Shelley in Season

Richard Holmes

• The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics by P.M.S. Dawson
  Oxford, 312 pp, £16.50, June 1980, ISBN 0 19 812095 8
• Shelley and his World by Claire Tomalin
  Thames and Hudson, 128 pp, £5.95, July 1980, ISBN 0 500 13068 X

If all poets have their psychic season, Shelley belongs to the very late stormy autumn and the very early frosty spring. His is a time of transitions: of high winds, wild hopes and freezing regrets. Both poetically and politically, it is an equinoctial world: restless, dangerous, brimming, beautiful and often cruel. This is the season of the Alastor-poet’s long pursuit, of Prometheus chained to his rock (pierced by ‘moon-freezing crystals’), of Julian’s evening ride with Count Maddalo, of the Wild West Wind, the breath of Autumn’s being.