I am a romantic at heart. Of the dark variety.

Simeon Solomon

I recently purchased The Romantic Image[1] by Frank Kermode. It mentions Simeon Solomon as the garret-living bohemian/starving artist/einzelganger.

I quote:

“…a Simeon Solomon type, garret-dwelling, ragged, pitiable but also odious…”

I research Simeon Solomon and find W. H. Auden‘s For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, which has the scene, “The Meditation of Simeon,” which begins:

“As long as there were any roads to amnesia and anaesthesia still to be explored, any rare wine or curiosity of cuisine as yet untested, any erotic variation as yet unimagined or unrealized, any method of torture as yet undevised, any style of conspicuous waste as yet unindulged, any eccentricity of mania or disease as yet unrepresented, there was still hope that man had not been poisoned but transformed….”

What Auden describes is jadedness, the primary malady of all romantics.