I received only one book for Christmas: from Tom, a 1921 compilation of three separate essays on poetry--Thomas Love Peacock's "The Four Stages of Poetry" (1820), Percy Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry" (completed before Shelley's death in 1822 but not published until 1840), and Robert Browning's "An Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley" (1852).

Peacock's essay is a satire on the state of contemporary poetry, and reading it feels rather like reading a satire on Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, except that the author is name-dropping Wordsworth and Coleridge. I'm still making my way through the introduction to the essays themselves, but I'm already highly amused by the Peacock quotations--for instance: "While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age." Things never change, it seems.

Peacock and Shelley were friends, and Shelley knew very well that Peacock respected the Romantics and was writing a satire. But Shelley, though brilliant, didn't have much of a sense of humor and could not resist fighting for his art. So he whipped off the "Defence" with the intent of publicly responding to his friend's essay, preferably in the journal that had already published Peacock's piece.

The essay is, as this volume's introduction notes, "a great poet's confession of faith," "a very personal document" that contains "nothing coldly judicial." This is a dry paraphrase of Shelley's burning, starstruck prose: "Poetry . . . makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life. . . . [It] redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." But Shelley's fervent argument did not reach its intended audience: soon after completing this paean, the poet drowned in a sailing accident, the magazine folded, and the "Defence" sat in his wife Mary's desk drawer for close to 20 years until she published it, with considerable excisions, in her version of his collected works. Those excisions, according to my little volume's introduction, deleted all references to Peacock's earlier essay, which Mary thought would distract admirers from a focus on Shelley's own claims.

Thanks in large part to his wife, the cult of Shelley blossomed. From being an embarrassment, he became a god, and his works sold briskly. Thus, in 1852, someone surnamed Moxon decided to capitalize on the poet's popularity by publishing a collection of 25 of Shelley's letters with a foreword by poet Robert Browning. This turned out to be an embarrassing commission for Browning: of the letters, all but two were complete forgeries. Fortunately, however, Browning entirely ignored the contents of the book he was introducing and used his essay to "[air] opinions on Shelley's prose, and Shelley's character, which he had formed long since. . . . The work of Shelley had been the inspiration of his earliest prime, and he had consistently refused, in the face of popular rumour, to believe that there could be any ugliness in a life which produced so beautiful a flower of verse."

Oy. Browning seems to have overlooked the woman troubles, the money troubles, the dead babies, etc., etc., etc. Probably Elizabeth Barrett Browning could have set him straight on those issues, but sometimes a blind-sided lover is best left alone with his ideals. Or so it might seem at the moment.

Anyway, now you have the background of the complicated little compendium I got for Christmas. I look forward to spending some part of today's blizzard combing through its faded, deckle-edged pages. I'll let you know if anything wonderful/terrible turns up.