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Shelley: Selected Poetry (Poetry Library, Penguin)

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Suppose someone published a Shakespeare selection, that included pretty set pieces from the plays ("Queen Mab! What's she?" from _Romeo and Juliet_, "I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows" from _Midsummer Night's Dream_), bits of _The Rape of Lucrece_ and _Venus and Adonis_, every last one of the "Sonnetf to Sundrie Notef of Mufic_, and a few songs: "It was a lover and his lass," and the like. But anything that hinted at a darker worldview or Shakespeare's wider range was ruthlessly excluded.

And suppose further that this anthology claimed that it represented Shakespeare's best work, showing his range and the things that make that writer great. So that anyone who knew Shakespeare through that anthology would think that he was good for the odd flower poem and a bit of "Hey nonny nonny" but not much else besides.

Isobel Quigly's _Shelley: A Selection_ is the Shelleyan equivalent of that Shakespeare anthology. Thus, Shelley's epic philosophical drama _Prometheus Unbound_, both a meditation about the relationship between thought and language and a metaphor for political renewal based on moral growth (among other things), is represented by a couple of incidental lyrics; all complexity and depth are left on Quigly's cutting room floor. _Julian and Maddalo_, with its urbanity, its bitter wit, crisp dialogue and vivid characterisation, is represented by one short purple passage (admittedly a splendid one) describing sunset over the Euganean hills.

The satirical Shelley is not represented at all: the contemptuous handling of contemporary political figures in the energetically grotesque _Oedipus Tyrannus_ is missing in action, as is the more nuanced satire of _Peter Bell the Third_. Oh, and the real Shelley may have been passionately engaged in the real world, protesting poverty, war and oppression in general and by specifics, in hard detail and in words of fire: but you won't find a hint of that in Quigly's selection. Many of Shelley's finest poems are simply omitted. _The Mask of Anarchy_ , _Song to the Men of England_, _Similes for Two Political Characters_, _Feelings of a Republican on Hearing the Death of Napoleon_, for example, and much else besides: Quigly won't trouble you with a word of it.

What she gives instead is every "pretty" poem Shelley ever wrote. That includes great lyrics like the _Ode to the West Wind_ and _To a Skylark_ and others, but also all the poems Shelley dashed off as gifts to women friends, often for them to use as song lyrics, and often written to fit existing tunes. These became enormously popular anthology pieces in the Victorian period, though Shelley himself showed little interest in them and never bothered to publish them.

It's not that these are bad poems. All are good of their kind, and many conceal a hard metaphysical kernel under a candied surface: _When the lamp is shattered_, and _Music when soft voices die_, for example. Shelley was in a sense more of a metaphysical than a romantic poet, and in another sense more of a metaphysical poet than the metaphysicals themselves, since he was often concerned with genuine metaphysical questions in his poetry: thought and language, epistemology, and so on.

But [...] Shelley is a minor and one-dimensional poet on the basis of this selection. But it's the selection at fault, not the poet.

Quigly also, irritatingly, strips poems of their contexts. She gives _Alastor_ and (surprisingly in view of its Dantean difficulties) _Epipsychidion_ complete, but rips away the prefaces that Shelley used, in each case, as part of his framing and distancing effect: they are important to the way in which the poem is to be presented, and to be approached.

She also follows the Victorians in getting various telling details wrong. Thus _The Indian Girl's Serenade_ is printed as _The Indian Serenade_; the change allowed the Victorians to treat the poem as a personal lyric rather than a performance piece, and to marvel over Shelley's exquisite but rather weak sensibility: "O lift me from the grass! I die, I faint, I fall!"

The name change conceals the fact that this poem was written for soprano performance (to a tune from Mozart's _La Clemenza di Tito_). Its charm is that it allows the performer opportunities to both use feminine wiles and at the same time mock them. The "faint" at the end of the song is best performed, by the singer, with one eye open to judge the effect. But Quigly knows nothing of this, referring to Shelley's "wholly personal love poems" in her wholly clueless introduction.

