When Poets Are Awful People

The exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” now at the New York Public Library, is the sort of exhibit that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything you didn’t already know about this poet’s short and messy life. What it does do, by virtue of placing the manuscripts and artifacts into a relatively confined space (the smallish gallery to the left of the main exhibition room on the ground floor of the Library), is give us the facts in a more concentrated and vivid way than we might otherwise receive them. The exhibit demonstrates, with dramatic succinctness, that Percy Bysshe Shelley and some of those he hung out with were pretty shitty people. I’m not talking about the sort of shittiness that we associate with, say, Ezra Pound or Martin Heidegger, whose politics were repugnant. No one likes a fascist, at least in the abstract. But Shelley had politics that were progressive and humanitarian, which may make things worse.