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Percy Bysshe Shelley. Masters of Poetry - Percy Shelley
Remarks on Shelley
I. His career
II. His acquaintances
III. His Italian letters
Percy Bysshe Shelley
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
Prefaces by Mary Shelley3. TO FIRST COLLECTED EDITION, 1839
POSTSCRIPT IN SECOND EDITION OF 1839
TO THE VOLUME OF POSTHUMOUS POEMS PUBLISHED IN 1824
Selected poetic works. Ozymandias
Music, when soft voices die
Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples
Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
To a Skylark
Mutability ("The flower that smiles to-day")
Ode to the West Wind
The Mask of Anarchy
To the Moon
Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats
The Cloud
England in 1819
The Question
The Indian Serenade
The cold earth slept below
On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery
War
Love’s Philosophy
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
A Roman's Chamber
Autumn: A Dirge
From the Arabic: An Imitation
Hymn of Apollo
One Word is Too Often Profaned
Prose Works. The Necessity of Atheism. There Is No God
On Life
On A Future State
On "Frankenstein"
On the Devil, and Devils
A Defence of Poetry
Letters. To Thomas Love Peacock
To William Godwin
To Mary Shelley
Notas
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
By George Edward Woodberry1
The natural charm by which Shelley fascinated his familiar friends lives after him, and has gathered about him for his defense a group of men whose affection for him seems no whit lessened because they never knew him face to face. The one common characteristic prominent in all who have written of him with sympathy, however meagre or valuable their individual contributions of praise, criticism, or information, is this sentiment of direct, intimate, intense personal loyalty which he has inspired in them to a degree rare, if not unparalleled, in literary annals. Under the impulse of this strong love, they have championed his cause, until his fame, overshadowed in his own generation by the vigorous worldliness of Byron, and slightly esteemed by nearly all of his craft, has grown world-wide. With the enthusiasts, however, who have aided in bringing about this result, admiration for Shelley's work is a secondary thing; its virtue is blended with and transfused into the nature of Shelley himself, who is the centre of their worship. To reveal the fineness and lustre of his character, his essential worth throughout that romantic and darkened career of thirty years, is their chief pleasure, and in this, too, they have now won some success, and have partially reversed the popular estimate of the poet as merely an immoral atheist; yet, although some amends have been made for harsh contemporary criticism, Shelley's name is still for orthodoxy a shibboleth of pious terror and of insult to God. It is still too early to decide whether the modification of the harsh criticism once almost universally bestowed upon Shelley will go on permanently, or whether it is not in some measure due to peculiar results of culture in our own time. Without attempting to prejudge this question, especially in regard to poetic fame, there seems to be, as the cause passes out of the hands of those who knew Shelley personally into the guardianship of the new generation, a tendency toward greater unity of judgment in regard to the larger phases of his character and conduct.
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The prose work of Shelley has remained in the obscurity which it once shared with his poetry. The formal essays, which concern the transitory affairs of the world or themes of thought remote through their generality, are valued, even by admirers of Shelley, mainly as media of his spirit; the familiar letters, scattered in old books, or collected only in a costly edition, and deprived of literary effectiveness because those of high and enduring interest have never been selected and massed until recently, have escaped any wide public attention; even the translations have been neglected. All this really large body of prose, however exalted by its informing enthusiasm, however exquisite in language, and melodious, lies outside the open pathways of literature. It is this fact which gave the element of surprise to what Mr. Arnold called his doubt "whether Shelley's delightful Essays and Letters, which deserve to be far more read than they are now, will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and finally come to stand higher, than his poetry,"—a judgment which well deserved Dr. Garnett's quiet rejoinder that "this deliverance will be weighed by those to whose lot it may fall to determine Mr. Arnold's own place as a critic." Dr. Garnett adds that, in an age when all letters approximate to the ideal set by men of business, Shelley's alone, among those of his time, rank with Gray's, Pope's, Cowper's, or Walpole's in possessing a certain classical impress similar to that of deliberate artistic work; and, secondly, that they exhibit the mind of the poet as clearly as Marlborough's do the mind of the general, or Macaulay's the mind of the man of letters. Their two prime qualities are beauty of form and transparency.
The sense of form has usually been denied to Shelley, and if by it is meant the purely critical impulse to remodel, revise, and polish for the sake of that finish which the schools prize, Shelley neither possessed it nor sought for it with any strong desire, but rather rejected it as dangerously submitting the mind to system, against which he was prejudiced. But if by the sense of form is meant the instinct for proportion, for regulated combination, for natural development of sensation into idea, idea into passion, so that the poem issues in a single harmony in the mind and heart; if, in other words, by that loose phrase is meant, not the corrective power of the critical, but the shaping power of the creative faculty working out ideal beauty directly, then both in his brief and in much of his longer poems Shelley was singularly distinguished by it. This spontaneous beauty of form, if we may so phrase it, is the only species that is found in these letters: fitness of words, sweetness of cadence, modulation of feeling in immediate response to thought and image, all conspiring to make up perfection of utterance, are continually present, but not through erasure and elaboration. Shelley's self-training in literature, almost unrivaled as an apprenticeship in its length and continuity, more comprehensive, profound, and ardent than Pope's, more vital than Milton's, had made such literary lucidity and grace the habit of his pen, and he was fortunate in employing his gift upon subjects intrinsically most interesting to cultivated men: upon the art and landscape of Italy, or his own always high human relations, or his poetic moods.
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