Keatsiana

"THE BEST OF MYLES" EXTRACT 5: KEATSIANA
from Myles na gCopaleen's 'Cruiskeen Lawn' column in the Irish Times (Introduction)

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      Chapman once became immersed in the study of dialectical materialism, particularly insofar as economic and social planning could be demonstrated to condition eugenics, birth-rates and anthropology. His wrangles with Keats lasted far into the night. He was particularly obsessed by the fact that in the animal kingdom, where there was no self-evident plan of ordered Society and where connubial relations were casual and polygamous, the breed prospered and disease remained of modest dimensions. Where there was any attempt at the imposition from without - and he instanced the scientific breeeding of race-horses by humans - the breed prospered even more remarkably. He was not slow to point out that philosophers of the school of Marx and Engels had ignored the apparent necessity for ordered breeding on the part of humans as a concomitant to planning in the social and economic spheres. Was this, he once asked Keats, to be taken as evidence of superior reproductive selection on the part of, say, horses - or was it to be taken that a man of the stamp of Engels deliberately shirked an issue too imponderable for rationative evaluation?
      The poet found this sort of thing boring, and frowned.
      'Foals rush in where Engels feared to tread,' he said morosely.

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Flann will return on Monday.