Word: shelley
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...SHELLEY: THE PURSUIT...
...month before his 30th birthday in 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sailing accident on the Mediterranean. Back in London, the Gentleman's Magazine harrumphed: "We ought as justly to regret the decease of the Devil." A far different post-mortem came from Lord Byron, who called Shelley "the best and the least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison...
Byron's view prevailed. By tearing out passages from diaries and journals and keeping the lid on their less savory memories, Shelley's intimates created a marzipan myth to be consumed in Victorian parlors. The poet, so the story went, was only nominally a seducer, de facto bigamist and flaming revolutionary. In reality he was, as Matthew Arnold wrote, "an ineffectual angel...
This first large life of Shelley since 1940 offers a "darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Richard Holmes, a British journalist, believes that if the writer was "essentially unstable," he was also the most premonitory radical theorist of his age. During a short life, Shelley either advocated or dabbled in vegetarianism, communal living, free love and the redistribution of wealth. Bisexuality as well as homosexuality intrigued him, and he championed women's rights. When war was still glamorized, he raged: "Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does...
...photograph the first floating Cabinet meeting on record. "That was longer than Gone With the Wind," remarked Actress Joanne Woodward following a film tribute to her and Husband Paul Newman in Manhattan last week. The program, which featured clips from 27 movies by Woodward and Newman, attracted Actresses Shelley Winters and Myrna Loy, Director Otto Preminger and some 2,800 well-heeled fans who contributed up to $250 apiece for seats at the Film Society of Lincoln Center benefit. "It's really a celebration of celluloid," quipped Newman, who sported a beard he had grown for his title role...