ABSTRACT
In 1985 Harold Bloom pointed out that The Sensitive-Plant had been all but ignored by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s critics. Not much has changed since, and this seems at first glance odd. It was a popular poem among Shelley’s Victorian admirers, and one of the poems that most successfully resisted the twentieth-century assault on Shelley’s reputation. The historicist turn evident in so much criticism since Earl Wasserman seems to have brought with it a turn against The Sensitive-Plant. Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges, Angela Leighton’s On Form, and recent books by Michael O’Neill all suggest a renewed interest in the formal character of poetry, and that is the kind of interest that The Sensitive-Plant seems more likely to repay. As he acknowledged in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley had ‘a passion for reforming the world’, but he was also ready to write poetry of a very different kind, poetry that seems to take delight in its own irresponsibility.
