Американці, яких я вивчаю,надихалися практиками і теоріями старшого покоління англійських романтиків. Бітники надихалися Вітменом і Торо. А ось іще один пасаж - це з розмови David'а Creighton'а з Керолайн Кесседі (дружиною Ніла) на таку цікаву тему, як секс, із книги Ecstasy of the Beats: On the Road to Understanding:
On another visit, I ask whether the Beats might be comparable to England's Romantic poets - the drug-addicted Burroughs to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jack the self-documenting William Wordsworth, Allen as Percy Shalley (though also emulating William Blake), Neal as Lord Byron, Carolyn as that womanizer's respectable wife - and all espousing "The Language really used by men" as championed in Lyrical Ballads. Does that make sense?
I get an unqualified yes: "The Romantics were typical Beats, all rebels against convention and despised by the social order". To be a writer, and "naughty", made up the essentials. "Shelley offered Mary to his friend, and in San Francisco it was similar".So there we have it.
The Beats looked to the future but also to the literary past. (...)
We look at a BBC videotape about the English Romantics, Pandaemonium, in which the Coleridge character is dynamically played by Linus Roache - in Carolyn's view, a perfect actor to represent Neal. It's the facial mobility she likes, as shown also by Lawrence Olivier and very few others (...)
Carolyn became absorbed by the women's interconnecting tales, from a family standpoint: "They were always breeding, Byron's half-sister, Augusta, ending up with six kids.Byron picks up a child and says, 'What a likeness!' That is, his own - and in front of everyone". The Byron-Shelley story vis-a-vis that of the radical Beats, she avers, as "just as bad if not worse".
Romantic poets tend to die young,and both Neal and Jack left this earth in their forties. Ahead were the documentaries and biographies giving so many stereotypes, distortions, lies. "Our little private togetherness", Carolyn reflects. "The most personal, intimate time of my life - now it's an industr and I hate it". An industry run largely by academics who are comfortably off, unlike this discerning woman happy for any gigs that come alone.
(...) And both speculated freely regarding out-of-space existence, Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" evoking some perfect place visited by human souls before entrapment in mere flesh, as conceived by Plato (...)
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home...
For Wordsworth there are glimpses of that perfect place, memories, possible within ordinary life. we then go beyond humdrum into ecstasy - ekstasis in Greek, meaning to stand outside our usual sense to sense the great beyond.Our true home is thus spiritual. Here's the "Oversoul" avowed also by that pillar of American Romanticism, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
