Shelley and the West Wind (1956)

Abstract

‘The source of poetry’, Shelley once remarked to Medwin, ‘is native and involuntary but requires severe labour in its development.’ It was his own practice, both at home and out of doors, to have a notebook with him whenever he could so that he might compose whenever the impulse came. Some twenty-eight of his notebooks survive. Since 1946, when Sir John Shelley Rolls added his great gift to Lady Shelley’s gift of 1893, some twenty of them have been available for study at the Bodleian, and today, by means of the photostat and the microfilm, they may be collated with those in America and elsewhere. It has, in consequence, now become possible to study a great number of his poems as they evolve from their ‘native and involuntary source’ through ‘severe labour’ marked by frenziedly scribbled and much corrected drafts into their fmal form or something approaching it. Interspersed, too, among the drafts he would scribble down all manner of related memoranda: quotations from Greek, Italian, Spanish, Latin, or French, abstracts from political, historical, scientific or philosophical works, prose-writings of his own, pen and pencil sketches, and a good deal of personal domestic matter. Out of all this we are enabled, very frequently, to obtain an unusually close glimpse into the hidden workings of genius. We get at the same time something like a ‘close-up’ of Shelley as he was.