Word: shelley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SCRIPT IS full of comic routines and caustic one-liners. Humor is the basis of the characters' lives, providing them with accurate insight and comfortable escape. Norman, the straight mathematician, and Shelley, his spacey girlfriend, are clearly self-parodies. Mike and Cootie, a Rosenkrantz-and-Guildenstern type duo, are careful, conscious performers. But other characters are confused about the interpretation of their lines. When Kathy has problems with her boyfriend, she complains...
Plato banned poets from his republic, but it was a Pyrrhic triumph. Versifiers have a habit of outlasting politicians, and there is a nucleus of truth in Shelley's romantic declaration, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." From time to time the acknowledged legislators agree; for one brief, shining moment, Robert Frost even shared the inaugural platform with John F. Kennedy. That, however, was a greater victory for p.r. than for poetry. The recent snubbing of Solzhenitsyn by the White House suggests that things have returned to the Platonic state. Which is where they should be, according...
Writing to older correspondents, Shelley blanched demurely at the thought of class uprisings. Yet when deeper thoughts were goaded out of him, they bore bloodstains. In 1819, after demonstrating workers in Manchester were annihilated in the Peterloo massacre, Shelley roared...
What possessed Shelley? Holmes has tried to find the answer by retracing a path trampled flat by idolaters. After a pampered, precocious childhood filled with adoring sisters, gothic novels and the promise of an inherited baronetcy, Shelley was thrust into a Dickensian boarding school. At Eton, his refusal to kowtow to senior students earned him the nickname "Mad Shelley." There followed University College, Oxford, which gratefully expelled young Percy Bysshe, after a scant six months, for writing a broadside on atheism...
...pamphleteer promptly ran off with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a London tavernkeeper. With Harriet came an older sister, eager to protect this new family tie with the aristocracy, plus Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley's best friend at Oxford. The odd ménage was shattered several years later when Shelley met Mary Godwin, daughter of the genteel radical, William Godwin. He eloped with her-and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont-generously inviting Harriet to join them as a "spiritual" sister. She refused. Shelley and his new entourage set out on years of restless travel, ending with...