A new essay published on 3rd May, 2026 by the Black Herald Press
https://www.blackheraldpress.com/post/public-vs-private-shelley-s-poems-of-love-and-redress-an-essay-by-anthony-costello
Sample paragraphs...
‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘Ode to Liberty’ and ‘Adonais’ are signature poems examining political issues and social mores; 'The Mask of Anarchy’ and its trenchant call for justice and suffrage, ‘Ode to Liberty’ with its pan-historical litany of tyrants and emancipated peoples in a dialectical struggle, nineteen stanzas detailing the suppression of people, and past violations of human rights. Both poems honour the importance of the individual. Shelley describes the oppressed as ‘glorious people’ in ‘Ode to Liberty’ and as ‘Heroes’ in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. Of Keats he writes in ‘Adonais’ that ‘The One remains, the many change and pass’. Shelley identifies with each person’s right to freedom, and self-identifies with those ‘who drew new figures’ on the ‘fragile glass’ [of the world] in ‘The Triumph of Life’. Individualism is a triumph of life. Shelley’s poetical works and prose are an attempt at making his own mark on the world; the lines that Shelley and Keats draw intersecting in poetry and life, the Romantic period notable for its series of criss-crossing figures in science, art, poetry and politics, and the indelible marks left behind.
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Shelley’s perfunctory treatment of Harriet Westbrook, leaving her and their children, and eloping with his [soon-to-be] second wife, Mary Godwin [Shelley], indubitable evidence of his bad, perhaps evil, character. The ensuing tragic suicide of Harriet creating more antipathy toward him; a disdain strong enough to overlook Shelley’s life-long fight for human rights, a dislike, perhaps hatred, strong enough to supersede any empathy for his personal loss — ‘I wept, I thought it was a dream, I weep’ (‘Epipsychidion’) — not forgetting the subsequent refusal to offer him custody of his children, Ianthe and Charles, due to his social radicalism and professed atheism. However, the private poems of love transmit healing and conciliatory light and offer his detractors pause for thought; a chance to see another side to Shelley, the altruistic tone in his poetry, and a sensitivity which is the source of the socially-conscious public poems, and central to his personality as expressed at home. It’s impossible to detect a purposely cruel man in these poems. They are free of the masochism of struggle that dominate his public life, free of defensive strategies, and function as a form of redressal with regard to his reputation. They display an emotional honesty, perhaps naivety, that if explored more fully could have led to him writing about his childhood and creating his own songs of innocence and experience.
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Perhaps the political poems are the result of Shelley’s childhood experience of abandonment and alienation, the political rebel and love-at-all-cost philosopher aspects of a persona Shelley inhabits for his revolutionary purpose, a public poet who protects the wounded boy traumatised by beatings at Syon House Academy and Eton; bullied for being different to the group, the majority, terrorised for being who he is: poet, original thinker, prose writer, reader, revolutionary, libertarian, republican, moral atheist, a unique individual.
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The poems of love are a pool of lambent light in which the public face of the poet disappears. The private Shelley — often naive, needful, child-like — emerges in poems addressed to those he loves; poetry he locates in domestic settings and where loveliness is at one with the ordinary: ‘moss-grown trees’, ‘sunny grass’, a human voice, a bird singing, a love-thought expressed. Love in Shelley’s private mode of being is all-encompassing, a trance-like ecstasy. When he’s able to separate himself from the self-alienating aspects of ‘the public poet’, he becomes happy in his own happiness. Whereas Keats finds vicarious happiness in a nightingale’s song [of happiness], Shelley is happy in himself when he feels, and expresses, love in all its manifestations. In this state of relaxed bliss he can say: this is how I feel, this is who I am. What is most beautiful is love, particularly when love is aligned with ‘the individual life’, an exalted state of being true to oneself that Shelley wants each person to realise and experience.
