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

[andie nachgeborenen]

Byron's ridiculously good looks have made it hard to take him seriously as a poet. You can be too pretty. Besides, there is the jealousy factor. He fucked practically every good lucking woman of note (upper class), regardless of marital status, and as many attractive lower class woman as he could get his hands on (if you looked that good it wasn't hard) from England to Greece, it's amazing he had time to write anything. 

In the Keats museum in Rome there is a letter in which he expresses his horror and shock at his wife's expectation that he _sleep_ with her, stay in the same bed all night after sex. I am not making this up.  

As a poet he's better than his rep but definitely a notch below Blake, Wordsworth (young), or Shelley -- who was also handsome and whose own love life, though far less casual and promiscuous than Byron's, was tangled and intense. He wrote some of the most intensely erotic poems in English to his lover. Mary Shelley dutifully reprinted them in her edition of his collected works, although the situation did not make her happy. She _might_ have destroyed them. An honorable woman.

--- On Thu, 1/15/09, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:


> From: Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The reds buy Shelley (Was Re: How Politics Ruined My Life:
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, January 15, 2009, 12:18 PM
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Doug Henwood
> <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Jan 15, 2009, at 12:03 PM, Eric Beck wrote:
> >
> >> Indeed. I always thought Byron was a shallow fop
> until I read Don
> >> Juan. Incredible. How come no one seems to take
> him seriously?
> >
> > Because he was funny and sexy?
> 
> That sounds right to me.
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