unusual taste for literature

I may be judged to have a rather odd taste of literature, but I must admit and declare that in my heart there is a firmly seated preference of prose over verse on basis of which preference I say that I prefer Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus to the entire verse canon of her husband and that of their friend Lord Byron who was a frequent visitor to their house to sip port, eat pork and the threesome would indulge in a conversation which it is a pity there wasn't a tape recorder and video camera to capture
After all, my intellectual and literary taste is bizarre, perverse and ideocyncratic. Who would adopt mentors such as The Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound and the Mitford sisters? Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Keats and Shakespeare are the stuff that mentors should be made of

Thersytes the infrastructural character in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida--more than Achilles, Helen, Hector, Cassandra, Andromache, Ulysses, Hecuba and even Troilus and Cressida--is one of my favourite character in the entire Shakespeare catalogue

I prefer modern drama written in prose to Elizabethan drama written in verse. For me the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, O'Neill, Synge, O'Casey, Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Beckett, Osborne, Edward Albee, Joe Orton and Harold Pinter, all written in plain prose are far better than the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Webster, Beauemont and Fletcher, all written in verse. Shaw's plays written in prose are far better than TS Eliot's plays written in verse. The poetry in Chekhov's prose is far better than the poetry in Ben Jonson's verse


My mentor these days is Jessica Mitford of the five Mitford sisters, each of whom was amazing, fascinating and wonderful in her own unique way. Jessica loved post and her letters are a treat, always rushing to the heart of the matter, be it an analysis of some intricate and inscrutable aspect of human nature or culinary details. "I shall never, never read anything else, " she said about Hitler's Mein Kampf. The Fascism of her sister Diana, wife of Oswald Mosley, founder and secretary-general of the British Fascist Party, was a personal pose as much as a political ideology. Unity, the younger sister, was a great fan of Hitler who invited her to a tea afternoon and that occasion was the most important thing to happen to her. The Mitford sisters, close relatives of Winston Churchill, all agreed that they loved Hitler and Winston equally