Books: Supreme Capacity

SHELLEY: A LIFE STORY (388 pp.)—Edmund Blunden—Viking ($3.75).

This new biography has been greeted in England as the first really satisfactory life of England's great romantic poet. U.S. critics should agree that, though Newman Ivey White's trenchant and scholarly two-volume Shelley (1940) has more information, Edmund Blunden's book has all that's necessary for a solid interpretation. A very fair poet himself, Blunden writes of Shelley devotedly, but with the ease and savor of long personal familiarity—not only with Shelley's works, but with his period (1792-1822), the scenes in which he lived and the...