The poetry
of Shelley is the expression of what the children of the revolution--men
and women who were brought up in and believed the revolutionary
gospel--thought about these things.
But it is more than that. Of no poet in English, nor perhaps in any
other tongue, could it be said with more surety, that the pursuit of the
spirit of beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley it interfused all
nature and to possess it was the goal of all endeavour. The visible
world and the world of thought mingle themselves inextricably in his
contemplation of it. For him there is no boundary-line between the two,
the one is as real and actual as the other. In his hands that old trick
of the poets, the simile, takes on a new and surprising form. He does
not enforce the creations of his imagination by the analogy of natural
appearances; his instinct is just the opposite--to describe and illumine
nature by a reference to the creatures of thought. Other poets, Keats
for instance, or Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and Homer,
might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter like leaves flying before
the wind. They might describe a poet wrapped up in his dreams as being
like a bird singing invisible in the brightness of the sky.
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