the Romantic poetsas is apparent by reading Wroe’s index references to “Death as lover,” “Dreams,” “Earth,” “Eternity,” “Life,” “Love,” “Mind,” “Self,” “Spirit,” “Truth,” “Will.” These abstract categories engross Shelley and his biographer precisely because they reflect his effort not only to reject the mundane and the jejune but also to create a new metaphysics of the self that would result, ultimately, in revolutionizing society and the way others think. If Shelley often seems self-absorbed and cruel to others, in part that is because the society of his times seems to him an impostureits laws and customs no more than a false set of standards that will sooner or later lapse in desuetude. This was, in fact, what his father-in-law, William Godwin, argued.

Wroe achieves some nice effects that demonstrate how the poet’s equipment, so to speak, became one with the world he was evoking in words:Other notebooks fell into the water with him. He smeared the wet away and went on writing, gouging the soft paper, making the letters run. Sea water gnawed at his drafts of A Defence of Poetry [1840] and Adonais [1821]; it corroded the pages and stuck them together with its silty, animal glue. Salt saturated his thoughts.

Here, Wroe’s prose captures the intensity and immediacy of a Shelleyan world.

Unlike conventional biographies, Wroe’s allows for a persistent page-by-page exploration of her subject’s writing. Eschewing chronology, she jumps back and forth in the poet’s life, tracing ideas that develop at various stages in Shelley’s career. Thus, she can produce his poetic fragmentslines that break off, are struck out, and replaced with othersportraying a poet restlessly racking his own mind and the universe for a proper orientation toward existence. Wroe never has to interrupt her narrative because Shelley’s poetic development, not the chronology of his life, determines the structure of her work.

Richard Holmes, author of an acclaimed two-volume biography of Shelley, observes in The Guardian that Wroe writes a prose almost as ecstatic as the poet’s own, making him once again an icon of liberation. Wroe’s overwrought language verges on a fictional transformation of the poet, Holmes suggests, even though he pays tribute to Wroe’s painstaking research. To achieve some of her effects, she has to rely on Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawny, a notoriously unreliable source, Holmes points out.

Even for Holmes, Wroe’s Shelley can become rather befuddling since he is so little anchored in time and place. Without a chronological structure, the reader is confounded in a sort of constant present tense. What is missed is the steady accumulation of detail and insight built up over the biographer’s tracking a subject over several different periods in chronological order.

Readers steeped in Shelley will notice that a good deal of Wroe’s language is suffused with Shelley’s own vocabulary and with allusions to his poetry even when she is not directly discussing a poem. Writing in The New Yorker, poet-critic Adam Kirsch notes that Wroe often writes as though she has embedded the whole corpus of Shelley’s work in her sentences. Also, because Shelley is so concerned with primal scenes and images, Wroe’s own concatenation of same results is an act of what Kirsch calls “mediumship,” as though she is channeling the poet. While this feat is impressive, it leads, as well, to a lack of perspective. Wroe’s method, Kirsch concludes, provides no way to assess Shelley except by his own standards. Like Shelley, Wroe provides little sense of history or historical context.

This inward Shelley, as biographer Peter Ackroyd deems Wroe’s poet in The Times of London, is a fine way to honor the poet and to diminish biographers’ customary concern with the frail and flawed man. While Ackroyd praises Wroe for writing precisely the sort of book that makes Shelley’s imagination come alive, he recognizes that there is an attendant danger: The life of the man who abandoned his first wife and lived in such an irresponsible way that his contemporaries shunned him becomes invisible, and thus his life, in a sense, also evaporates in the ether of his verses. The poet becomes, in a word, all atmosphere.

Shelley is an acquired taste, writes critic Richard King, who suggests that responses to Wroe’s biography will depend very much on readers’ reactions to the poet. Shelley’s abstractions leave some readers cold, although Wroe warms them up, so to speak, by immersing readers in the actual scenes where Shelley penned his verse. She is able to do so not only because of memoirists like Trelawny but also because of Shelley’s surviving notebooks, now housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Selections from Shelley’s notebooks and drawings (reproduced in Being Shelley) lend an air of authenticity to the biographer’s prose. Even in scenes that seem fictionalized there is warrant in the notebooks for the biographer’s wording.

However, King raises an important issue: While Wroe may be faithful to Shelley’s texts, to what he witnessed as his life, that is not the same as saying she has reproduced the lifethat is, what actually happened to Shelley. King calls this the biographical fallacy: taking the text for the life itself. What Shelley wroteas far as biography is concernedis only his choice of many alternative ways of describing his experience. In effect, this hewing so closely to the Shelleyan text is a species of imagined autobiography rather than biography.

As other critics have noted, there is a tiresome circularity in Shelley’s thoughtrelieved, however, by brilliance of language and imagery. Much the same can be said for Wroe’s biography. The basic outlines of her argument are apparent almost from the first page, and so in the hands of a less accomplished writer such a book would surely seem redundant and too long by half. Even though Wroe writes well, except for all but the most devoted Shelleyan, it is likely that at several moments in Being Shelley the reader will revolt: Only so much ecstatic verse is absorbable, and thus for the less committed the high-toned language is likely to pall. Like Byron, the reader becomes wary. After a good deal of Shelley’s highfalutin talk, Byron rejected words that were all about utopia, an unreal realm that had to be viewed with much caution. Then, this is exactly what Ann Wroe has meant to produce: an incautious biography that sweeps the reader up in the vortex of a Shelleyan world. If vertigo results, thatfrom Shelley’s and Wroe’s perspectivessays as much about those who never wish to leave the ground as it does about those who want to fly.