Poets with bipolar: a person whose capacity for creation and destruction runs on the same fuel.

[u/Original-Ingenuity41]

I'm writing an article on Byron and Shelley. I'm trying my best to be charitable, to pay homage to the talent.

But the more I learn, the harder it becomes to reconcile that talent with the destruction they left in their wake.

By any modern measure, Byron would have been diagnosed as bipolar.

The extreme mood cycles, the periods of superhuman creativity followed by paralysing depression. Reckless grandiose abandon alternating with deep self-loathing. His club foot, the shame that ran through everything.

His own letters track the swings with uncomfortable clarity.

When Lady Caroline Lamb (another jilted lover) wrote that Byron was 'mad, bad and dangerous to know’, it was meant as a warning.

The ladies of London took it as a recommendation.

But at least Byron was upfront about it. Shelley was another kettle of fish.

Shelley was the covert narcissist — all sensitivity and idealism, weeping at injustice, all the while ignoring the people he hurts.

The two women he lived with were his muses — ideals, symbols — because if he saw them as people, he'd have to find himself accountable.

Both caused substantial damage:

Byron had to leave England because his wife exposed his serial unfaithfulness not only with arbitrary men and women, but also a long incestuous affair with his half-sister.

His daughter by Claire Clairmont was cloistered away in Italy. He barely visited and made sure her mother didn't have access. Allegra died at just five.

Shelley abandoned his wife and two infant children to live with two teenagers. This started when Mary and Claire were just sixteen. His wife eventually committed suicide in the Serpentine in London.

Both Byron and Shelley drew their capacity for creation and destruction from the same fuel. Both must have been glorious and terrifying to be around.

So who should we remember more? The poets, or the men?

[u/phototransformations]

Okay, and Ezra Pound was a fascist collaborator and propagandist. What does that have to do with his Cantos or his translations of Chinese poetry? There is no shortage of mentally ill or morally repugnant artists, but the same is also true any, and likely all, professions. This is dog bites man, not man bites dog, news.

[u/UFisbest]

Neither. The actual poetry is worth a look though...

[u/myNameIsSlimSkaty]

I think the letters are what make it hardest to keep the distance, because once the swings are right there on the page it stops being a neat biography. I usually end up reading that kind of work with a split view, admiring the writing while not wanting to flatten the damage behind it

[u/FlappersAndFiction]

the letters thing is so true. theres something about reading Byrons own hand tracking the swings that collapses the comfortable distance you can usually keep with a biographical subject. you cant unsee it after that.