The Poet 215
the saint are often beyond Eros— for the warrior it is a secondary
matter. Perhaps, for what ever reason, the erotic faith inevitably
dwindles. Maybe it is simply a matter of age— young poets can write
the Romantic poetry of their moment because they genuinely feel
what it is to be possessed by the desire to complete being in the Soul-
mate. As desire dwindles, the passion for self- creation through
love may dwindle in its intensity as well.
Shelley and Keats, the archetypal Romantics, died before they
could wither entirely into erotic detachment. But in Shelley’s last
substantial eff ort, “The Triumph of Life,” there is evidence of a
souring— though who knows where the poem might have gone had
Shelley lived to fi nish it? Whitman and Words worth (who is some-
thing of a post- Romantic even at his height), end their careers with
de cade upon de cade of stale verse. Whitman goes on palely imi-
tating the astonishing work of 1855 to 1865, sometimes moving
into unconscious self- parody. Words worth is worse: he becomes a
guardian of the established order, in time writing a sequence of son-
nets in praise of capital punishment. In Blake’s terms, he goes over
to Urizen and he stays there. George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose
relation to the Romantic is complexly ambivalent, travels to Greece
to martyr himself in the Greek war for in de pen dence against the
Turks. Byron hates and fears old age, which sets in for him, by his
account, at around thirty- six years.
Hart Crane dies young— apparently a suicide. Though he never
surrenders the Romantic quest, he cannot quite sustain it, either.
After the amazing achievement of Howl, Ginsberg’s poetry becomes
fl atter and more programmatic, though not without its fl ashing mo-
ments. His Buddhist mentor, Trungpa Rinpoche, persuades him
that his fi rst poetic thought is inevitably his best thought, a precept
that does not always serve Ginsberg well. Despite his lifelong ad-
herence to Blake and Whitman, one would be hard pressed to say
that Ginsberg completes the Romantic quest, burning fully through