, where he supported himself by writing tedious memoirs and spent much of his time in bars, drinking heavily. I myself several times sat with him and other roustabouts in the White Horse Tavern in the mid-1950s but learned to avoid Gogarty, since his rancidity was unbounded.
Southey, a close friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Landor, had forsaken the revolutionary stance of his youth and became another timeserver of the Tory persuasion. Byron’s gusto is gargantuan in his dedicatory assault upon the wretched Southey:
Bob Southey! You’re a poet—Poet–laureate,
And representative of all the race.
Although ’tis true that you turned out a Tory at
Last—yours has lately been a common case;
And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?
With all the Lakers, in and out of place?
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
Like ‘four and twenty blackbirds in a pye;
‘Which pye being opened they began to sing,’
(This old song and new simile holds good),
‘A dainty dish to set before the King’
Or Regent, who admires such kind of food;—
And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumbered with his hood—
Explaining Metaphysics to the nation—
I wish he would explain his Explanation.
You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only Blackbird in the dish;
And then you overstrain yourself, or so,
And tumble downward like the flying fish
Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,
And fall for lack of moisture, quite a-dry, Bob!
And Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion,”
(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages)
Has given a sample from the vasty version
Of his new system to perplex the sages;
’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,
And may appear so when the Dog–Star rages—
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the Tower of Babel.
You—Gentlemen! by dint of long seclusion
From better company, have kept your own
At Keswick, and, through still continued fusion
Of one another’s minds, at last have grown
To deem as a most logical conclusion,
That Poesy has wreaths for you alone:
There is a narrowness in such a notion,
Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for Ocean.
I would not imitate the petty thought,
Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice,
For all the glory your conversion brought,
Since gold alone should not have been its price.
You have your salary; was ’t for that you wrought?
And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise.
You’re shabby fellows—true—but poets still
And duly seated on the Immortal Hill.
The joy of Byron’s satiric drive is infectious and allows us to accept his mistaken estimates of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In any case, he knew better and relied upon his intense surge of comedy to justify his prejudices. That verve is triumphant as he opens Don Juan:
I.
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.
II.
Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,
Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe,
Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk,
And filled their sign-posts then, like Wellesley now;
Each in their turn like Banquo’s monarchs stalk,
Followers of fame, “nine farrow” of that sow:
France, too, had Buonaparté and Dumourier
Recorded in the Moniteur and Courier.
III.
Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, Mirabeau,
Petion, Clootz, Danton, Marat, La Fayette
Were French, and famous people, as we know;
And there were others, scarce forgotten yet,
Joubert, Hoche, Marceau, Lannes, Desaix, Moreau,
With many of the military set,
Exceedingly remarkable at times,
But not at all adapted to my rhymes.
IV.
Nelson was once Britannia’s god of War,
And still should be so, but the tide is turn’d;
There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar,
’Tis with our hero quietly inurn’d;
Because the army’s grown more popular,
At which the naval people are concern’d;
Besides, the Prince is all for the land-service,
Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis.
V.
Brave men were living before Agamemnon
And since, exceeding valorous and sage,
A good deal like him too, though quite the same none;
But then they shone not on the poet’s page,
And so have been forgotten—I condemn none,
But can’t find any in the present age
Fit for my poem (that is, for my new one);
So, as I said, I’ll take my friend Don Juan.
Byron’s hero is not Mozart’s Don Giovanni, who does go down with the Devil, but a charming teenage youth, strangely passive, yet courageous and madly attractive to all women. He is not at all Byron or even Byronic. Sometimes he reminds me of D. H. Lawrence’s “Don Juan”:
It is Isis the mystery
Must be in love with me.
Here this round ball of earth,
Where all the mountains sit
Solemn in groups,
And the bright rivers flit
Round them for girth:
Here the trees and troops
Darken the shining grass;
And many bright people pass
Like plunder from heaven:
Many bright people pass
Plundered from heaven.
But what of the mistresses,
What the beloved seven?
—They were but witnesses,
I was just driven.
Where is there peace for me?
It is Isis the mystery
Must be in love with me.
Shakespeare’s Antony could have said, “It is Isis the mystery / Must be in love with me,” since Cleopatra’s dying transcendence identifies her with Isis, to whom the fatal asps are devoted. Lawrence’s Don Juan is closer to Lord Byron than to the Noble Lord’s hero.
John Keats,
“Ode to a Nightingale”
THE ODES O
F John Keats center upon the simultaneous wealth and destitution of seeking to live in a physical world. Like Shakespeare and the early Wordsworth, Keats exalted our common human life. And yet he knew that no adventurer in humanity had been able to conceive so immanent an existence. “Evil” in Keats and in his disciple Stevens tends to be simply the suffering and pain we all of us undergo because we are natural women and men in an altogether natural world. The transcendental impulse that powers Shelley’s Pindaric flights is not alien to Keats, yet he turns away from it as Shakespeare did, choosing Ovidian flux and change over Platonist yearnings for a premature Eternity. That is part, but only part, of the agon waged by the Great Odes, particularly “Ode to a Nightingale”:
I
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
Keats composed this grand ode in 1819. In December 1818, his brother Tom died of tuberculosis, the family curse, which was to destroy the poet himself. Tom’s death haunts the poem throughout, but particularly in its third stanza. The heartache and the drowsy numbness are induced not by the poison of hemlock or an opiate but by a burst of joy at hearing the nightingale’s song:
II
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,