‘The poet and the man are two different natures.’ Shelley, like Eliot, believed in that distance. Yet emotional self-expression is a prime characteristic of the Romantics, and Shelley was, as Harold Bloom
notes, the greatest ‘High Romantic’ of them all. Queen Mab, printed but not published for fear of prosecution (the notes are as notorious as the poem), throws down the gauntlet: atheism, vegetarianism and free love are all praised. The lines we’ve taken tell us, sadly, that ‘Even love is sold’. ‘Ozymandias’, his finest sonnet according to Richard Holmes, is the result of a challenge. Shelley and a friend had visited the British Museum’s Egyptian exhibition and each agreed to write a sonnet. Only one is remembered; such is genius. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ honours Byron, who enjoyed the recognition and success that eluded Shelley in his lifetime. ‘I have lived too long near Lord Byron,’ he said, ‘and the sun has extinguished the glow worm.’ Not quite, as time would prove.
‘Julian [Shelley] and Maddalo [Byron]’ is a conversation between the two poets – ‘the child’ is believed to be Allegra, Byron’s daughter by Claire Clairmont. Love’s terrible cost is told by ‘the madman’ who loved ‘the lady who had left him’, and though she returned had been destroyed by her. The Mask of Anarchy is not only a response to the Peterloo Massacre, in which a number of unarmed protestors were killed and over five hundred injured, it is also a Miltonian hymn to liberty and burns with a hatred of authority. ‘Love’s Philosophy’, supposedly written to Sophia Stacey, a ward of Shelley’s uncle who shared a house with them in Florence, is mischievous and sweet. It is also disconcerting, as Shelley was at the time in the midst of tragedy. More was to come. Shelley, Keats and Byron, a poetic constellation, were wiped out within a few years of each other. Keats, who did not much care for Shelley, was the first to die, aged twenty-five. ‘Adonais’, Shelley’s tribute to him, is also a fierce attack on the critics who had caused Keats despair such that he would wish for an unmarked grave. ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ It was water that claimed Shelley who, strangely, as a schoolboy often quoted Southey’s ‘The Curse of Kehama’: ‘And water shall see thee / And fear thee, and fly thee / The waves shall not touch thee / As they pass by thee!’ They did not flee him. He left unfinished, mid-sentence, ‘Then, what is Life? / . . . Happy those for whom the fold’ / Of’, the poem which, according to Harold Bloom, persuades us is how Dante would sound, had he composed in English. The 550-line fragment, The Triumph of Life, is, according to Bloom, ‘the most despairing poem, of true eminence, in the language . . . It would bewilder and depress us were it not for its augmented poetic power.’ Shelley is buried beside Keats, in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. ‘Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange’.