Allen Ginsberg on the English Romantic poets (“Nineteenth Century Poetry‘) his October 8 1981 Naropa class continues from here
Student: Where did all these poets get consumption, I wonder? It seems like all of the…
AG: I don’t know. Shelley was supposed to be very frail.
Student: ..writers..
AG: “Pale Shelley”. Well, it was more common in those days.
Student: Yeah.
AG: The only reason we don’t get it nowadays is they’ve got some kind of cure for it.
Student: So romantic.
AG: It was considered romantic at the time.
Student: Yeah. Hmm.
Peter Orlovsky: I guess also he did a lot of reading.
AG: Yeah, stayed inside.
Peter Orlovsky: Stayed inside, no sunshine.
AG: Stony towers.
Peter Orlovsky: Damp room.
Student: Maybe you’re putting the cart before the horse. They didn’t get consumption because they were poets, I mean.
Student: No.
Student: They became poets because of the sense…
AG: Yeah.
Student: … of death and all that, that might have brought their sensitivity out.
AG: He was dying of consumption. And Keats … had Keats died by then?
Student: Uh, no. Eighteen …
AG: This says 1818.
Student: … twenty.
AG: Keats died two years later? [Editorial note – Keats died, actually, in 1821]
Student: Twenty.
Student: Didn’t Byron die right in there, too?
AG: Later. Byron died after. [Editorial note – Byron died in 1824. So within three years Keats (1821), Shelley (1822) and Byron were dead.]
He does say “Some might lament that I were cold”. So he knows that somebody is going to be sorry. Somebody’s going to be sorry when he dies.
AG: Now you’ve got.. I was just in Rome and on the Spanish Steps where there’s a big fountain, there’s a house where Keats died where they have a giant library and memorial to Keats and Shelley and Byron and (Edward) Trelawny and all their friends. And there’s a room where Keats died of consumption overlooking the Spanish Steps. Now it’s like a big museum and many regret. And there’s a basic air of Romantic mournfulness about the place, because all these poets died young. All the good ones, the great ones- like Byron, Keats, Shelley – died young. And their sort of less-inspired friends lived on to write memoirs when they were ninety years old. Hogg, I guess, [(The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858)) and Trelawny (Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, in the same year, when he was sixty-six. He was to live on until he was eighty-nine..]
So that’s a depression. The exaltation a couple of years earlier, a year earlier – two years earlier – 1816.
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-six-and-a-half minute in and concluding at approximately twenty-eight-and-a-half minutes in