This Familiar Life: LRB Reviews Selected Poems and Prose by Percy Bysshe Shelley

For the London Review of Books, Seamus Perry reviews Selected Poems and Prose by Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (Penguin, 2018). "The editors . . . seek to clear up any obscurity with a plain note, ‘silver sphere: The planet Venus as the morning star’ – and no doubt that is right," writes Perry. More from this:

Gertrude Stein once memorably remarked of her childhood home of Oakland, California, ‘There is no there there,’ a phrase which seems to me coincidentally to capture what Shelley does in some of his very best poems, and suggests the ways in which he is unlike most of his Romantic contemporaries, who were in one way or another very committed to the idea of being ‘there’. ‘For thou wert there,’ Coleridge says admiringly in the poem he addresses to Wordsworth, meaning that his friend had actually been in France during the Revolution, ‘thine own brows garlanded,/Amid the tremor of a realm aglow’. In this respect you can see Shelley’s great and fruitful friendship with Byron as a genuine meeting of admiring antitypes. Shelley dosed Byron with the elevated Wordsworthian feelings that made it into the third canto of Childe Harold (‘to me/High mountains are a feeling’ and so on), but Byron himself quickly came to recognise that he had been momentarily taken over by a voice not his own. ‘As to “Don Juan” – confess – confess – you dog and be candid that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing,’ he wrote to a friend, back in his home idiom again. ‘It may be bawdy – but is it not good English? it may be profligate – but is it not life, is it not the thing? – Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world?’ Shelley, by contrast, entertained very mixed feelings about the merits of living in the world – ‘the trance of ordinary life’, he calls it in the preface to his long revolutionary poem Laon and Cythna. Or, as he put it most disarmingly in the charming ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ‘this familiar life, which seems to be/But is not’.

Read the full review at LRB.