‘These Common Woes’: Shelley and Wordsworth

Abstract

We know that Shelley was exposed to Wordsworth’s poetry by 1811, during his stay in the Lake District (Blank, 1988, p. 26). On 2 January 1812, Shelley wrote out from memory Wordsworth’s poem, A Poet’s Epitaph, to send to Elizabeth Hitchener, explaining that he found the first stanzas ‘expressively keen’, and describing his hope that the poem would give ‘some idea of the Man’ (Shelley, 1964, I, p. 218). Yet within the week, Shelley wrote again to Elizabeth Hitchener. A 7 January letter suggests that Shelley already suspected that Wordsworth would fail to fill the exemplary role in which the earlier letter tried to cast him. This second letter is most explicit about Shelley’s disappointment with another member of the Wordsworth circle, Southey, whom he characterises as a kindly man, but without ‘the great character which once I linked him to … Once he was this character, everything you can conceive of practised virtue … Wordsworth & Coleridge I have yet to see’ (Shelley, 1964, I, p. 223). The conclusion at very least sounds a challenge to the two poets whom Shelley was never, as it turned out, to meet in person, but in whom he maintained a life-long interest.