Shelley’s Marvellous Poetic Genius. Here Prof. Cazamian’s view have been summarized. Shelley’s poetic genius was marvellous, though his span of life was very short, and it was cut off at twenty-nine. Shelley’s poetry is suffused with a creative beauty of a purely poetical quality which has appeared in no other English poet with the exception of Spenser, and to a lesser degree, Keats. Its dazzling images, its rapid rhythms, its grace and delicacy of touch, its exquisite melodies and harmonies, win us to forget the vagaries of the reformer in the perfection of the artist. The beauty of his verse is incomparable. His diction is magnificent. His lyricism is marvellous. His verse, responsive to the influence of every mood, trembles and sighs with alternative despondency and hope. “In the old to the West Wind it moves to stately music, wrapped in a garment of splendid imagery. In the lines To a Skylark it takes wing with its subject ‘in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.’ Alone among modern poets, Swinburne has surpassed him in variety of metre and music, but Swinburne used .his forms with greater self-consciousness and was often too intent upon the perfection of his workmanship to remember the vital qualities which Shelley never forgot.”
“No poet, ancient or modern, has equalled Shelley in the power of accumulating successions of sublime images in flowing verses; no poet has ever exhibited such inexhaustible resounds as in finding words metrically suited to the subtle and intricate wanderings of spiritual thought.”
He is not an unequal poet like Wordsworth; he is much more constantly a poet than Wordsworth. Shelley’s poetical career was of a shorter span than that of Byron and was concentrated within some ten years only. “Shelley’s life,” says Prof. Cazamian, “was one of passionate devotion to intellect, and this ardour explains how his ideas were transmuted into poetry.” In Byron we find more power of the intellect than of the imagination. In Shelley, on the contrary, the imagination is first and the intellect second.
