SOURCE: Walter, Nicolas. “Shelley Right and Wrong.” New Statesman 101, no. 2617 (15 May 1981): 18-19.

In the following excerpt, Walter presents a favorable review of Shelley and His World, calling the work “excellent” and “refreshing.”

Shelley was so wrong about so much. Despite his famous claim, poets are not the legislators of the world, and he was more unacknowledged than most, both during his short life and long after his death. His published books of fiction were dreadful in every sense. His first published book of verse was withdrawn and destroyed because it included a plagiarised poem. His first published work of non-fictional prose got him expelled from Oxford, and helped to drive him away from his family and his class. His first major poem helped to drive him further away and also to drive his children away from him, and got its publishers prosecuted for 30 years. His second major poem...