Happy Birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley

I owe my half-humorous-yet-utterly-sincere fondness for the romantic era to a book my mom used to read to us, which had a sample poem by each poet it collected and a portrait to go with it. Percy Bysshe Shelley appeared with a little biography near his buddies Keats, Cooleridge and Byron. I never forgot that he was the one who died by drowning. It seemed hauntingly appropriate--his hair, in the portrait, floated as if he had fallen in the water, and, besides, his name sounded like a fancy seafood.

So when I heard that it was his birthday I felt the need to dredge up a few links:

Ozymandias, the poem from my childhood book. It's short, sweet and incredibly timed, and I used to recite it to myself walking around by the fountains in the walled garden at Old Westbury, as goofy as that sounds.

Mark Twain's brilliant and comprehensive In Defense of Harriet Shelley shows why we shouldn't trust idealistic biographers so easily, especially when they lay blame without proof. Twain wouldn't have called himself an idealist--he was a gritty, imperfect pessimist who mocked on principle--but he came down heavily on the side of the innocent and defenseless, and his righteous anger, combined with his wit, was a terrible thing to arouse.

And on a lighter note, Ogden Nash's poem You and Me and P.B. Shelley, though I wish it were set up on a nicer website. I first read it in a book illustrated by Quentin Blake, and it was full of hilarious illustrations of the events described--including one of a pop-eyed P.B., floating hair and all.