Feb. 18th, 2005

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Revelation of the day: The Wanderings of Oisin (Oo-sheen), my favorite Yeats poem, is spirit brother to that bizarre, disturbing, psychedelic '70s cartoon made by some Yale students to illustrate Erik Erikson's life stages.

Though I can't tell if the Fenians are the Romantics or the Rhymers Club.
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I'm on to Tennyson's Holy Grail, and speaking of Romantics they seem to be represented as knights here. Galahad is clearly Keats:

"God made thee good as thou art beautiful,"
[...Beauty is truth, truth beauty...]
Said Arthur, when he dubb'd him knight; and none,
In so young youth, was ever made a knight
Till Galahad...

Tristram is maybe Byron. Arthur is Wordsworth if he isn't Milton or Hallam. Or perhaps Wordsworth is Lancelot, as Lancelot is dealt with harshly in the Idylls of the King, though I don't remember Tennyson elsewhere echoing Shelley, Browning et al. in their apostasy charges. And Percivale himself...well, clearly he's Tennyson, at least in part. And yet the name (minus the -e ostensibly added to harden a syllable too weak to end a line with)...and the clear echoes of Alastor and The Triumph of Life... And what quester has ever been as driven and unlucky as Percy Shelley?

The film Velvet Goldmine also weirdly parallels the Romantic family dynamic. The Fairy guy is Blake, sticking to his art, serenely surviving the brief flare-up of kindred spirits, the Bowie guy is Jesus/Judas Wordsworth, Ewan is a Shelley or Keats keeping the faith in a dark attic on the Continent, the journalist is a Browning writing The Lost Leader and Memorabilia, and like Browning presumably someone who will keep the feather but never quite dare to fly. Wonder if Haynes glanced at The Visionary Company. Presumably not.

I need to cut it out. This is as bad as numerology.

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