For me there are three possibilities, and I can't decide.
Mostly I'd like to be Shelley. With some differences. I'd try to juggle my emotional attachments more capably, hopefully more responsibly. I'd urge the workers of England and Ireland to bloody revolution, not nonviolent resistance. And I wouldn't go sailing in a damn storm - at least not until I'd finished "The Triumph of Life."
It would be neat to be a straight Hart Crane.
Third: Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky. He had the kind of look I'd like to have - ultra-tough. I like the idea of broadcasting revolutionary odes over the radio, and having my words painted on trains to electrify the peasants. But again, some differences. When Stalin and his lackeys started crowding me, I wouldn't shoot myself (though his last poem was so great it was almost worth it); I'd tell them to liquidate themselves, go into emigration, find an unmarried girlfriend, maybe hang out with Trotsky, maybe take the icepick for him or maybe live long enough to find myself in a complete political vacuum.
I wouldn't be John Ashbery. The most John Ashbery has ever been able to do for me - except maybe for "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" - is to amuse me briefly. Like being stoned. A kind of brilliant, ultimately tedious noodling, not music.
And I wouldn't be Wallace Stevens, because then I wouldn't be able to admire him from afar. Imagine BEING that poor lonely closed-off insurance executive, living in one wing of his mansion while his wife lived in another, admiring Mussolini for God's sake and never traveling .... Though I would like to have his money.
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