Mr. Salt’s Shelley

Mr. Salt’s Shelley

The revised edition of PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, POET AND PIONEER, by Henry S. Salt (Watts and Co., 1s. net), may be welcomed as a useful corrective to “the orthodox and sentimental view of Shelley” advanced by his conservative-minded critics from Leslie Stephen to Mr. Clutton Brock. Mr. Salt, who has carefully sifted the biographical evidence, adopts in the main Trelawny’s estimate of Shelley’s character, and his study of “the poet-pioneer of the great democratic movements” is a cool and measured vindication of Shelley’s vehement championing of causes and reforms once bitterly opposed but now more or less accepted by “the privileged classes.”

The Guardian, 19 May, 1913, p. 5