Allen Ginsberg on Nineteenth-Century Poetry, on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples” continues from here
Student: When he says, “Whom men love not – and yet regret”, he means regret his death, is that it? After his death?
AG: Well, everybody thought he was personally extremely charming and a great genius and very brilliant, but also thought he was really erratic and a scandalous fuck-up because he was subject to big tempers. If he got hurt he would scream. Very much like (Gregory) Corso in a way – hypersensitive in a sense of if he got cut he would really go into a tizzie and he acted a lot on impulse and totally anarchically and according to his likes. I think he married a girl named Harriet (Harriet Westbrook) and had a couple of children [Editorial note – In 1811, when Shelley was nineteen, he eloped with 16-year-old Harriet and spent two years travelling with her through England and Ireland distributing pamphlets and stirring up rebellion. By 1814 they had separated] and then met William Godwin‘s daughter and ran off with her in 1816 to Europe – Switzerland, I think. And that scandalized everybody. And then Harriet committed suicide and then the courts took away his children [Editorial note – His first child, his daughter Ianthe, was born in 1813, while still living with Harriet. She bore his second, his son, Charles, four months after he’d eloped with Mary Godwin.By 1817 Shelley had fathered two children by Mary ,the first, born three months after Charles, died after only two weeks. Shelley and Mary married twenty days after the discovery of Harriet’s suicide] So it was like continuous social problems. And because of the court taking away his children he abandoned England forever and went to Italy sort of in a great tizzie or snit or anger – a fit of anger.
So “Whom men love not” – in other words, nobody dug him personally or he thought and actually he was attacked a lot, but at the same time everybody recognized that he was some kind of a brilliant character and a brilliant writer and a brilliant idealist of some sort that didn’t know how to live in the world.
Student: It sounded like it’s his ego, you know, kind of a big.. kind of a poser by himself that’s..
AG: Well, yeah, but it’s also it’s an accurate statement. It’s also real – “men love not – and yet regret,” – people did regret his death, people did appreciate him as pure poet, but at the same time thought he was a shit, (some of them), or thought he was a scandalous atheist. And he was an extreme strange eccentric and very brilliant genius. And he did get in a lot of trouble. He got kicked out of … when he was in Eton, a public school he went to, high school.
Student: (..went to Oxford)
AG: Well, he went to Eton first and there he was called “Mad Shelley.” Or there was another nickname for him. Do you remember what that was? Mad Shelley or…?
Student: Mad Shelley was it.
AG: There’s another one, too.
Student: Oh, yeah. Oh.
AG: It’s in here. I’l look int up. Shelley the Atheist. “Shelley the Atheist”. That’s Shelley. That kid is “Shelley the Atheist”. Or “Mad Shelley”. They were ragging him.
And then when he went to Oxford he wound up, with his friend T.J. Hogg trying to tell everybody about atheism and I guess it was on account of writing “On the Necessity of Atheism“ that he got kicked out of Oxford. One of the few people who ever got kicked out of Oxford whom Oxford regretted and officially …
Student: …reinstated, or something.
AG: … reinstated by putting a big statue of him; big white marble statue…
Student: After he died?
AG: … Pardon me?
Student: After he died?
AG: Oh, this century.
Student: Oh.
AG: Or maybe 1880 or 1890. I think this century. In one of the colleges there’s a little Shelley chapel near where he lived, where he’s memorialized by an official statue and a formal vote of the entire faculty saying that it was a mistake, that Oxford had made a mistake in kicking Shelley out. – “Whom men love not – and yet regret.” – It’s absolutely accurate, that line. They themselves regretted, they said. So he’s prophetically correct, actually. He knew where he was at, to some extent.
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twelve-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately sixteen-and-three-quarter minutes in