[lbo-talk] The reds buy Shelley (Was Re: How Politics Ruined My Life:

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Wed Jan 14 18:42:17 PST 2009


I'm with you on Shelley:

Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number Shake to earth the chains like dew That in sleep have fallen on you Ye are many, they are few

--The Masque of Amarchy

I paraphrase from memory, but I think it is pretty close. Still gives me chills. Beats Mike Gold into a tin can.

You can add Blake and the young Wordsworth to that set. Byron, if you can stomach him. Go back, Milton too, if you believe Blake and Christopher Hill. (He was a revolutionary, whatever else he was!)

Visited Keats' last room in Rome overlooking the Spanish Steps, now a museum, lots of books, manuscripts, memorabilia, of all those guys. bought a Shelley magnet. The young woman at the entrance said, it's interesting to see who buys which of these. I said, Oh, you mean the reds buy Shelley. She said, Precisely.

Picasso -- well I've defended the CP against a lot of charges, and I certainly won't deny Picasso's greatness, especially through, say, the 20s. But his later art was self-parody and his politics were kneejerk Stalinist. No Shelley he!

--- On Wed, 1/14/09, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:


> From: Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Politics Ruined My Life: Was Fuck Hope
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Cc: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 7:09 PM
> On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:18:48 -0800 (PST) andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> writes:
> > Wasn't the question _quality_, not influence.
> >
> > Pound, Eliot, Yeats, fascists or reactionaries, all
> great poets.
> > Philip Larkin, right wing racist jerk, same. Kipling,
> great
> > storyteller. Balzac, great novelist. One of Marx's
> unfinished
> > projects was a literary study of Balzac. Conrad
> (monarchist
> > reactionary, Carlist gunrunner), great master of the
> English
> > language. Celine (Nazi collaborator), great writer.
> Daughter watched
> > Birth of a Nation with me, fascinated horror. She
> said, I know I
> > could never admit this outside the house, but this is
> one of the
> > greatest movies I've ever seen. Riefenstahl, pure
> Nazi propaganda
> > and high cinematic art. Etc. And one can add:
> Heidegger, Nazi, great
> > philosopher; Schmitt, Nazi ideologue, great political
> thinker.
> >
> > On the flip side there are mountain ranges full of of
> PC dreck. I
> > will take one page of Balzac or Conrad tforeverything
> that Mike Gold
> > every wrote, and he wasn't the worst by far.
> >
> >
>
> I would agree with all that. There are certainly writers
> and
> artists whose work I admire, even though I may find their
> political views to be pretty dodgy. On the other hand,
> there certainly
> have been great artists who had also had decent politics,
> or
> at least their politics were not quite so objectionable as
> those
> of Pound, Eliot, or Yeats. Shelley was not a half-bad
> poet,
> and his politics were quite progressive. G.B. Shaw wrote
> some pretty good plays, and Pablo Picasso could really
> do something with paint.
>
> There is certainly no law that says good artists must
> also have good progressive politics, and goddess
> knows there are plenty of untalented people
> with good political views, but sometimes you
> do get people who combine great artistic talent
> with a strong progressive politics.
>
>
> >
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