Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself

by Ann Wroe

From Ann Wroe--author of highly and widely praised Pontius The Biography of an Invented Man --comes another singularly iconoclastic a book about Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the greatest poets in the Western tradition, that is concerned at once with the making of poetry and the transforming power of it. Extraordinary for its elegance of style and complete immersion in Shelley’s work, Being Shelley aims to turn the poet’s life inside rather than tracing the events of a life in which poetry erupts occasionally, it tracks the inner journey of a spirit struggling to escape and create.

In her own quest to understand Shelley, Ann Wroe takes up the questions that consume the poet Who, or what, was he? What was his purpose? Where had he come from? And where was he going? By answering those questions, Shelley sought to free and empower not only himself, but the entire human race. His revolution would shatter the Earth’s illusions, shock men and women with new visions, find true love and liberty--and take everyone with him.

Now, for the first time, this passionate and radical quest is put at the center of Shelley’s life. The result is a Shelley who has never been seen in biography before.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, History, Romanticism, Literary Criticism, Biography Memoir

464 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2007

About the author

Ann Wroe is a journalist and author - working as Briefings and Obituaries editor of The Economist. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature and the English Association.

Reviews

[Sean Barrs · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been a very long time since I spoke about Shelley, though I have never forgotten anything he taught me. I have carried his words with me ever since I discovered them.

I can honestly say no other writer has affected me so much; no other writer has intellectually stimulated me to such a degree, and no other writer has made me understand myself on a such a level: he woke me up.

Ideas are powerful. And Shelley put a potent one in my head that will always linger there. He made me imagine a world free of all cruelty and suffering, a world where every being is free and perfectly in tune with their environment. His words and ideas are classified by today’s standards as idealistic, romantic, lofty and the stuff of dreams. But do they have to be?

I fundamentally believe that the romantic movement of which he was a part of had a greater understanding of reality than we do today. They saw the corruption. They saw how we were destroying the environment. And they proposed alternatives. They idealised nature. They idealised Mother Earth. And they wanted to save her. If they walked the world today, they would weep. They would shudder with disgust at what we have done. And it is because of that that I believe we need to reconnect with such romantic thought, we need to remember who we are and what our purpose is.

The ecosystem is fragile, and we need to protect it. We need to be the shepherd to the flock, not the harbinger of its doom. And this what the romantics envisioned, Shelley chief among them. Poetry is the ultimate expression of thought; it is the barest reflection of the soul: it is the essence of who the poets were and what they wanted. Through poetry as an artifice, these writers were able to represent the world as they saw it: they were able to find themselves. And, to a lesser extent, help their readers find these ideals to.

This biography touches the heart of Shelley and his poetry. It brings both the idea of “poet” and “man” together, celebrating his life and work. And, for me, it was food for the soul that I savoured over many months.

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[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am astonished at the skill and clarity with which the author of this biography has defined the scope and approach to her biography of Shelley, and the beauty of the language she uses to tell his truly interesting man's story. I thought that Richard Holmes' biography would never be equaled or superceeded, and I don't expect Wroe to replace him. She has found a way to focus her questions and concerns about Shelley in order to make a superb addition to our knowledge and insight into Shelly's mentality, his intellectual and emotional life.

Thirteen years later (2021).
Now and again I've thought about this biography over the years since I read it. I really must read it a second time. Nonetheless, because recently two persons have "liked" my first thoughts, and at the risk of distortions that arise from a faulty memory, I am adding remarks of critical substance, I hope, to my effusions of years ago.

First of all, Wroe's book is a product of an extraordinarily intrusive empathy. She attempts to record her experience of occupying and inhabiting the body and mind of Shelley and to tell of what she saw as an alien "invisible eye" (Emerson) as she reconstructs the trajectory of the course or his life. We should take her title, Being Shelley, quite literally. As she writes in her introduction: "[Being Shelley] is an attempt to write the life of a poet from the inside out: that is, from the perspective of the creative spirit struggling to discover its true nature." She designed her narrative quite effectively in an entirely original and most interesting way to achieve her purpose.

She organizes her perceptions - as a trained (and highly skilled) medievalist very well might - into four parts, entitled Earth, Water, Air and Fire. In each part she describes each of Shelly's ways of being in the world - from purely earthy (and Earth-bound) interests and derivative behaviors to his experience of purely transcendent perceptions and their derivative behaviors.

