The biography of a soul

This is a book that really ought not to work. Being Shelley is not quite a biography and not quite a critical reader and not quite anything most people will have seen before. If you want to know, in order, what happened in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley — where he went, who he met, what he did — you’d be best off looking elsewhere. If you’re an undergraduate looking for a line-by-line interpretive guide to his canon, likewise this is not your book.Yet I think Being Shelley will grow to be indispensible to anyone writing or thinking about the poet from now on — a vital companion to the two more conventional volumes that it isn’t.

Marrying a poetic style to a scholarly seriousness, Ann Wroe is, as she puts it, attempting ‘to write the life of a poet from the inside out’. The imaginative sympathy that we ask the literary critic to extend to the work, she extends to the life — or, at least, the inner life. Shelley wasn’t deeply interested in the objective truth, and nor is Wroe. ‘His imagination,’ one friend of the poet’s reported, ‘often presented past events to him as they might have been, not as they were.’

Set out in four themed sections (‘Earth’, ‘Water’, ‘Air’, ‘Fire’), this is the story of Shelley’s ‘poet-self’, the biography of a soul. And if the very idea makes you reach for something sharp with which to gouge out your own eyes, stay your hand. This is a startlingly good and original book, destined, I fear, to be widely and very badly imitated.

Wroe sets out from the proposition that the big questions for Shelley were ‘whence I came, and where I am, and why’; that to understand the poet you need to watch him grapple with those questions, and that to watch him grapple with them, you need to look at his own words.