Simon Haines, Shelley's Poetry: The Divided Self. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-312-16551X. Price: £40/$59.95.

Haines' stated objective is to stimulate interest in 'poetry as itself' and not in terms of some other thing, such as biographical detail, the history of philosophy, or an abstruse theoretical position. The study is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 deals with nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism of Shelley. Chapter 2 offers some insight into Shelley's 'Views of Poetry.' Chapters 3-6 provide closer readings on the central canonical poems in a roughly chronological order (beginning with Queen Mab). There are particularly strong musings on Julian and Maddalo, Ode to the West Wind, and The Triumph of Life. Haines is strongest in the first two chapters, which might suffer only from excessive systematizing. The chapters of literary criticism, while sensitive in places, seem to fall short of his stated objectives, and the critical preferences he outlines in the opening of the study are paradoxically at odds with his own critical method. Chapter 1 is divided into separate discussions of Shelley's detractors and his defenders. Some may find this an unnecessarily dualistic (or excessively simplified) way of thinking about the history of Shelley criticism. The approach is helpful, however, as it isolates some of the objections to Shelley common to both nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics while highlighting the ways in which Shelley's 'detractors' differ as well. The overview is particularly helpful for those who are not familiar with the major critical statements (Eliot, Leavis, Arnold and the usual suspects) but also useful for those who would benefit from a synopsis of the views of J.T. Coleridge, J. G. Lockhart, W.S. Walker, and Hazlitt. Haines is particularly sympathetic to Hazlitt and argues that his appreciation (and criticism) of Shelley was based on aesthetic principles, and, according to Haines, so avoided the political and religious bias characteristic of his contemporaries (12). Hazlitt's evaluation of Shelley arose out of a perceived interrelationship of poetic and moral inadequacies in the poet (15), and this point serves as a touchstone for much of what Haines himself goes on to say. In the second part of this chapter, the 'case for' Shelley is outlined, and these are divided into 'Referential Defences' and 'Symbolist Defences' of the poet. A Referential Defence, according to Haines, is one which values poetry by appealing to biographical or philosophical issues. Again, these categories might seem unnecessarily reductive, but it can also serve as a helpful way of understanding general critical responses to Shelley. The usual suspects again appear but only to be placed in one camp or another (Rosetti, Forman, Dowden, White, Holmes are placed in the Referentialist-Biographicalist camp; Notopoulos, Reiman, Wasserman in the Referentialist-Philosophical group). Haines points towards how much Shelley criticism (both 'for'and 'against') is polarized around these two camps within the Referentialist group, namely, whether Shelley's poetry should be read with the poet's own life in mind— or whether his poetry is best understood in terms of a philosophical system, no matter how inchoate or fluid that system may be. In discussing Shelley's philosophy, or the philosophical traditions into which critics want to place him, Haines suggests that the poet can be read either as a Platonist-idealist or as a sceptic (35). Here Haines tends to oversimplify what seems to be the most interesting and difficult area of Shelley criticism, and, if one is looking for an overview of critical opinion on this idealist-sceptical debate, one is left wanting a more detailed synopsis of what Haines does so well. Apart from the Referentialist camp, Haines identifies a 'Symbolist' group of critics, which is further divided into the Coleridge, Yeats, Bloom and Fogle camp and the 'later …