Word: shelleys
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...group, the 32 poets were remarkably hardy: ten lived to be over 70; only four died before 40. Of these four, Shelley was drowned and Marlowe killed in a tavern brawl, Keats died (at 26) of tuberculosis, and Byron of an unspecified disease (from his symptoms, diagnosticians now suspect typhoid or malaria...
Most famed neurotic of all was Shelley. A brooding hypochondriac (Nicolson says flatly: "All creative writers are hypochondriacs . . . all creative writers are nervous"), Shelley was long obsessed with the conviction that he had tuberculosis. Once, overcome by the thought that he had caught elephantiasis from a lady with thick legs, he fell on the floor and writhed with an imagined attack of the disease. On another occasion he had a hallucination that he had seen a baby rise from the sea and clap its hands at him. But Nicolson insists that Shelley was "on the whole" sane: "After all, even...
...Frank Dobie is a maverick and a Texan. He can quote Wordsworth or Shelley at length-but he is also a he-man who once ran a 250,000-acre ranch. At the University of Texas, where he has taught for 28 years, Dobie likes to be called Professor Pancho. His lecture preambles-"Now, I'll tell you a little story of Liver-Eating Johnson . . ."-have delighted thousands of students. He refused to move into the new skyscraperish university tower. "It looks like a toothpick in a pie," he said, and opened an office in the oldest building...
From 1812 to 1818, Peacock gyrated in the circles of vegetarians, astrologists, freethinkers and other cranks who trailed his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. Laughing uproariously at their disputes over how to reform the world, he got the notion of putting them into a novel. The result, Headlong Hall (1816), permanently settled the question of Peacock's proper pursuit...
...party where violently opinionated cranks, in an atmosphere of high spirits, alternate between chasing pretty girls and discussing everything, contradicting each other, and settling nothing-except that they make perfect butts for Peacock's gay, sometimes lethal, satire. Crotchet Castle and Nightmare Abbey, a goodnatured, witty caricature of Shelley as Scythrop dowry, the baffled lover, are probably the best of Peacock and least likely to bog the reader in temporary verbal swamps...