Shelley

Francis Thompson calls Poetry a “beautiful, wild, feline” creature: shut out from the Church, she may find shelter beneath the Evil One’s wings. Among the poets he would welcome home is Shelley, a “straying spirit of light.”

Writing in the early twentieth century, Thompson enters a debate over whether poetry can serve faith—or must be treated with suspicion. He sees in Shelley a poet whose childlike wonder and spontaneous imagination resist the polished, self-conscious habits of his own age. But how can a rebellious spirit, drawn to beauty and love, belong in a religious vision of the world? With vivid argument and close attention to Shelley’s poems, Thompson asks what poetry can reveal about the sacred—and what is lost when it is cast out. Can Shelley’s song lead toward the light Thompson sees within it?

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