Abstract
Between March and December 1819 Shelley wrote most of Prometheus Unbound and A Philosophical View of Reform, the whole of The Cenci, The Mask of Anarchy and Peter Bell the Third and several of his most famous lyrics, including the Ode to the West Wind — some 6000 lines of verse in all. After the usual hibernation, the lyric impulse took command again in the spring, and the unity among the lyrics written between September 1819 and July 1820 makes it natural to group them together in this chapter.
And walks with angel-step upon the winds.
Erasmus Darwin, Loves of the Plants
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Notes To X: Blithe Spirit
The imagery of the boughs probably arose because Shelley was so impressed by the waterspouts he saw out at sea from Leghorn in the summer of 1819. They looked like tree-trunks, and he refers to ‘the black trunks of the waterspouts’ in A Vision of the Sea. The clouds near the waterspout would then be seen as being shaken off the boughs of the waterspout tree. See Henning Krabbe, Shelleys Poesi (Copenhagen, 1953), pp. 276–7.
H. D. Grant, Cloud and Weather Atlas (New York, 1944), p. 44. Plate I in Ludlam and Scorer’s Further Outlook (1954) shows a cloudscape like Shelley’s, except that the low clouds are fractocumulus not fractostratus.
See also Ludlam and Scorer’s Cloud Study (1957), p. 61.
For background to this paragraph, see J. Ruskin, Modern Painters; K. Badt, John Constable’s Clouds (Routledge, 1950);
W. J. Humphreys, Fogs and Clouds (Baltimore, 1926.)
For details of this banner cloud, see J. S. Collis, The Moving Waters (1955), p. 28. For photographs, see Grant, Cloud and Weather Atlas, pp. 90–1.
Hardy’s phrase. See E. Hardy, Thomas Hardy (1954), p. 218.
A Clutton-Brock, Shelley, the Man and the Poet, p. 226. See also R. Bridges, Milton’s Prosody (O.U.P., 1921), pp. 96–9.
See B. R. Pollin, Musicfor Shelley’s Poetry (1974).
See preface to L. Vivante’s English Poetry (1950). The ‘New Critics’ are severely mauled by
W. C. Barton in Shelley and the New Criticism (1973).
E. Legouis and L. Cazamian, History of English Literature (1948 edition), p. 1058.
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© 1984 Desmond King-Hele
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King-Hele, D. (1984). Blithe Spirit. In: Shelley. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06803-6_10
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