I am
preparing to depart with the McConnell Scholars Oxford Society for England in
only three days! I am most excited about
our upcoming visit to University and Merton Colleges during our stay at Oxford. Both places are filled with a rich history of
literary figures, some of whom have influenced my love poetry and creative writing.
Romantic poet Percy Shelley earned a reputation for his unconventionality long before he matriculated at University between 10 April 1810 and 25 March 1811.* At the age of twelve Shelley entered Eton College where he “rebelled against the ‘fagging’ system, which involved younger boys acting as servants for . . . older pupils.” Upon his entrance to Oxford, Shelley befriended Thomas Hogg with whom he bonded over the works of David Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Rousseau, and William Godwin. Shelley was an anti-royalist, vegetarian, and he was opposed to marriage (even though he later married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin).
However, the characteristic that most affected his brief tenure at Oxford was Shelley’s Atheism. Shelley anonymously printed a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism, which was discovered by University authorities only minutes after Slatter and Munday displayed copies in the window of their shop just across the High from Univ. College. Shelley and Hogg were both expelled after they refused to answer questions about the pamphlet. Shelley only revisited Oxford once after his expulsion. He died eleven years later after his boat overturned during a sudden story in Italy. Seventy years after Shelley’s death, University College accepted a life-sized marble statue of the poet. The statue had originally been planned for Shelley’s grave which was located in a Protestant cemetery in Rome (his ashes were buried next to the poet John Keats), but cemetery authorities had refused the “romanticized effigy of the naked poet as he was washed up on the shore.” University College fellows built a small shrine, and placed the statue in a “dingy corridor . . . behind a long featureless stretch of wall fronting the High.”
Merton College was the first “self-governing community of scholars administering its own properties under its own statutes.” T.S. Eliot (the favorite poet of Dr. Birzer who visited us twice this semester to discuss the life and works of Eliot) attended the college to write his thesis on the work of philosopher F.H. Bradley. Eliot was a member of the Coterie, an Oxford literary club where he gave his first reading of his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Poets Keith Douglas (a favorite among the scholars who discussed English poetry with Dr. Skinner this semester), Louis MacNeice, and Edmund Blunden also attended Merton. J.R.R. Tolkien was a Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton.
Romantic poet Percy Shelley earned a reputation for his unconventionality long before he matriculated at University between 10 April 1810 and 25 March 1811.* At the age of twelve Shelley entered Eton College where he “rebelled against the ‘fagging’ system, which involved younger boys acting as servants for . . . older pupils.” Upon his entrance to Oxford, Shelley befriended Thomas Hogg with whom he bonded over the works of David Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Rousseau, and William Godwin. Shelley was an anti-royalist, vegetarian, and he was opposed to marriage (even though he later married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin).
However, the characteristic that most affected his brief tenure at Oxford was Shelley’s Atheism. Shelley anonymously printed a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism, which was discovered by University authorities only minutes after Slatter and Munday displayed copies in the window of their shop just across the High from Univ. College. Shelley and Hogg were both expelled after they refused to answer questions about the pamphlet. Shelley only revisited Oxford once after his expulsion. He died eleven years later after his boat overturned during a sudden story in Italy. Seventy years after Shelley’s death, University College accepted a life-sized marble statue of the poet. The statue had originally been planned for Shelley’s grave which was located in a Protestant cemetery in Rome (his ashes were buried next to the poet John Keats), but cemetery authorities had refused the “romanticized effigy of the naked poet as he was washed up on the shore.” University College fellows built a small shrine, and placed the statue in a “dingy corridor . . . behind a long featureless stretch of wall fronting the High.”
Merton College was the first “self-governing community of scholars administering its own properties under its own statutes.” T.S. Eliot (the favorite poet of Dr. Birzer who visited us twice this semester to discuss the life and works of Eliot) attended the college to write his thesis on the work of philosopher F.H. Bradley. Eliot was a member of the Coterie, an Oxford literary club where he gave his first reading of his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Poets Keith Douglas (a favorite among the scholars who discussed English poetry with Dr. Skinner this semester), Louis MacNeice, and Edmund Blunden also attended Merton. J.R.R. Tolkien was a Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton.
*Source: "Oxford: A Cultural and Literary Companion" by David Horan