The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life... is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you,... And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems and new!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Keats is minute in observation, with an eye to every particular of every object; Shelley, usually working on a panoramic scale, ge...neralizes and reduces, in order that the details of his scenes may fit within a unity of the whole. Keats is naturalistic and representative, whereas Shelley more noticeably imposes his subjective conceptions upon what he sees. Shelley's vision is usually directed either up or down, while Keats looks out before him, horizontally; he glances at the sky casually, albeit observantly, while Shelley's gaze is earnest and painful, as if he strove to pierce the atmosphere and arrive at some ultimate vision above the air itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist w...hen the aesthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »