The Sensitive Plant
We add another extract to show his almost unearthly skill in visualizing the wilder aspects of nature. Note the extreme simplicity and ease of the style:
We paused among the pines that stood
The giants of the waste,
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude
As serpents interlaced.
The Pine Forest
(d) His style is perfectly attuned to his purpose. Like all the finest lyrical styles, it is simple, flexible, and passionate. Sometimes, as in The Cenci, it rises to a commanding simplicity. The extracts already given sufficiently show this.
(e) Shelley’s limitations are almost as plain as his great abilities. His continual rhapsodizings tend to become tedious and baffling; in his narrative he is diffuse and argumentative; he lacks humor; and his political poetry is often violent and unreasonable.
(f) His Reputation. During his lifetime Shelley’s opinions obscured his powers as a poet. Even to Scott, who with all his Tory prejudices was liberal enough in his views on literature, he was simply “that atheist Shelley.” After his death his reputation rose rapidly, and by the middle of the nineteenth century his position was assured. By the curious alternation that seems to affect popular taste, his fame since that time has paled a little; but no fluctuations in taste can ever remove him from his place among the great.