She is ever mindful, however, that she is writing "a book about Shelley the poet, rather than Shelley the man." [I'm not sure how this poet (or most any other) wasn't simultaneously a man/human being. I have never fathomed disembodied spirits, and Wroe doesn't explain how such a being might be constituted. But never mind.] Accordingly each part of her book begins with a discussion of his poetry and his experiences that yielded images and imagery that he added to his poetic vocabulary and "dictionary." Then she proceeds with her narrative of each of Shelley's modes of being in the world and the poetry he wrote from each plane - or compartment - of his existence.

Quite ingenious - that design. Of course, I've simplified and distorted these matters here, necessarily, I think. Nonetheless, I've read at least 400 biographies of literary figures over the last thirty or forty years, perhaps more. I hardly remember many of them, but I do see them on shelves and in stacks about the place. I am sure, however, that I've not encountered any other life narrative that unfolds in this particularly original and pleasing way.

[Charles Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the graduate school I attended, Keats was king. That had a lot to do with the university's possession of valuable Keats manuscripts and letters, and with the Keats scholars it attracted to the faculty. As a result, Shelley was somewhat overlooked. Though the two poets have a lot in common, Keats is more hard-edged, more precisely descriptive than Shelley, whose verse has a quality that I like to compare to the paintings of the Impressionists -- a play of light and shadow, a sense of the evanescent. I love them both, but there is a ... for want of a better word, spirituality about Shelley's poems that I have come to appreciate. I've had Ann Wroe's book, which was sent to me as a review copy, on my shelves for some time now. And now that I've read it, I'd recommend it to almost anyone who wants to know what Shelley was about.

First off, he was New Age before the age: liberated by his disbelief in traditional religion -- indeed, hotly antagonistic to traditional religion -- so that he became a dabbler into all things mystical and spiritual. Like Lord Byron (and unlike Keats), he had an independent income that allowed him to explore things that society forbade or frowned upon: atheism, free love, radical politics, all things antiestablishment. But his rebellion was more intellectual than physical.

Wroe's portrait of Shelley is a work of impressionistic criticism -- a mode not much indulged in lately, but one that she revives brilliantly. She thinks like Shelley and sometimes writes like Shelley. She explores his life and art through his relationship to the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. They provided Shelley not only with the imagery of his poems but also with the portals of entry for his exploration of nature. She doesn't give us "readings" or "interpretations" of his poems so much as give us examples of how his thoughts and feelings coalesced in them. But anyone who wants to understand "To a Skylark" or "Ode to the West Wind" or "Prometheus Unbound" will find rich insight into them. She draws heavily on Shelley's notebooks, re-creating for us the process of composition by reproducing the fragments, heavy with strikeouts and marginalia, and occasional drawings and doodles, from which he assembled the finished works. This is not as dry as it sounds, for she weaves them into her narrative, sometimes stunningly, as in the observation that the last words he wrote were in his notebook were "an aching question: 'Then, what is Life I cried --' The page was folded at the top. On the joining sheet, in faint outline, a boat began to appear." Shortly after writing the fragment and sketching the boat, he set out in his own boat for his death.

[Ricky Ganci · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the strangest biography I’ve ever read. It was about as non-sequential as anything I have ever read—the order of events had absolutely nothing to do with what we were learning about Percy Shelley. Organized by elements, Wroe examines Shelley’s life as made up of his search for the Spirit of Beauty, and how he went about doing that. What I really liked about it was how Wroe portrayed him as a sort of mysterious and fantastical figure who predicted his own downfall and never really found what he was looking for until he realized that he was the thing he was looking for. The research that went into this volume’s creation must have been staggering and in-depth. All the discussions of drawings and sketches alongside the poetry gave me a perspective on Shelley that I hadn’t taken previously. I felt the romantic spirit of the poets as I was studying, and though I can’t come to the same conclusions that Shelley made about the world we live in, I definitely see how he came to them. The book had an undeniable metaphysical air to it—as the author mentions in her Acknowledgements—but I think that was what made it so enjoyable. Very unorthodox and cool, I could get used to reading poetical biographies if they all read like this one.

[Bertie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her writing is extraordinary - hard to believe she and Shelley lived so far apart in time. She writes with an almost supernatural ability - as if she has commandeered his mind and body. But it isn’t just her amazing understanding of his brain; her exquisite writing matches his genius.

[Manda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shelley was a certifiable nutter, if this book and the ones I've read on the Wollstonecraft/Godwin sisters are any indication. The experimental style the author's taken here does seem to give a sense of how completely ungrounded in anyone else's reality he was, which makes for an interesting read.

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting approach, a biography organized by idea, rather than chronology. Wroe's attempt to get inside Shelley's head is more successful at some points than others, but having read this, I certainly feel I know a good deal more about him.

[Hannah Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful biography. Really enjoyed this.

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This experimental biography approaches Shelley's life not a as linear biography, but rather a thematic and elemental one, divided into four sections on the natural aspects of earth, water, air, and fire.

This makes a lot of sense to a writer like Wroe, particularly with the Romantic poets, and it pays dividends here. It's as if Wroe sublimated herself in the biographies and poetry of Shelley and returned with a non-linear account of the four elements within Shelley's imaginative life. So, for instance, Earth not only focuses on Shelley's writing on those subjects but also aspects directly related to them, such as plant life, growth, leaves, trees, and so forth. Same for Water: rivers, streams, sailing, boating, the icy peaks of Chamonix. Air? Breathing, wind, balloons, sails, the poetic voice. Fire? Burning, stars, the funeral pyre, embers.

It mostly adds up although I wouldn't necessarily advocate this for the neophyte Shelleyan. Start with Richard Holmes's all time great linear biography and if your thirst isn't sated, proceed to here. Still, a rare look at a rare poet.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is neither a conventional biography nor a work of literary criticism, but something in between. This is fitting, for Shelley oscillated between multiple poles—empiricism and idealism, atheism and panentheism, with poetry inscribing the world that is and as it should be (the Poet as alchemist). All of this expressed in language at once precise and dreamlike.

Wroe’s decision to evoke the experience of life as a poet rather than a man’s life is imaginative. I suspect I admire the result more than I might have liked the man, with his reflexive antiauthoritarian behavior and his irresponsibility in matters of love and family, his proclamation of equality with his expensive tastes (the tradesmen whose bills he left unpaid apparently not among those who should share in this equality). Along with all this an inflated sense of the greatness of his own spirit, resulting in another oscillation, one between a Hume-influenced materialism that rejected hope of an afterlife as wishful thinking and the reluctance to conceive that a soul such as his should cease to be.

I came to this book having read little of Shelley before, in fact, of the Romantics in general (apart from Blake) beyond what Palgrave included in his Golden Treasury. I was surprised to find that Shelley’s vision and language are just what I needed in this winter of our discontent.

[Peter Chandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

The unique approach of Ann Wroe's biography makes for an exceedingly worthy and noble attempt at recapturing the Romantic spirit of the poet Shelley for the modern age. It's depth of incite certainly speaks of a great labour of love and it all makes for a most inspiring and thought-provoking read. It is though inherently somewhat flawed, in its very approach of forgoing a traditional chronological narrative, of becoming somewhat confusing, elusive and infuriating at times. I cannot feel that the poetic spirit can be quite so completely abstracted from the material world in which it finds itsef and so with the man, in reading the book I did from time to time feel a greater need to pin him down in time and getter a clearer idea of the progress of evolution of his character. Indeed perhaps in common with the subject of the book itself! It may well be telling of the book's success that the area in which it is flawed seem to be those same area in which Shelley was himself.

[Peter Vicaire · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was written in an interesting format/manner - or as the author describes, "from the inside out," as she used much of Shelley's own poetry to mirror and set up his own bio. It's a neat approach and provides quite a fascinating look at a cat who was definitely out there, especially for his time, but whose thoughts on life (and death) resonate loud and clear today.

[Mark McKenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shelly was a wild man. Didn't finish this; I had too much required reading for reviews. I will return to it, though. "Being Shelley" is the kind of book you can pick up anytime and sink back into. I went to high school with one of Shelley's distant relatives, also named Percy. So I'm invested:)

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

A man, he insisted, "cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

This is true; as anybody knows, when you're working in a medium, you're working in it — you call it something else, you might as well. That's not the point. This is for people who don't understand, or who are hasty, or in the audience, or critics — it only gets you so far. It's true enough that you're writing, but that's not what "true enough" means — it's only blank PAGES if you don't give yourself over to it, if you don't know how to calm the mind down and steer it, if you aren't not unattentive to times you'd rather be outside the window you're gazing through, and heed it. (So much of this is about heeding!)

