Tag Archives: Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Song of Night’s Sweet Bird

By Robin Bates | Published: October 6, 2013

Shelley’s elegy to Keats, “Adonais,” gives us a rich vision of our relationship with death.

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Poets Unacknowledged Legislators? Maybe

By Robin Bates | Published: July 24, 2013

A debate on whether poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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Gripped by a Mind of Winter

By Robin Bates | Published: February 10, 2010

Snow is pounding us for the third time in two weeks and classes once again have been canceled.  Significantly enough, I have been forced once again to postpone Midsummer Night’s Dream.  “Where are the songs of spring?  Ay, where are they?” queries Keats (although he’s asking from the vantage point of autumn, not that of […]

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Can Pastoral Elegies Ease the Pain?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2009

In a grad school class I once heard Peter Lehmann, a friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, say that, during the London blitzkrieg of 1940-41, all the London bookshops sold out their poetry. This means, I think, that in times of tragedy we turn to poetry for solace. It’s like the way that people who […]

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