Mark Bennett wrote:
>
>
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> joanna
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> >The case to be proved is rather the opposite since the only genius
> aristocrat I can think of is Tolstoy
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> Joanna
> ___________________________________
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> Well, Nabokov started out as an aristocrat. Maybe it's a Russian thing
> . . .
>
Joanna doesn't appreciate John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who (considering his early death) wrote a quite astounding body of great poems. But in any case "aristocrat" (in the sense of titled nobility) is too narrow a category. Milton came from a _very_ substantial family. Byron doesn't count, but Shelley came from a substantial "gentleman's" background.
And George Herbert, though not titled himself, was of long established noble family. See
http://www.bartleby.com/217/0202.html
*****The famous Border family of the Herberts had furnished a long line of soldiers, courtiers, judges and men of affairs—an ancestry such as lord Herbert of Cherbury delighted to tell of with a pleasing vanity. The persuasion to a more peaceful calling reached George Herbert, not through his father’s line, but through his mother, Magdalen, daughter of Sir Richard Newport of High Ercall, Shropshire. Her husband died in 1596, leaving her with a family of seven sons and three daughters, “Job’s number and Job’s distribution as she herself would very often remember.”*****
Sir Phillip Sidney.
Wyatt.
Raleigh.
Surrey. He got the axe not so much for anything he did but because his ancestry was royal. He's usually granted credit for 'inventint' blank verse.
There were few poets before the 19th century that were not in one way or another 'hangers-on' of noble families.
Carrol