ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a point of departure for a more comprehensive reading of the evolution of Blind's Shelleyan form of Decadent poetry than has hit her to been traced by her critics. In her career in the Memoir attached to her collected poetry, Richard Garnett insists that poet, editor, and biographer Mathilde Blind would have been more popular if she had been less ardent and more conciliating. In a fragment of her autobiography included by Garnett in his Memoir, Blind offers a statement that suggests how Shelleyan Romanticism informs her aesthetic approach, in which she watched the shadows of the outer world in that magic mirror we call poetry, and the reflection was more enchanting than the thing reflected. With Garnett's assistance Blind contributed to the process of the popularization of Shelley's poetry as a result of the appearance of Rossetti's two-volume Moxon edition in 1870.
