Word: shelley
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...American romantics of the '60s shared with their forerunners a vision of profound, if unspecific change that would regenerate mankind. In urging the abolition of the common law in England and the repudiation of the national debt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, according to Historian Crane Brinton, "saw nothing between himself and his dream." A poetic-minded radical of the '60s, Carl Oglesby, described the comparable Utopian stance of today's revolutionary: "Perhaps he has no choice and he is pure fatality: perhaps there is no fatality and he is pure will. His position may be invincible, absurd, both...
...example, "may make you lose sight of concrete goals,") came unpleasantly close. Its forecast, though not immediately verifiable, seemed plausible. I could rationalize it all away, but I don't. Astrology used to be a medieval relic, a creation of the imagination comparable to the visions of Blake, Shelley, and Yeats. In its own, non-scientific, metaphorical way, it was beautiful and intriguing. Today, packaged and chrome-plated, gushed'over by teenyboppers and prattled about in dimestore books, astrology has become a chapter heading in volumes on the new "Youth Culture," an inspiration for composers of "tribal rock musicals...
...Buckley ("The youth of America are overwhelmingly on the side of heroism") and Adam Walinsky ("Those facts are as fanciful as your casualty figures"). The studio audience was also rung into the fray-a frequently effective device of the Frost show. Most impassioned of the unscheduled guests was Actress Shelley Winters, who chimed in four times from the front row and once, on the verge of tears, implored the panel: "No matter what facts you gentlemen muster, you have to know that millions of boys and girls tonight, all over the country, are saying, they made a goddamned mess...
...does not accept it gladly, and the later stars in the Caxton Constellation (an English group in Gutenberg's inky way) do much to disprove his own thesis. Paradoxically, too, so will his book itself, at least temporarily, if it achieves the wide attention it deserves. "Chatter about Shelley" may be contemptible, but Shelley's chatter was often more important than most men's theses. Even lately George Orwell's essays and memoirs have achieved an influence likely to persist beyond 1984. Letters and men of letters are declining, but they are not yet entirely fallen...
...English [studies]." sniffed one history don, "chatter about Shelley." George Saintsbury, who died in 1933, is an early example of the disease of scholarship. "A journalist transformed in middle age into the most venerable of professors," he became for generations of students the "supreme exponent of English lit." He was also the classic exemplar of the winetaster theory of literature. Saintsbury, indeed, wrote with equal learning and authority on poetry and port but, alas, as if they were the same sort of thing. Pundits who teach poetry as a matter of the palate-or of professional gain-naturally detest...