Poetry Criticism | Shelley, Percy Bysshe - Judith S. Chernaik (essay date 1968)

Judith S. Chernaik (essay date 1968)

SOURCE: "The Figure of the Poet in Shelley," in ELH, Vol. 35, No. 4, December, 1968, pp. 566–90.

[Chernaik is an American-born English author and educator. In the following essay, she discusses the autobiographical and symbolic importance of the recurring poet figure in Shelley's verse.]

If there is a single image which draws together the most problematic aspects of Shelley's art, it is the recurrent figure of the frail Poet, pale of hue and weak of limb, consecrated to his youthful vision of Beauty but incapable of realizing or recreating it, driven at last to death by unassuageable desire for he knows not what. His literary associations vary from poem to poem, but the unsympathetic reader (and most readers at the present time fall into this camp), noting the resemblances between the fictional heroes of Alastor and The Revolt of Islam, and the "idealized" self-portraits of...

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