The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2002

The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time. Ian Gilmour. Chatto & Windus. [pounds sterling]20.00. 402 pages. ISBN 0-701-17110-3. As the author of this joint biography states in his introduction, the two poets' lives 'were full of extraordinary incident and controversy'. They lived through the horrors of the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon and were themselves leading figures in the romantic movement in literature.

The argument of this book is that both these poets, famous in their day as much for their radicalism as for their romanticism, were men whose early years were the formative period of their lives. As he argues, when Byron left Harrow almost half of his life was over, when Shelly left Eton, three-fifths of his had been spent. The book also argues that there were great similarities in the two men's personalities and upbringing even though superficially they were quite different. Lord Gilmour traces these early influences to establish parallels and shows how the two men were in agreement even before they met in 1816: both had adopted the then trendy hostility among Radicals to the Church, Christianity in general, the Crown and Royal Family and, finally, the British Constitution. 'This shared dislike of so much that almost all their contemporaries unquestioningly accepted, and most of them revered, provided a strong foundation for their future friendship'. That friendship will be surveyed in a later volume.