Shelley Percy Bysshe - Being Shelley: the poets search for himself

T his book is an experiment. It 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. It is a book about Shelley the poet, rather than Shelley the man. The distinction was one he himself was sure of. The poet & the man, he wrote in 1821, are two different natures; though they exist together they may be unconscious of each other, & incapable of deciding on each other's powers & effects by any reflex act.

The man who was Shelley is not neglected. He was the dragging shadow with which the soul had to live. But the usual priorities of biography are reversed. Rather than writing the life of a man into which poetry erupts occasionally, my hope is to reconstruct the world of a poet into which earthly life keeps intruding. This, I believe, is how things were for Shelley. The lives of great writers and thinkers are not principally a succession of ordinary events in the day-to-day world. They live, and often move, elsewhere.

Sheer astonishment at Shelley's poems made me write this book; astonishment, and regret that his spiritual force seems to have been largely forgotten. In the twentieth century his biography was rewritten to recover, rightly, his political radicalism. As a result he has been brought severely to earth, as if this is the only way to make him strong, sharp and relevant to us. But if the life of the spirit is man's most vital resource and means of change - as Shelley believed it is - he has truly revolutionary things to suggest to us. To dwell on his metaphysics does not blunt his challenge or still his urgency at all.

My sources have been almost entirely Shelley's own words: in poetry, prose, letters, recorded conversations, and especially his notebooks, preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Huntingdon Library in San Marino, California. Of the mountain of literary criticism on Shelley I have read what seems best. But his is the only mind whose labyrinths I want to explore - through his confident, flowing essays, his scratched-out, stumbling efforts to describe his visions, and also in his pauses.

This book does not proceed chronologically. It takes seriously Shelley's statement that a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. Its narrative track is the poet's quest for truth through the steadily rarefying elements of earth, water, air and fire. It is an adventure story of Shelley's search to discover, in his words,whence I came, and where I am, and why.

These questions enthralled and obsessed him. Everything Shelley proposed and pursued had its basis in his search for the meaning of life and the truth of his being. His friends and lovers - Byron, Mary, Leigh Hunt - complained about his devotion to mystifying metaphysics and wished he could be weaned away from it, but Shelley's emphasis made perfect sense. No revolution in the moral and social order could take place until he, and all men and women, knew themselves for what they were and could unlock the true power they possessed.

Some readers may complain, as Shelley's friends did when they read his works, that this book is not about real life. I would disagree. And, more to the point, so would he.