Percy Bysshe Shelley

(Born: August 4, 1792 - Died: July 8, 1822)

English poet. Poe gives Shelley high praise in Poe’s review of The Drama of Exile and Other Poems (part II, BJ, Jan. 11, 1845). Much of his comment there is repeated in the first entry for a Marginalia installment from Southern Literary Messenger (May 1849). Poe seems to have been particularly fond of Shelley’s poem “The Senstive Plant.”

Shelly is mentioned in Poe’s review of Alciphron, a Poem, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1840.

“As examples of entire poems of the purest ideality, we would cite the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, the Inferno of Dante, Cervantes’ Destruction of Numantia, the Comus of Milton, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Burns’ Tam O’Shanter, the Auncient Mariner, the Christabel, and the Kubla Khan of Coleridge, and most especially the Sensitive Plant of Shelley, and the Nightingale of Keats.” (Review of The Culprit Fay and Alnwick Castle, from Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836)

Poe quotes from Shelley’s “I Arise from Dreams of Thee” in his lecture on “The Poetic Principle.”

A letter from Poe to J. R. Lowell (July 2, 1844): “I am profoundly excited by music, and by some poems — those of Tennyson especially — whom, with Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (occasionally) and a few others of like thought and expression, I regard as the sole poets.”

From Marginalia: “There is about the same difference between the epicyclic lines of Shelley, et id genus, and the epics of Hell-Fire Montgomery, as between the notes of a flute and those of the gong at Astor’s. In the one class the vibrations are unequal but melodious; the other have regularity enough, but no great deal of music, and a trifle too much of the tintamarre.” (Democratic Review, November 1844)

In Enigma, from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter (Feb. 2, 1833), Shelley is the answer to the quiz in lines 7-8: