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(Born: August 4, 1792 -
Died: July 8, 1822)
English poet.
xxxx. Poe gives Shelley high praise in Poe's review of The Drama of
Exile and Other Poems (part II, BJ, Jan. 11, 1845). Much of his comment
there is repeated in the first entry for a Marginalia installment from Southern
Literary
Messenger
(May 1849)
Shelly is mentioned in Poe's review of Alciphron, a Poem, Burton's
Gentleman's Magazine, January 1840.
"As examples of entire poems of the purest ideality,
we would cite the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, the Inferno of
Dante,
Cervantes' Destruction of Numantia, the Comus of Milton, Pope's Rape of
the Lock, Burns' Tam O'Shanter, the Auncient Mariner, the Christabel,
and
the Kubla Khan of Coleridge, and most especially the Sensitive Plant of
Shelley, and the Nightingale of Keats." (Review of The Culprit Fay
and Alnwick
Castle, from Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836)
Poe quotes from Shelley's "I Arise from Dreams of Thee" in his lecture
on "The Poetic Principle."
A letter from Poe to J. R. Lowell (July 2, 1844): "I am profoundly
excited by music, and by some poems--those of Tennyson
especially--whom, with Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (occasionally) and a
few
others of like thought and expression, I regard as the sole poets."
From Marginalia: "There is about the same difference between the
epicyclic
lines of Shelley, et id genus, and the epics of Hell-Fire
Montgomery,
as between the notes of a flute and those of the gong at Astor's. In
the
one class the vibrations are unequal but melodious; the other have
regularity
enough, but no great deal of music, and a trifle too much of the tintamarre."
(Democratic Review,
November 1844)
In Enigma, from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter (Feb.
2, 1833), Shelley is the answer to the quiz in lines 7-8:
"A bard of brilliant but unlicensed page
At once the shame and glory of our age"
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