Over the past months there has been a number of references on dotCom to a "Manichaean" mindset. Now The New Yorker has belatedly entered the lists.

Adam Kirsch has a review of Ann Wroe's new book, Being Shelley, which he entitles: "Avenging Angel: Inside Shelley's Manichaean Mind."

Here's some of what he writes:

Quite simply, Shelley believed that anyone who disagreed with him wasdepraved at heart. As a result, his political vision was essentiallyManichaean: The Manichaean philosophy respecting the origin andgovernment of the world, if not true, is at least an hypothesisconformable to the experience of actual facts, he wrote. Mankind wasmade miserable by the willful selfishness of tyrants and priests. Andthe millennium, in Shelleys limitless, idealizing vision, was not justa matter of universal suffrage. In Prometheus Unbound, he imagines itas a time when the mountains of the moon turn into living fountains,ugly human shapes and visages grow mild and lovely, and it becomesthe pain of bliss / To move, to breathe, to be.

And Kirsch concludes:

Shelley, who frequently quoted the Platonic injunction Knowthyself, never knew himself well enough to acknowledge the intoleranceand self-righteousness that went hand in hand with his sublime egotism.Instead, exiled in Italy with few friends or readers, he indulged inthe voluptuous self-pity that animates so many of his poems. In his owneyes, he was always misunderstood by the world, like the lonelycreature he wrote about in The Sensitive Plant: But none evertrembled and panted with bliss / In the garden, the field, or thewilderness, / Like a doe in the noon-tide with loves sweet want, / Asthe companionless Sensitive Plant.

The most important limitation of Wroes method is that it leaves herwith as little critical perspective on Shelley as Shelley had himself.Being Shelley means feeling as Shelley felt, and Wroe tremblinglyrecapitulates the poets sense of being too fragile for this world:Rain punished Shelley, too. He stood in it, his heart naked to itsfreezing, battering drops. By the time he drowns, Wroes Shelley hasbecome literally angelic, ready to return to his heavenly home: Whitewings unfolded vastly from his shoulders, as if through this batteringfrenzy he could rise to the upper sky. But, if there is one lesson tobe drawn from Shelleys life and work, it is that you cant trust a manwho believes he is an angel.