Or perhaps more appropriately, since I'll be talking about the 19th Century: Free Love, Absinthe, and Poetry.
It seems there has long been a connection, in Western Civilization at any rate, between avant-garde art, social deviance, and progressive/liberal/radical politics. Think of Lord Byron (1788-1824) who wrote lots of poetry, had a very...umm..."interesting" sex life, and went off to fight for Greek independence. That revolutionary act cost him his life, albeit from disease rather than a bullet--although I think that until the 20th century most soldiers died of diseases rather than military action. He was famously described as "mad, bad and dangerous to know"--but then poets and painters generally had rather scandalous reputations.
As late as the 1950s the connection persisted, with the Beatniks famously partaking of drugs and drink, writing and reciting poetry, and voicing their perception of the hopelessly stifling middle-class world of America. As Allen Ginsberg declaimed:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix...
By the sixties poetry had been eclipsed by music, and the only poetry most of the bohemian artistic types, now called hippies, were really interested in was that of singer/songwriters such as Bob Dylan. There are still a few poets here and there who aren't also musicians, and a bit of poetry gets published, but almost none gets talked about in the wider world. Indeed, Ginsberg may have been the last of the outrageous, and famous, avant-garde poets.
All my life I have memorized poems, the first poem I committed to memory was from Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book"--I was about 7 or so. I went right on memorizing poems, decade after decade, and then recently I realized that I had started to forget poems. It seemed to me that the oldest poems were still firmly in my memory, but those I had acquired in the last few years were vanishing. Furthermore, attempting to memorize a new poem appeared to take a lot more effort, and the results were more tenuous and ephemeral. The obvious explanation is that a brain that is very near 70, and very far from 7, just doesn't work that well. However it occurred to me that I also spent less time reading poetry than used to be the case, so I resolved to remedy that, and put a copy of the complete poems of A. E. Housman on my night stand. I started reading a few pages most nights before going to sleep.
I marked all of those I liked and all that I had previously known "by heart" (lovely phrase, that). I discovered several poems I had not been familiar with that I added to my liked list, and committed one new poem to memory (and finally found out what "lief" actually means):
Could man be drunk for ever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down at nights.
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.
One interesting thing about Housman is that one would not immediately put him in the "poet" class, as described above, but rather in the quite different "scholar" class. He would seem to be a rather stuffy academic sort, both in appearance and in terms of how he spent his life. He was a renowned classical scholar, who ended his career as a professor at Cambridge. His magnum opus was a five volume annotated edition of the "Astronomicon" of Marcus Manilius (don't worry if that doesn't ring any bells for you, it doesn't for me either, and I actually studied a bit of the science of Classical Antiquity in graduate school).
The British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote a play in 1997 all about A. E. Housman, called "The Invention of Love"--it opens with Housman meeting Charon at the river Styx. Charon tells him they can't get started yet, because there are supposed to be two passengers, a poet and a scholar, to which Housman replies:
AEH--I think that must be me.
Charon--Both of them?
AEH--I'm afraid so.
To see just where and why Housman strays from staid academic to radical poet I think this late poem of his provides a clue:
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
Consider this as well: A. E. Housman and Oscar Wilde were both British and nearly contemporaneous, Housman was born in 1859 and Wilde in 1854. In 1895 Wilde was in the midst of his legal troubles over his homosexuality, while Housman was busy getting his poetry collection "A Shropshire Lad" published. Housman never married. Unlike Wilde he was the soul of discretion in his public actions, perhaps this was made easier as the great love of his life was strictly heterosexual and told him so. They parted company early on, apparently rather coldly, but Housman remained devotedly in love the rest of his life.
In his requiem poem for Yeats, W. H. Auden wrote "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry." In the case of Housman I believe unrequited love and social strictures condemning such love hurt him into poetry. He once compared his poems to the process by which an oyster makes a pearl, which is created to protect the creature from an irritation that has gotten inside its shell.
I think Housman should have the last word, so here is the first poem of his that I committed to memory, back when sexual politics involved some stirrings of modern feminism but no hint of equal rights for gays.
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.