Quigly's introduction clearly places her as a late surviving Victorian, who has read a little Leavis and Elliot but nothing of the critical work done on Shelley up to this anthology's first publication date, which is 1956. Nothing has changed in this recent re-publication, despite the rich and fascinating work in Shelley criticism and Shelley studies in the years since Leavis. But Quigly wouldn't be the person to guide you through that material anyway.

I recommend the Norton Selection of Shelley's poetry and prose instead, with a much better and wider selection, and intelligent introduction and notes. And it's quite reasonable to want the romantic (in the Valentine's Day sense) Shelley, though that is only one side of a multi-faceted poet of astounding technical skill, sophistication and range: but for that side of Shelley I'd recommend Richard Hughes' _Shelley on Love_. Either selection is far better than this vapid and misleading collection of prettiana.

Cheers!

Laon
PS Also avoid Penguin's Poet to Poet series' Shelley entry. 20th century poetaster Kathryn Raine's Shelley selection is if anything slighter than Quigly's.

I very much enjoyed this collection. It introduced me to the poignant poetry of one of the greatest English Romantic writers. Shelly is a poet you will most likely be required to read at some point in your life. If not, you would be doing a serious diservice to yourself to not seek to indulge in his writings by your own accord. "Song to the Men of England" is perhaps my favourite Shelly poem, despite the fact that it illustrates the utter hypocrisy of English aristocrats. This collection is bound beautifully, and includes all of the poems Shelly was famous for. It is priced reasonably, so there should therefore be no reason for you not to pick it up!

Note: I made some immature Mormon angry because of my negative reviews of books that attempted to prove the Book of Mormon, and that person has been slamming my reviews almost as fast as they are posted.

I must have really burned him or her because I've deleted this review and re-posted it and within an hour, I had a "not helpful" vote. Give me a break. That person's faith must be very fragile, indeed. Oh, well.

I'm trying to be "helpful," so your "helpful" votes are appreciated. Thanks, and I hope you find some enjoyable lines (below). Thanks.

This collection has many of the poems we all love. It's not an exhaustive collection, but it's worth buying for Quigly's introductory essay, and as she said, "Shelley lives on outside his verse, and continues still to attract or repel, as he did when he was alive." How true.

In "Astor; or the Spirit of Solitude," Shelley left a perfect, though probably unintended,description of himself.

"The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius."

And of our place in history, it gives us pause to read Shelley's "Ozymandias."

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said; Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the and,
Half sunk, a shattered visages lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
That lone and level sands stretch far away.

And I must quote a few lines from the "Skylark."

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Purest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art....
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.



Also, check out the engravings opposite some of Shelley's poems in "A Celebration of Humanism and Freethought," by David Allen Williams. I've scanned two pages (in my picture section), and I would highly recommend this book to any poetry lover.

It's full of rare engravings opposite selections of poetry and verse. A lost classic worth checking out (below).

A Celebration of Humanism and Freethought
A Celebration of Humanism and Freethought

Book looks pretty good and is a great deal for the price. only has a couple of small scuffs on the cover. Binding and everything else looks great.

Shelly was a master at combining images and creating a world that was uniquley his own. The problem is, that world seemed to consist mainly of foggy sea shores at sunrise and forest cathedrals. While there is nothing wrong with visiting such a world, there is very little reason to stay there.

Shelly's lyrics are uneven, sometimes resorting to rhymes that make me cringe. His strength is iambic prose. Even this suffers from what appears to be a limited vocabulary which para doxically inclused eccentric spellings like "aery".

Having said all that, I must admit that I am in sypmpathy with Shelly. He dwells in a solitary world of fairy beauty that is the spiritual home of every soul in search of Truth. This goes a long way toward forgiving his somewhat middle ground talent.

"Queen Mab" and "Alastor" are the best peoms in this collection. Most of the other seem to be either comments or footnotes to these. They encompass Shelly's strange universe beautifully.

"Alastor" is the strongest in terms of imagery reflecting isolation and the hard choice to foresake worldy pleasure to find a higher truth. All sorts of moonlit coves lie just past the crashing waves of the main stream. One only wishes that Shelly could see the beauty he was leaving was a part of what he sought.

I recomment this edition, and the critical essay at its beginning, as a starting point for study of Shelly and his work.