Chapter 33 - Contemporary Reviews

Summary

Conservative reviewers berated Percy Shelley for his political radicalism, his opposition to religious orthodoxy, and his alleged personal immorality. The Tory Quarterly Review subjected Shelley to violent personal attacks, to which he responded in Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. In 1821, pirate editions of Queen Mab provoked some of Shelley’s most vituperative and partisan reviews. Nevertheless, even politically antagonistic reviewers acknowledged the aesthetic merits of Shelley’s poetry. Moreover, positive and negative reviews alike registered the originality of his stylistic innovations and experiments with poetic form. Many of the passages quoted by hostile reviewers as evidence of Shelley’s allegedly incomprehensible diction include striking examples of his distinctive figurative language. In perceptive articles by John Gibson Lockhart, the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine defended Shelley’s poetry while condemning his political principles. Meanwhile, Leigh Hunt consistently defended Shelley in the pro-reform Examiner. Eventually, the elegiac reception of Adonais fed into the posthumous mythologising of Shelley.