On the back cover of an 1817 notebook he scratched with a knife, lengthways, in inch-high capitals, the words SINCERITY AND ZEAL. The motto had been his at least since 1812, a stout Godwinian tag a young man who knew he had truth to tell, and meant to tell it. He needed to share, communicate, publish, sell, urge by example, as long as he had strength and breath. This was his duty as a Poet . . . Quite unconvincingly [at times], Shelley claimed not to care [about popular success, at all ... ]. His poems were for the few and initiated, the Συνετοί [Prudent], not the man in the street or the critic in his den. He was 'morbidly indifferent,' he told Byron, whose works sold by the cartload, as to whether the reviewers liked him or not.

Mmm-hmm. Of course, for a guy whose idea of social reform included a 1000-yr. plan, who felt — not unjustly, given Rush LIMBAUGH, fist-fights in BARS, and ANTI-SEMITISM that lead to NAZI GERMANY — that, in the wake of the French Revolution, and the suffering it caused, universal suffrage was rushing things, not pacing society to keep up with itself (my words — not his!). A lot of reform needed to be done first. We could be plenty busy.

[Courtney Doss · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was perfectly fine, except that it was not at all what I wanted. I went in expecting a biography and what I got instead was very longwinded musings about Shelley's personality. Details of his life are brought up piecemeal, mentioned in conjunction with excerpts of his poetry and discussions of reoccurring themes that the author really goes on and on about. I think this book could have been much more effective if it had been shorter. It's not meant to be a comprehensive biography, so why bloat the theses of each section with stream of consciousness writing?

Ann Wroe is a good writer in the creative sense. I was particularly impressed with her handling of the Coda section, wherein she discusses the death of Shelley and returns to the themes she discussed throughout the book. She writes beautifully, and I highlighted plenty from that section. I just wish that the rest of the book had leaned into that beautiful, concise, poetic language that worked so well for me in the end than into the repetitive reciting of Shelley's own poetry and the same people and events in his life again and again.

Another flaw of this book was the format in which I read it. How much of that is the fault of the author, I can't say, but regardless it is a fault in the book. As I said, this book quotes frequently from Shelley's poetry, prose, letters, etc. but the text is not at all separated from Wroe's writing. This meant that sometimes I was left confused about where Shelley's writing began and Wroe's ended or vice versa. It really slowed down my reading and was a touch annoying, if I'm being honest.

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel as if I had read Peter Pan but Peter was a real life person with real concerns and issues.

She saw him too, in dreams; Hogg heard his light, quick steps still running, and Trelawney, gazing at the sea, heard his shrieking laugh again.
[...] And by a pond in London one might find a boat of folded paper not much larger than a dragonfly, inscribed with lines that had begun to blur and run:

I am not
Your obedient servant,
P. B. Shelley

Far away, serenely, Vesper glittered in the darkening sky.

[Ryan Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself” by Ann Wroe provides an insightful and profound examination of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s complex life and literary contributions. The book skillfully weaves together the two facets of Shelley’s identity—the passionate poet and the intellectual individual grappling with his personal struggles, even understanding how his artistic temperament affected his personality. It highlights the richness of his experiences, from certain tumultuous relationships to his radical ideas, while also delving into the beauty and intensity of his evocative poetry.

[VALTER ULAJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear fellow readers: This is not a biography in the traditional sense. In fact, I would not call it a biography since, it seems, neither does its author. This, we can accurately say, is a book about Shelly and his many perspectives on matters concerning life and the realm beyond it. If you like philosophy, you will like this book; if you like beautiful and poetic writing, then this book is worth reading. Hope you enjoy it, as I did.

[Telyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well researched and fascinating but rather disorganized look at Shelley. The almost stream-of-consciousness approach to the writing the author uses in an attempt to look inside Shelley's death-obsessed mind is bewildering at best and makes this book difficult to read.

[Susan Baumgartner]

Excited to delve into the backstory of this man. Manage a trois??? You go, Shelley....
Sigh, my life isn't such that I can curl up with this one for the time it deserves.

[Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shelley's poetry has caused many a young girl's head to spin and Ann Wroe is no exception. A problematic book.