Shelley and the utility of the arts.(Arts Education from Past to Present)(Percy Bysshe Shelley's strategy of arts )

Editor's note: This essay is the ninth in an occasional series on past treatments of major issues in arts education policy from antiquity through the twentieth century. Future essays will appear as occassion arises. What can the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) teach us about arts education today? Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), in one of his best fits of grumpy Victorian high seriousness, described him as "not entirely sane" and "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." (1) Nevertheless, Arnold ...