Every modern school of poets, once
out of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and
sentimental. None has done better than to spangle a confused sensuous
pageant with some sparks of truth, or to give it some symbolic
relation to moral experience. And this Shelley has done as well as
anybody: all other poets also have been poets of illusion. The
distinction of Shelley is that his illusions are so wonderfully fine,
subtle, and palpitating; that they betray passions and mental habits
so singularly generous and pure. And why? Because he did not believe
in the necessity of what is vulgar, and did not pay that demoralising
respect to it, under the title of fact or of custom, which it exacts
from most of us. The past seemed to him no valid precedent, the
present no final instance. As he believed in the imminence of an
overturn that should make all things new, he was not checked by any
divided allegiance, by any sense that he was straying into the vapid
or fanciful, when he created what he justly calls "Beautiful idealisms
of moral excellence."
That is what his poems are fundamentally--the _Skylark_, and the
_Witch of the Atlas_, and the _Sensitive Plant_ no less than the
grander pieces. He infused into his gossamer world the strength of his
heroic conscience.
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