Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Romanticism is good in poetry but can be fatal in real life.  “The lot of the man who sees life truly and thinks about it romantically is Despair,” says Bernard Shaw [Preface to Caesar and Cleopatra ].  Some of the finest poets in the history of English literature met their end in the prime of their life.  Will Durant argued that they were killed by their romanticism.  Shaw wouldn’t have disagreed. Today’s Hindu newspaper reports that “Sixty years after death, Stalin (is) turning hero for Russians.”  Celebrating the 60 th anniversary of Stalin’s death, “a majority of Russians” expressed the view that “the Soviet dictator had played a positive role in Soviet history.”  The report goes on to say that “The number of people who called Stalin the most outstanding historical figure jumped from 12 per cent shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union to 36 per cent in 2008.”  And now 49% of Russians view Stalin as a great hero “even though they are aware of millions of innocent peop

I’m quite convinced that I am a Romantic.   The last of the Romantic poets (William Wordsworth) died in 1850.   He was the first of them, in fact.   Yet I call him the last simply because he lived longer than the others. Most of the Romantic poets died young.   P B Shelley lived 30 years.   John Keats died at the age of 26.   Byron managed to make it to 36.   I often wondered why they died so young.   One of the books of Will Durant told me a few years ago that the Romantics died young because they dreamed too big. Durant was not a literary critic.   Literary critics are not supposed to look at the biographies of writers; they are only supposed to analyse the written discourses.   Durant was a philosopher and so he was free to look at the biography (just as he would have been free to look at anything else).   He thought that the Romantics died young because the world they dreamt of could never be materialised. The Romantics tried to run away from the society, from the city, f