Dominic West has said Lord Byron is his favourite poet because he was a “top shagger” and said he was not concerned the rise of AI might snuff out poetry. The actor was taking part in a “poetry battle” at the Big Brue festival in Somerset, against rock star Bob Geldof, who said he preferred the Irish poet WB Yeats to the excesses of Byron. West said of Byron, who was one of the great Romantic poets: “Byron was shagging everything.
Byron was the proto-rock star. He was a top shagger.” He also said he was unconcerned that AI might stop humans from writing poetry, and added that today’s rappers are the new poets. Rappers are people writing amazing poetry every day.” Byron, famed for poems such as She Walks in Beauty and the unfinished epic Don Juan, went into self-enforced exile because of mounting financial debts, as well as rumours that he was sleeping with his half-sister, and accusations of homosexual behaviour which was illegal at the time.
West, who is best known for his roles in The Wire and The Affair, added: “There was all sorts of reasons for his exile and being cancelled, and so I, you know, but actually he’s a towering figure. I mean, Yeats is an incredible poet and a wonderful man; you wouldn’t possibly hesitate to call him a legend. You’d certainly hesitate to call him a man who enjoyed sex.” The actor then recited She Walks in Beauty, and said: “Byron wrote this one after an all-night party, as he was getting undressed, drunk, about a woman he’d just seen.” Geldof, former lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, acknowledged that his literary hero, Yeats, was not a “shagger”.
He said: “He only got shagged when he was, I think, 31 by Olivia Shakespear, and he was very practical about the whole thing. But it drove a vast energy into his poetry.” Yeats, the Irish poet who wrote such famed poems as The Second Coming, was one of the giants of 20th-century literature. He is known for his lyricism and his writing on Irish political struggles, including the 1916 Easter Rising, an armed rebellion by Irish Republicans against English rule.
Geldof said that Yeats is the greatest poet the world has ever seen, adding: “Yeats is to us [Irish people] what Shakespeare is to the English. A lot of which you know has gone out to the world and is constantly recited in newspaper headlines. He set up the first Irish National Theatre.
He revived the Irish language.”
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