A question re: Percy Bysshe Shelley

[truepenny]

Can anyone explain to me why we study Percy Bysshe Shelley as anything more than a minor Romantic poet and the husband of the author of Frankenstein?

There is no irony in my question. I dislike the Romantics (for values of "dislike" ranging from "am bored by" to "loathe"), so I'm well aware that I am not best positioned to see PBS's merits. And I am feeling particularly uncharitable toward him at the moment because I'm reading Anne K. Mellor's book on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and have gotten to the part where PBS's self-centered, selfish, callous thoughtlessness is partly responsible for the death of their daughter Clara Everina and where PBS proves himself TOTALLY INCAPABLE of understanding why MWS has gone off him a bit in consequence.

So, yeah, my fondness for P. B. Shelley, never great to begin with, is currently at its all time low.

Byron was just as bad in his private life (possibly worse, although there we have to get into comparative ethics and well, let's not go there), but I do understand why he's part of the Western canon--I get it. I even--sort of--get Wordsworth, much though he bores me until my eyeballs roll back in their sockets.

But what is there about Shelley that makes him worth discussing?

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Well, some days he was pretty good. Then again, some days he was off, too. I think this is one of those things that falls into Taste, No Accounting for. Also, a lot of the early critics were pretty dazzled by his personality and looks, as well as, IMHO, a certain amount of wishful thinking "There, if I had but the nerve and guts to burn all my bridges, could go I." I suspect that, removed from his own time and his fanboys, there's not as much there as they thought, which is what you are scenting.

There are a few pieces that shine, still. {As mentioned here by someone else, "Ozmandias".) But when we add him up, we're adding him up without the effect of the man himself, and thus our sum is not the same as the on his contemporaries and those close in time to him came up with. I don't see how it can be, either.

Also, we've done rebels. We can be Less than Impressed by rebels. Rebels are no longer Not New, they've become something we can mock, when we think they merit mockery. Shelley was a Rebel when it was a new idea, and I think he stuck in people's awareness because of that.

And once in the canon, you can't pry 'em out with a crowbar.

Then again, there's John Crowe Ransom's jab:

Sing a song for Percy Shelley,
Drowned in pale lemon jelly

from this (http://vmlinux.org/ilse/lit/ransom.htm).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I <3 John Crowe Ransom.*

Really, that's all I have to say.

---
*One of the best English assignments I ever had in high school was a compare and contrast paper of his poem "Dead Cousin" with somebody else's poem "Dead Boy." Poetry is all about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug, and that assignment taught me to understand that. Also the incomparable value of specificity.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I <3 him too. I first read "Survey of Literature" about 30 years ago. I was very young and painfully serious about poetry, and it had not occurred to me that poets could get away with being so unkind about other poets.

It was oddly liberating.