Word: shelley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...SHELLEY - Newman Ivey White -Knopf (2 vols...
...biographers and critics had a good year, led in interest by Van Wyck Brooks's New England: Indian Summer and in weight by Newman Ivey White's ten-pound, two-volume Shelley. It was the year of a posthumous volume by Mark Twain. The one volume of great poetry was not a new poet's, but the last work of W. B. Yeats...
Camouflaged by rainbows, skylarks, fairies, peris, sensitive plants and Epipsychidions, there was no more successful softener than Sapper Shelley. "You are a funny people, you Shelleyites," Explorer Henry M. Stanley warned an officer of the Shelley Society. "You are playing-at a safe distance yourself, maybe, with fire. In spreading Shelley you are indirectly helping to stir up the great socialist question . . . the one question which bids fair to swamp you all. . . ." Thomas Carlyle rudely cut short one Shelleyite rhapsody. "Yon man Shelley," he growled, "was just a scoundrel, and ought to have been hanged...
...Christianity," says Biographer White, "was for Shelley probably the greatest single despoiler of the human spirit." He liked to sign atheos (atheist) after his name in hotel registers. Other Shelley dislikes: commerce, finance, monarchy, almost any tradition, marriage. Shortly before his death, Shelley wrote Leigh Hunt: "The system of society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations. . . ." Before he was tossed out of Oxford (for publishing The Necessity of Atheism), Shelley had dedicated himself to this overthrow...
Biographer White is charmed by the steadfastness with which, during his lifetime of 30 years, Shelley indulged his "passion for reforming the world." He traces every step of it: Shelley's elopement with Harriet Westbrook; their attempts to reform Ireland and Wales; Shelley's desertion of Harriet for Mary (Frankenstein) Godwin, and Harriet's suicide ; his inheritance of a fortune; their last, tragic days in Italy. There Shelley encouraged revolution in Spain, Naples, Greece, England; there he wrote his most important verse; there he drowned. Wrote the Tory Courier: "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry...