Bysshe, Bash, Bosh

 How much of what we read can we trust. I don't mean in the Age of QAnon where all abandon hope that enter there but in the relatively more considered area of literary biography. 

Following my briefest of surveys of the Romantic Poets recently I ordered Richard Holmes's biography, Shelley, the Pursuit. I wasn't expecting to be converted to Shelley who gives Byron and Blake stiff competition in a competitive field for being the most excessive but I had read that he was 'by all accounts the most lovable of human beings'. 

It is to both Shelley's and Holmes's credit that a biography of someone who didn't reach the age of 30 can be quite so gripping and detailed. He died at the same age as Marc Bolan almost to the day and maybe the two of them justify further comparison, but elsewhere. But, only 117 pages in to the scholarly 733 of the book, it's already difficult to see how he's going to become quite so 'lovable'.

His atheism, advocacy of 'rights' on social issues and anti-materialism all add up to him being way ahead of his time which is needless to say for many of us now but still woefully not clear to many others. One can't help but admire a certain sort of idealist even if Holmes also uses the word, 'libertarian', which has taken on more sinister overtones in recent decades.

On the other hand, while it is not to his father's credit that he disowned such a troublesome radical who got himself inevitably sent down from Oxford, it is neither quite within Percy's remit to be glad to be rid of such family ties and yet still expect to finance himself by claiming on their fortune. In that respect he most closely resembles Baudelaire who was probably a better poet but was forever dependent on handouts to pay for his indulgence in morbid gothic self-absorption and the paragon example among all those who have given poets a bad name ever since.

The comparison with Marc Bolan might lead to thinking of Shelley not in terms of T. Rex who turned out wonderfully well but other late 60's rock acts. The film of The Song Remains the Same might be a case in point but Led Zeppelin were at least a little bit any good.

The comparison depends on how it all seemed natural, and fashionable, at the time but was overblown, sold itself on the premise of a new age of liberation and high moral principle but, in hindsight if not then, was the most outrageous confidence trick because actually the work they produced was vacuous and no good at all.

Shelley's got 600 more pages in which Holmes might redeem him but I'm looking forward to it more in the expectation of outrageousness than I am of heroism. One thinks of poets now as being side-lined, involved in their own little cultural backwater and not being quite such 'colourful characters'. Not quite but even if they aren't, we could be grateful for that.