Word: blunden
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...Blunden defends Shelley's first efforts at "Gothic" romances (he wrote several at Eton and Oxford) as honest, would-be commercial work; Horrid Novels were popular. Shelley enjoyed Oxford, holding his own there with what Blunden calls his "wickedly perfect politeness." He was really surprised and hurt when his love of epistolary arguments and pamphleteering got him expelled for printing a reasonable discussion on The Necessity of Atheism...
...Liberty. Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., had hoped that his son would get comfortably to Parliament and stand for Reform. Instead, Percy took direct action against what he conceived as oppression, social and personal, by marrying a pretty schoolgirl who didn't want to go back to school. Blunden supplies attractive pictures of this adventure-of Harriet "ready to die of laughter" as the 20-year-old Percy, slim and shrill-voiced, stood on a Dublin balcony hurling moral tracts at selected passersby. A combatant for liberty, Shelley poetized in Queen Mob against kings, priests, commerce, wealth...
...borne Shelley two children, as his wife. Godwin himself, the author of many ennobling and free sentiments, took advantage of the situation to get money out of Shelley. Shelley left Harriet. In 1816 Harriet's body was recovered from a pond in a London park. Blunden only guesses at the circumstances of this painful episode. His book (published 14 months ago in England), was written before publication in the U.S. of The Shelley Legend, (TIME, Nov. 19, 1945), which does a lot to set the record straight. Author Robert Metcalfe Smith proves that Mary Shelley deliberately used forged letters...
...longer work, in particular Prometheus Unbound, Blunden remarks that "it exacts from the reader a sustained and informed intentness failing which it becomes a luminous haze, and few people have the necessary time and period knowledge for elucidating its multitude of hints to the imagination." Shelley thought Dante's Divine Comedy superior "to all possible compositions." In The Triumph of Life, his last long poem, half finished before he was drowned, he wrote in the terza rima of Dante and with something like Dante's conciseness; Blunden suggests that it holds terrible irony as well as a power...
...with women, Shelley is thought of-and was considered in his own day-as a somewhat effeminate character. But of his looks just before he died, Thornton Hunt gave this testimony: "The outline of the features and face possesses firmness and hardness entirely inconsistent with a feminine character. . . ." Biographer Blunden finds it regrettable that no portrait of Shelley except the very young and rather girlish one by Amelia Curran has survived. To Blunden, Shelley exemplifies "the supreme capacity called genius...