Word: shelleys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SHELLEY: A LIFE STORY (388 pp.)-Edmund Blunden-Viking...
This new biography has been greeted in England as the first really satisfactory life of England's great romantic poet. U.S. critics should agree that, though Newman Ivey White's trenchant and scholarly two-volume Shelley (1940) has more information, Edmund Blunden's book has all that's necessary for a solid interpretation. A very fair poet himself, Blunden writes of Shelley devotedly, but with the ease and savor of long personal familiarity-not only with Shelley's works, but with his period (1792-1822), the scenes in which he lived and the mass...
...thinks gigantically," said Lord Byron to Leigh Hunt. "If thought were light, and our planet visible by it, and space were time, the next ages would see us coming by a little ray, made up of such minds." A few days later their friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, aged 29, vanished with his fated little sailboat into a sultry Mediterranean storm. The next ages have been only fitfully aware of Shelley as a gigantic thinker. And Blunden's biography scarcely supports that description; but it shows the poetry maturing with the man: eloquent, fervorous, audacious, imaginative...
Child of England. Field Place, the Sussex manor house where Shelley was born and grew up, "has a mighty roof of Horsham stone, and a line of chimneys like towers." It also has a park, a brook and a lake satisfactory to a fanciful child. Shelley's father, the squire, was a progressive gentleman farmer and brought up his eldest son to know something about pig-raising and Swedish turnips. If Percy seemed literary in boyhood, his literariness was long confined to a large appetite for sixpenny thrillers about vampires, specters and enchantments-a set of motifs he never...
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...