Shelley: Selected Poetry (Penguin Poetry Library)

I'm not the fan of poetry that some people are. I've been more likely to buy and read anthologies that cherry pick, rather than read entire books by one poet--with a few favorite exceptions such as Shakespeare, Donne, Dickenson--and especially Keats, which I suspect is spoiling me for lesser romantic poets. The book of Keats' poetry I rated a five. Even if I wasn't crazy about his one epic poem, Endymion, I found so much depth in his work. Not simply in the sense of how specific poems hit me, but that almost every single one, even ones I wasn't familiar with and weren't among the most famous, struck me as a gem.

I didn't feel that way about Shelley. The back of this edition says that his work "has been criticized for its didacticism and undisciplined emotion." If by that is meant it's larded with classical allusions and filled with so many flowers and birds I find it at times very girly--well, I can't help but agree. Like Coleridge, who I read just before this, Shelley strikes me as full of poetic cliches. A friend who has read a lot in this period tells me that the Romantics were all about the cliches--but with Keats his treatment of conventions felt fresh. The introduction says of Shelley that "no poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety." Harsh perhaps, and although I found him more worthwhile than Coleridge, there were perhaps only a dozen poems here out of the 71 included here I really liked, and few I'd call out as ones I loved: "Ozymandias" (my favorite--I loved the irony, something I found rare in Shelley), "Love's Philosophy," "The Cloud" (with imagery that really seemed fresh to me rather than canned), "Music, When Soft Voices Die" (often anthologized and set to music) and "Autumn: A Dirge." All of them among his shorter, lyric poems.

The introduction also says of Shelley that "if one must grade poets, he comes, in the hierarchy of his period, well after Wordsworth and Keats." I haven't read Wordsworth extensively enough to judge if I'd agree--or enough of the other Romantic poets certainly. But I can't help agree about this assessment of Shelley when compared to Keats, which is why this book of Shelley's poems is rated a couple of steps lower than Keats. ( )