Areopagus Volume LVII

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the fifty seventh volume of the Areopagus. Two hundred and thirty one years ago today Percy Bysshe Shelley was born, a man who has not unreasonably been called England's greatest ever poet. Had he lived longer — for Shelley, living in self-imposed exile, died in a storm off the Italian coast at the age of just twenty nine — then this accolade might be indisputable. Alas, what he left was more than enough:

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

Radical, resolute, indomitable, inspired; through few other voices did Romanticism speak so powerfully, and hardly anywhere else can we find a poet so committed to the human spirit in all its coequal misery and glory than in Per…