Tuesday 22 March 2011

The Passionate Poet


This is Byron writing about his life of intense and never-ending poetic passion:

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

By this rationale, we should be able to recognise the most passionate of persons by their state of disrepair. And, while we're quoting Byron, here he is describing John Keats:

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - he is always frigging his imagination. - I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam of vision produced by raw pork and opium. 

I've just worked out what I'm having for lunch.

Bring on the bacon!

2 comments:

  1. Byron did a fair amount of frigging himself, mental or otherwise.

    Hello, by the way. I'm new and enjoying your blog.

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  2. Bahahahaha seconds before I read this I posted a status update that included the phrase "mental masturbation".

    Needless to say its uncommon to hear once a day let alone twice in the space two minutes.

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