In this new edition I have added "Peter Bell the Third". A critique on
Wordsworth's "Peter Bell" reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley
exceedingly, and suggested this poem.
I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the author of "Peter
Bell" is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry
more;--he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its
beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Shelley, ideal. He
conceived the idealism of a poet--a man of lofty and creative
genius--quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the
beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and
pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for
truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of
the moral improvement and happiness of mankind, but false and injurious
opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best
allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted, even as
transcendently as the author of "Peter Bell", with the highest qualities
of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness.
This poem was written as a warning--not as a narration of the reality.
He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth, or with Coleridge (to
whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem), and therefore, I repeat,
his poem is purely ideal;--it contains something of criticism on the
compositions of those great poets, but nothing injurious to the men
themselves.
No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views with regard to the
errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and the pernicious
effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully
written: and, though, like the burlesque drama of "Swellfoot", it must
be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry--so much of
HIMSELF in it--that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right
belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.