George Bowering and the Romantics

On my study wall I have a bunch of pictures, including, to my right, two big portraits of poets. There is Charles Olson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know, that is odd. Before the summer of 1863 I resisted the Romantics, except for Blake, because everyone I knew was reading Blake, and not just because Allen Ginsberg had mentioned him. Ezra Pound was not happy about the Romantics, nor the “sludge” that followed them, before the light of day provided by Hulme, etc. So of course I read Pound and the people Pound said we should read. My friends and I were reading Donna y Prega, or whatever and so on; but in the summer of 1963, during the big poetry bash in Vancouver, Allen Ginsberg, just back from Asia, recited Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, and later Adonais, and I was swept along. I had expected to follow Olson all over for those three or four weeks, but was surprised to find myself enjoying being in the orbit of Ginsberg. Then I went to Calgary and taught for three years, and then I went to London, Ontario, to be a graduate student, and took a course of the Romantics, and paid most attention to Shelley. And so the years went by, and most of the Romantics fanciers I knew were hot for Coleridge, but I persisted in reading Shelley, even reading ten Shelley biographies. Eventually I went to Italy and checked out houses Shelley had lived in, went to the Protestant graveyard in Rome, saw Keats’ grave and took a leaf to give to my Keats friend in Vancouver, saw the “grave” of Shelley, etc. Yes, I do allude to Keats, especially in my fourteen-page poem Do Sink, that explodes Keats’s “cease to be” sonnet. I have also written a miniaturized translation of Shelley’s Adonais, something called He Is Not.

from a 2005 interview with George Bowering on Art Recess 2