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    <name><![CDATA[W.]]></name>
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  <read_at>Sat Jan 17 00:00:00 -0800 2009</read_at>
  <date_added>Sat Jan 17 16:11:05 -0800 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Sat Jan 17 16:28:19 -0800 2009</date_updated>
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    <body><![CDATA[I'm reading this slowly and really savoring it. The biographer is a masterful writer and researcher, and this work also contains in-depth portraits of Shelley's extremely influential parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft) and many of the literary luminaries (Coledrige, Lamb, etc.) who were intimates and influences in their circle. Many of these intellectuals were born or bred firebrands, and I find this books is disabusing me of the notion that these thinkers aspired to or achieved propriety in their earthly dealings. Far from it! Many of these souls were metoric, Promethean, dangerous to those who would love them, and idealistic even to the point of self-destruction. Many were ostracized or vilified. Nevertheless, these alchemized souls left a supernal residue in the forms of books, paintings, music, children, and sometimes--rarely--new ways of seeing the world, or conceptions of individual liberty. Seymour pays equal heed to them all, and writes perceantly and empathetically of the great divide between the augustan ideals to which many of these creators and thinkers aspired, and the mortal travails which inevitably lay a drag to their initially untrammeled and heady race towards history.]]></body>
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