SHELLEY'S IDEAS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 921, 5 April 1957, Page 14

SHELLEY'S IDEAS

SHELLEY AT WORK, a Critical Inquiry, by Neville Rogers; -Oxford, Clarendon Press, English price 35/-. SINCE Mr Eliot patronised him, and Dr Leavis laid his dead hand on the Ode to the West Wind, Shelley’s repu-

tation in England has slumped. Only in America has modern scholarship been seriously concerned with his development and the full implications of his major poetry. The American work has been valuable, but ponderous; one- sighs for a latter-day Shelleyan as graceful and sensitive in appreciation as Professor Blunden. Mr Rogers-a London schoolmaster, aided by the Leverhulme Foundation to make a full exploration of the Shelley Notebooks now in the Bodleian-has not the Blunden touch; nor hag he produced another Road to Xanadu. But those who can _ break through the barrage of methodology he lays down in the best American manner, will find in this conscientious study some rewarding interpretations and some really useful new material. Mr Rogers works out a representative group of favourite Shelleyan images and symbols, then proceeds to examine some of the more important later poems in the light of first drafts, notebook memoranda, and correspondence in Shelley’s developing thought. He demonstrates in formidable detail ity .Platonic underpinning from Queen Mab onwards; even more usefully, perhaps, he fully elucidates Shelley’s debt to Wieland and Calderon. A final chapter on "Poetry and the Power of Mind" is disappointingly scrappy. But the main thesis-that Shelley is a genuinely philosophical poet whose symbols are linked into a coherent and impressive metaphysical system

-is firmly sustained. Rather unfairly, the common reader may be more grateful for clear reproductions of some of Shelley’s fascinating little notebook sketches than for the pages of solemn commentary upon them.

James

Bertram