Percy per se

 Midway through the Shelley biography it is one of the best biographies I've ever read or thereabouts. Many of the biographies I've read are those of poets. They would be well over a yard's worth of shelf space if all kept together but the likes of Ezra Pound were from the library because I don't want a copy contaminating the house. Another contender is Donne by John Stubbs.

Richard Holmes is both scrupulous and scholarly and his sources being first-hand and hugely detailed make it vividly alive which it needs to be because disbelief would otherwise not be suspended for long.

He begins with the proviso that,

There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them. 

 

But it is for anybody who might enjoy the most lurid Hammer horror schlock, a Rabelasian tale of astonishing self-indulgence or the definitive answer as to how poets and poetry got their bad names.

At halfway, it is 1816, Shelley is 24 and still has nearly six years to live. So far he has run up debts and absconded from many of them, lived itinerantly in many parts of the British Isles and into Europe, enchanted teenage girls with tragic consequences and imagined an assassination attempt that might just have been a burglar.

The good side of him which would be reason to admire him is a revolutionary spirit ahead of his time that is genuinely moved by hardship, vegetarian and devoutly atheist but that comes at some cost and that which he's famous for - his poetry - doesn't really stand up to our latter day scrutiny and one doubts if it ever will again, having been so fashionably of its own time.

Holmes reports that the painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, found Shelley hypocritical,

'Shelley said he could not bear the inhumanity of Wordsworth in talking about the beauty of the shining trout as they lay after being caught, that he had such a horror of torturing animals it was impossible to express it'. Haydon felt this compared badly with the pain Shelley had caused in his own domestic life.

 

His concern for Harriet Westbrook's suicide might yet bring him to some maturity but that will be too late. As such, his dependance on others to sponsor his gloriously idealistic principles isn't something he seems to acknowledge or be grateful for but previous influential prophets of their own manifestos of superior ethics and generations of middle class campus Marxists since have enjoyed the luxury of espousing their high-mindedness while being indulged by others. If Shelley's legacy was to damage the reputation of poetry for the next two hundred years that wasn't much compared to the effect the charismatic rabble-rouser did in the Middle East two thousand years ago whose glib goodness was written up by his followers and caused almighty wickedness. A.N. Wilson's more balanced, and hugely informed, account sees it in more credible terms.

But Richard Holmes, from 1974, provides an impressive read which could be taken at face value as the gothic horror that it is but can't help also being a cautionary tale and warning against the excesses of the Romantic individual who, despite what he preaches, is effectively no more than an advert for himself.