Thanks for both, Robin.
My wife is rapt; she has printed out the whole poem, and says it speaks to her
even more than her favourite Wordsworth passages.
She says she twisted her ankle part way through the Romantic poets course twenty
years ago, and missed Shelley altogether!
I recall Donald Davie long ago ('Purity of Diction...') made a case for a
levelheaded rather than rhapsodic Shelley on the strength of 'Julian and
Maddalo'. But I guess it remains on the unread or under-read side of Shelley.
Max
Quoting Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>:
> Specifically:
>
> Most wretched men
> Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
> They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
>
> Shelley, "Julian and Maddalo", Line 544.
>
> Robin
>
> > "... in the preface to the collection [Elizabeth Barrett (Browning)]
> > insisted on the sorrow and suffering necessary to the poet, and she quoted
> > from Shelley's 'Julian and Maddalo' to clinch her argument that 'we learn
> > in suffering what we teach in song.' ... "
>
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