Word: shelleys
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Child of 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...
...enlightened Godwinian, Mary suggested that they all live together, she as Shelley's sister and Harriet, who had now 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...
Child of Poetry. After Harriet's death, Shelley devoted himself to his poetry in Hampstead, in Leigh Hunt's cottage, where young Keats was a fellow visitor, and in Geneva, where the glamorous Lord Byron was a neighbor. The Napoleonic Wars were over; the long golden age of travel on the Continent had begun. Shelley's household abroad included not only Mary, whom he married, but her sister, Claire Claremont, one of Byron's cast-off mistresses. His scandalous behavior shocked London, and he never returned to the city after 1818, later writing stanzas beginning "Hell...
...Naples, Rome, Florence and Pisa, though ostracized by such respectable English tourists as Walter Savage Landor, Shelley wrote the poetry by which he is best remembered. He thought Keats "a rival who will surpass me" and invited the dying poet to join him; Keats was touched but had enough sense not to. After the "Peterloo massacre" of working people in Manchester, Shelley wrote his Mask of Anarchy, a revolutionary poem of memorable drive...
...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...