Wednesday 28 March 2007

Marx on Byron and Shelley

Marx, who knew and understood poets just as well as philosophers and economists, used to say:

“The true difference between Byron and Shelley consists in this, that those who understand and love them consider it fortunate that Byron died in his thirty-sixth year, for he would have become a reactionary bourgeois had he lived longer; conversely, they regret Shelley’s death at the age of twenty-nine, because he was a revolutionary through and through and would consistently have stood with the vanguard of socialism.”

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