I have a weakness for old books and was lucky enough to stumble upon this copy of SHELLEY'S POETICAL WORKS some years ago. It dates from the 1870s–some 50 years after Shelley's death—and is a beautiful book with a marbled cover. The book is open to his poem "Music," –named only "To--" in this edition. It's another of my favorite poems and I wrote a setting for soprano and harp that you can find on my site: Music by Mary Rae (on the right under "Listen").
Music
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken;
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
I was very interested to read the introduction to the book written by William B. Scott. Fifty years after Shelley's death he attempted to sum up his generations understanding of Shelley and his place in history. There was a great deal of praise, but also reservations. I quote below:
"And thus it is, unquestionably, with Shelley; inspired by an overmastering love of right, believing in the possibility as well as the philosophical justice of freedom in following good and happy impulses, or impulses apparently such, and also in the power possessed by ordinary human nature to use properly this freedom; we shall find him expending himself with the most fruitless results. Unselfish to a superhuman degree, he sacrificed others as well as himself, and, what is even more important now to the world, sacrificed his art. We must therefore be content to acknowledge a large section of his poetry to be of little interest as poetry, although all of it is of importance as the work of one of the most supreme intellects in that direction."
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2 comments:
Color me confused. The author's qualms about PB Shelley were in the realm of morality and philosophy. But then in the last sentence he seems to say that such problems make his work "of little interest as poetry." Perhaps they make it less valuable as a guide to life, but why less valuable as poetry? Or is the author going with Blake's (and later, Allen Ginsberg's) equating the poet with the prophet?
I think Shelley presented problems to those who felt his life and work was full of political and personal excess, and he was often evaluated along those lines. I'm with you--judge the poetry by the poetry itself. I admit to being quite interested in biographical details, but I think poetry should stand on its own apart from the writer's life. And while I admire some poems over others, I don't think there's much of Shelley to be tossed aside-- and almost 190 years after his death, things look quite different.
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