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The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Bcl1-Pr English Literature Series)

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Edward Dowden was an Irish critic and mediocre poet, who was most noted for his critical works on Shakespeare. However what catapulted him to international fame and that which made him a name of currency among readers of the romantics was his biography of Shelley. This is the official biography based on the archives collected at Boscombe Manor by Mary Shelley and her son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, these are now found at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The impact that this biographical work had on Victorain critics cannot be overestimated. Shelley's character is depicted in a rather depriciatory vein, with repeated invectives, sustained charges of childishness and callous selfishness and, as if it were not enough, his poetry is affected with a bloated sense of utopian idealism, referred to as overdramatic and teeming with empty abstractions. Why was this critic chosen to write a biography of a poet so politically and theologically dissident is a question that has yet to be answered. Shelley is insistently demeaned as odious, frivolous, ridiculous, and irrational. The biographer uses language of a scathing stamp to defame Shelly as he abandons Harriet Westbrook and his daughter Ianthe; while later while recounting the suicide of Mary Shelley's half-sister Fanny Imlay Godwin he is obviously intent on imputing responsibility on the author of Prometheus Unbound, depicting him as insensitive and free of scruples. His relationship to the Godwins is fleshed out in painstaking but all-important details, and that with Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt is scoured with no less scrutiny and maligned intent. His days at OXford, with ensuing expulsion are of particular interest because they set the tone for the entire work. As he befriended Thomas Hogg, as he read omnivorously for up to 16 hours a day, his mind full fancies, he published a seditious tract on Atheism and was expeditiously expelled by the Tory bigs that held official and unofficial sway over the university. His knowledge of the world is characterized as boyish and unexpurgated of a tendency to mark with virility where his effeminacy was most petty. Women had no place in politics those days and his spiritual affimity with the iridescence of mother Earth seemed to be a flaw Dowden would not forgive him.
The condescending tone of Dowden came to haunt Shelley for years before an attempt at rehabilitation surfaced during the early 20th century, yet once again compromised by TS Eliot's rather churlish denigrating description of Shelley's poetry as stuffed with the ideas of adolescence, an empyrian void that TS Eliot found repellent.
However the value of this work goes far beyond the critical aura that it emanated in time, for it contributes a wealth of anecdotes that are referenced to letters and poems themselves, so as to render the reading of these that much more complete and satisfying. It is, and shall forever remain, a particularly fresh historical treasure since it reminds us of the place of interpretation and the ideological imperatives of early scholars, vividly defined in such a promulgation as this. We may never get enough of this biography because we must return to it every time we try to understand Shelley and begin by as skewed a portrait as any poet has suffered.
The language and the theoretical applications employed are refined and keen, however specific to its time and philosophical climate.
A necessary read for any scholar and an exceptional engaging work for fans of Shelley, or more broadly speaking his circle in general.
As another great critic Horace Smith wrote in his obituary for the PAris Monthly Review, "never was there a name associated with more black, poisonous and bitter calumny than his. Shelley had the misfortune to entertain, from his very earliest youth, opinions, both in religion and politics, that were diametrically opposed to established systems."
The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley is outstanding in its ideological imprint on our ideas on the poet, the man and the political vanguardist, who by some standards was merely a rash dreamy youth who refused to come down from Parnassus as he composed in purity was others found adulterous and infalmmatory.