Selected Poems [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Shelley is England's greatest lyric poet, and perhaps the greatest of any time and place. Though his extraordinary talents have always been acknowledged, even in his own day, he has from the beginning been a subject of controversy and abuse. His contemporaries reacted violently to his opinions on religious, political, and social institutions, and were confirmed in their views by unfortunate events in his private life. Our knowledge of his life, his character, and his works has been enormously extended, and we are no longer much shocked by his ideas, which have ceased on the whole to be radical. Controversy today is based mainly on ignorance, and on the inability of some to see Shelley as a whole and to recognize that he was a very complex individual who nevertheless possessed a singularly inward unity. There are five major aspects in Shelley's character. He was an idealist, a philosopher, a rebel, a reformer, and a poet—áll at the same time. As an idealist he had a firm faith in the essential goodness of humanity, a belief that mankind could and would move forward towards perfection. Experience and suffering made him remove this era of perfection further and further into the remote future, but they never made him surrender all hope. Shelley was a philosopher, one who has an insatiable desire to know the meaning of the whole scheme of existence. His poetry is therefore highly intellectual; it is aglow with a passionate interest in" ideas. Even his sheerest, his most airy and musical lyrics, are expressive of definite trains of thought. His view is always cosmic, in contrast with the more specific and personal poetry of Keats. It is therefore fitting that the last words of his last long but incomplete poem, The Triumph of Life, should be, "Then, what is fife?" Shelley was a rebel. If he were living today, he would still be a rebel against the multitudinous evils resulting from our institutions and from perverted human nature. He was truly, as he described himself in Julian and Maddalo, iv