Cenci : a drama by Shelley, written in 1820.
... poem the Miltonic turn also is not absent, while the Shakespearean tone which, again, Keats sometimes practised, Shelley had expressed his intention of assimilating more successfully than in his Cenci and there is no reason to doubt that, with a greater maturing of his poetic thought-process, he would have done so. Thompson's style, therefore, was not on that side a development inimical to Shelley's... worked by fire-spurts soon consuming themselves and he had not a sustained gift of building with a large and symmetrical hand. The spacious energy which fashioned Prometheus Unbound and rendered The Cenci — however wanting in personal life — a feat of dramatic construction, could discover no crowning Page 85 outlet through a fine yet sporadic strength. Thus Thompson failed ...
... imitations of the worst Page 81 Elizabethan type, Shelley even, forgetting his discovery of a new and fine literary form for dramatic poetry to give us the Elizabethan violences of the Cenci , Tennyson, Swinburne, even after Atalanta , following the same ignis fatuus, a very flame of fatuity and futility, are all victims of the same hypnotism. Recently a new turn is visible; but as yet ...
... excellence to rank him among the greater English poets. What might he not have done if he had lived to fifty? But I don't believe he had any dramatic genius in him. None of these poets had. Shelley's Cenci is a remarkable feat of dramatic construction and poetic imagination, but it has no organic life like the work of the Elizabethans or the Greeks or like such dramas as the Cid or Racine's tragedies ...
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