Volume 22, Number 10 · June 12, 1975
What Shelley Knew
By G.M. Matthews
Shelley: The Pursuit
by Richard Holmes
Dutton, 829 pp., $22.50
Shelley's life was short, yet it is nearly impossible to write a short life of Shelley. So many happenings, private and public, affected his work that the biographer's space begins to run out before the poet has written anything for which his life is worth remembering. And almost all he did and believed needs so much explaining that a mere summary of facts tends to sound like parody. The best short life, Edmund Blunden's of 1946,[1] was so careful not to blame anybody that its total effect is unlifelike, while the full-scale biographies—all double-deckers—are now between thirty-five and ninety years old. Of these last, Newman Ivey White's[2] is indispensable as a kind of memory bank of known sources, but in its abridged form[3] it has a distinctly prewar flavor. Richard Holmes's new single-volume biography is a very good book, compulsively readable, which really does make contemporary sense of Shelley and his friends.
Review, 2048 words
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