By Michael Lee Jan 18, 2008, 10:22 GMT
Conscious, inseparable, one’…Possessing and possessed by all that isWithin that calm circumference of bliss,And by each other, till to love and liveBe one…
The above lines were culled from Ann Wroe’s new biography on the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. I chose these lines not merely out of ardor but also to illuminate the man’s obsession. Followers of the poet would have undoubtedly chosen a different subset of lines from his output but no choice would stray far from the subject of love.
Of all the practitioners of Art none may be more mysterious than the poet. It is the poet’s mind through which the world is absorbed and dispensed most uniquely and, often, celestial. If poetry is the highest of Arts than poetry too is the highest point to which the mind ascends, and it is this fixation Wroe chases throughout the book- “Sheer astonishment at Shelley’s poems”, she calls it. In an attempt to distinguish her pages from previous Shelley biographies, Wroe makes clear in the preface this is a work ‘about Shelley the poet rather than Shelley the man’, dividing nearly four-hundred pages into four parts: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, with three subchapters in each. Personalities, such as spouses, friends, and children are spoken of along the periphery.
Through Shelley, Wroe reminds the reader of the many uneducated men and women who were brilliant thinkers- scorners of establishment, they were, opposers of the system, and we learn Shelley is among this lot. In the preface to his poem The Revolt of Islam, Shelley, an autodidact, describes his path toward poetry by crediting the daily tutorials of nature and dismissing formal teaching.
“I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests…I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men.”
In every deep thinker there lives this moment of recognition, where, as Wroe writes, “This was his sudden awakening, on one particular morning, to the shadow of the Spirit of Beauty in the world. After this he became a fighter for Liberty and an insatiate seeker after Beauty, Love and Truth, obsessions that never left him.”
It is a poet’s condition to wander, and wherever Shelley roamed he did so with a heart that pumped outside his body. Everything Shelley saw he became. He would stare into night skies and hunt stars, and when none appeared, Shelley did what any poet would: he would sew them into the sky with his imagination. Mostly Shelley wasn’t the type of poet who waited for that unforeseen bolt of inspiration. He watched, he listened, he wrote. When alone Shelley could be found sitting by the sea, watching the waves surging and retreating, spinning Valentines to his love, or reading with “his face only inches from the page.”
“His senses” Wroe writes, “were the ultimate and only source of knowledge about the world.”
But Shelley observed too, and let seep in, the squalor of the world around him. Inequality and political upheaval affected his imagination and poetry to the point where his verse sometime lay incomplete and incoherent. In addition to losing his trust in man and segregating himself further from humanity, Shelley fought a society denouncing his wish to acquire the pure life he so sought.
Although Shelley endured two broken marriages, Wrote faults the women. “I was required to love because it was my duty to love”, Shelley once said. Whether it was the inability of his first wife Harriet- who latched onto his every word and every idea, and wishing only to be his- to match Shelley’s intellect or, later, Mary Shelley worrying what was ‘proper’ and what ‘Everybody’ said or did, Shelley is, basically, granted an acquittal by Wroe.
Citing such hardship, Wroe sees tragedy in Shelley’s life by sketching him fragile and, at times, mad- her explanation is almost apologetic. And, in an otherwise well-written book, this is a point on which the author fails. It’s a tone that afflicts most biographies.
The only time we exist in equilibrium is the moment we are first born. For most, youthful innocence and principals is eventually traded for greed, excess, and higher rungs. Shelley never made the trade; he refused to compromise to the customs of the world. Perhaps he was not mad after all, as Wroe asserts. He desired ‘more in this world than any understand.’ There is genius in thinking one can not only live but thrive off the world’s beauty and the love given to and received from another.
Review first appeared http://statenislandadvance.com/
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