7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent and Creative Look at Shelley, March 6, 2009
Ann Wroe is certainly hard to pin down. I honestly can not think of a biographer who can tackle the wide range of different subjects that Wroe has and yet do it well. Percy Shelley is as far from Pontius Pilate as any human could be and yet she captured both men very well. "Being Shelley" is not a conventional biography and Wroe seeks to capture the poet's creative side as much as possible. She does this by tracing his life and works through various elements (air, earth, water etc). It's a gamble and it pays off for Wroe beautifully. Unlike a number of his more recent biographers who want to focus on Shelley's radical politics or his rather scandalous personal life, Wroe explores his creative vision and she uses primary sources-from poems to journals-to present her argument. If she does not present a coherent life, Wroe is able to open up a little window on the heart and soul of one of the great poets of the English language in this vivid and readable book.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Experimentum Crucis, June 15, 2010
This review is from: Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself (Hardcover)
Shelley has always been known - quite rightly to my mind - as a "poet's poet" meaning that only those gifted to some degree with the poet's transcendent vision will latch on to him as a fellow spirit and his poetry as evocative of the stirrings of their own souls. Likewise, then, Ann Wroe is a poet's biographer, limning the soul of the poet through his poetry to which only the "initiate" will respond. "Sheer astonishment at Shelley's poems made me write this book; astonishment, and regret that his spiritual force seems to have been largely forgotten." All who, like Wroe, have experienced moments when:
"I arose & for a space
The scene of woods and waters seemed to keep,
Though it was now broad day, a gentle trace
Of light diviner than the common sun
Sheds on the common Earth..."
cannot but share in her astonishment and so treasure this book which Wroe, in the first sentence of the Introduction calls an "experiment," "an attempt to write the life of the poet from the inside out." Who would ever wish, one asks oneself upon finishing this book, to write of a poet, especially as visionary a poet as Shelley, in any other way?
Wroe takes a non-chronological, thematic approach to Shelley's life, using the Four Elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire as her poetic cicerones through Shelley's life and work, treating the two, rightly, as inseparable. I could go onto a lengthy disquisition here, but that is for Ann Wroe's coruscating and enrapturing narrative to do for the reader. Let me simply cite Wroe's own splendid evaluation of Shelley's pilgrimage through this world:
"One fact, however, lay at the core of all these histories: a fact so intrinsic to Shelley, and so precious, that he was unable ever to describe it. Each Shelley-character held a memory - disturbed, but not eclipsed, even by stark grief - of a blissful, momentary, controlling presence both within and beyond himself. This was what made him mad, if he was truly so: that he had glimpsed this presence while on Earth, and could not bear the rift between that reality and his existence."
After finishing this erudite yet bracing labour of love, one feels tremendously indebted to Ann Wroe. This book, to crib a bit from "Adonais," is a portion of that loveliness which Shelley made more lovely, and now Wroe has made lovelier still.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Psychological Shelley, September 11, 2009
This review is from: Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself (Hardcover)
Wroe's book offers a compelling portrait of Shelley. Its strength and innovation comes from the use of manuscript evidence to think through the poet's psychology. The limitation of this study is that those who want more of a thinking Shelley are better served by Hugh Roberts, Stuart Curran, and Earl Wasserman.
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