Word: shelleys
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Edward Trelawny knew Shelley some six months, Byron two years, but he wrote (30 years later) the most colorful firsthand report of their strange doings-Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Last fortnight Margaret Armstrong (Fanny Kemble) reported the even stranger doings of Edward Trelawny, showed him to have been more Byronic than Byron...
...return to England was perfectly timed. Byron had written the early cantos of Childe Harold. Young ladies were dreaming of giaours, Manfreds, Mazeppas, with wild eyes, black mustaches, long cloaks, wicked pasts. In Lausanne one day Trelawny read Shelley's Queen Mab. He rushed to Pisa to meet the satanic author, was astonished at Shelley's "flushed, feminine and artless face," soon felt as romantic about Shelley as he had about De Ruyter...
Long-distance autopsies are risky. French Scholar Denis Saurat enraged the high-minded by "demonstrating" that blind John Milton (like deaf Ludwig van Beethoven) suffered from hereditary syphilis. Diagnostician Moorman finds Milton tuberculous. Other famous consumptives: Pope, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Descartes, Balzac, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Chekhov, Dostoevski, a brow-wrinkling list of other writers and thinkers. Doctors suspect that tuberculosis develops genius because 1) apprehension of death inspires a burning awareness of life's beauty, significance, transience, 2) the bacillus breeds restlessness and an intoxicated hypersensitiveness...
...Curtis Institute, Student Foss met Composers Samuel Barber (Music for a Scene from Shelley) and Gian-Carlo Menotti (Amelia Goes to the Ball). Each of these grownups, asked by King-Coit to write music for The Tempest, begged off, suggested Lukas Foss. He wrote the music in a month, based much of it (by request) on Sicilian folk tunes, turned in a remarkably workmanlike score. Archaic in mood, making deft use of a small orchestra, The Tempest reminded some listeners of Austria's late Gustav Mahler...
...candid, sensitive, objective-is Frances Winwar's Oscar Wilde and the Yellow 'Nineties. Readers may find something reminiscent of Wildean paradox in the fact that a woman wrote it. To readers of her previous biographies (Farewell the Banner: Coleridge and the Wordsworths; The Romantic Rebels: Byron, Shelley, Keats; Poor Splendid Wings: the Rossettis) it is also a reminder of Biographer Winwar's uncommon skill in portraying the pre-Wilde period. At its best, her book does for the decadent flowering of England's Nineties what Van Wyck Brooks did for the flowering of New England...