Galignani's Messenger, an English newspaper to the Tories. published in Paris. 8. A light carriage for two persons sitting face to
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740 / GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
horse?and commission for the Midland Counties and by the holies!?You shall have your account in decimals.?Love to Hobby?but why leave the Whigs?
To Percy Bysshe Shelley
[KEATS AND SHELLEY]
Ravenna, April 26th, 1821
The child continues doing well, and the accounts are regular and favourable. It is gratifying to me that you and Mrs. Shelley do not disapprove of the step which I have taken, which is merely temporary.'
I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats2?is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he would probably have not been very happy. I read the review of 'Endymion' in the Quarterly. It was severe,?but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.
I recollect the effect on me of the Edinburgh on my first poem;3 it was rage, and resistance, and redress?but not despondency nor despair. I grant that those are not amiable feelings; but, in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena.
'Expect not life from pain nor danger free, Nor deem the doom of man reversed for thee.'4
You know my opinion of that second-hand school of poetry. You also know my high opinion of your own poetry,?because it is of no school. I read Cenci?but, besides that I think the subject essentially un dramatic, I am not an admirer of our old dramatists as models. I deny that the English have hitherto had a drama at all. Your Cenci, however, was a work of power, and poetry. As to my drama,5 pray revenge yourself upon it, by being as free as I have been with yours.
I have not yet got your Prometheus, which I long to see. I have heard nothing of mine, and do not know that it is yet published. I have published a pamphlet on the Pope controversy, which you will not like. Had I known that Keats was dead?or that he was alive and so sensitive?I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his attack upon Pope,6 and my disapprobation of his own style of writing.
1. Byron had recently placed his four-year-old major satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers daughter, Allegra, in a convent school near (1809). Ravenna, against the wishes of her mother, Mary 4. Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, lines Shelley's stepsister Claire Clairmont. 155?56 (Byron is quoting from memory). 2. In a letter to Byron, April 17, 1821: 'Young 5. Marino Faliero, published in London on April Keats, whose 'Hyperion' showed so great a prom-21, 1821. Shelley's The Cenci and Prometheus ise, died lately at Rome from the consequences of Unbonnd (next paragraph) were written in 1819 breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at and published in 1820.
the contemptuous attack on his book in the Quar-6. Keats attacked Augustan poetry (but not nec
terly Review' (see Shelley's Adonais, p. 822). essarily Pope) in 'Sleep and Poetry,' lines 181?
3. The review of Byron's Hours of Idleness in the 206. Byron's pamphlet, Letter to ********[John Edinburgh Revieiv prompted him to write his first Murray], on the Rev. W. L. Bowles' Strictures on
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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY / 74 1
You want me to undertake a great Poem?I have not the inclination nor the
power. As I grow older, the indifference?not to life, for we love it by instinct?
but to the stimuli of life, increases. Besides, this late failure of the Italians7
has latterly disappointed me for many reasons,?some public, some personal.
My respects to Mrs. S.
Yours ever, B
P.S.?Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer? Could not you take a run alone?
the Life and Writings of Pope, had just appeared in be snuffed out by an Article.' London. His best-known comment on Keats, writ-7. A planned uprising by the Carbonari, a secret
ten a year and a half later, is canto 11, stanza 60 revolutionary society into which Byron had been in Don Juan, beginning 'John Keats, who was initiated by the father and brother of his mistress
killed off by one critique' and ending ' Tis strange Teresa Guiccioli, failed in Feb. 1821.
the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1792-1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley, radical in every aspect of his life and thought, emerged from a solidly conservative background. His ancestors had been Sussex aristocrats since early in the seventeenth century; his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, made himself the richest man in Horsham, Sussex; his father, Timothy Shelley, was a hardheaded and conventional member of Parliament. Percy Shelley was in line for a baronetcy and, as befitted his station, was sent to be educated at Eton and Oxford. As a youth he was slight of build, eccentric in manner, and unskilled in sports or fighting and, as a consequence, was mercilessly bullied by older and stronger boys. He later said that he saw the petty tyranny of schoolmasters and schoolmates as representative of man's general inhumanity to man, and dedicated his life to a war against injustice and oppression. As he described the experience in the Dedication to Laon and Cythna:
