I thought that it lacked a lot! Could have used a little tweaking here and there!

This is a useful survey of Shelley's philosophical thought. There are few poets whose philosophical thought is so central to their work, or so important in its own right.

_Destroyer and Preserver_ is a high-water mark in one strand of Shelley criticism, and a necessary and valuable one. It emphasises, rightly, that Shelley was a tough-minded and realistic thinker, in many respects firmly in the Humean tradition.

And it is a corrective to the mid-20th century picture of Shelley the Platonist, a portrayal that is in a direct line of descent from the "harmless" de-sexed and de-politicised Shelley of the Victorian imagination.

I might have given the book four stars rather than five, were it not for the empty one-line, one-star review that I'm following: "needs tweaking" indeed! I could dock the book a notch for what it doesn't do: the hard but necessary task (not yet accomplished) of re-integrating Shelley's Platonic thought with the sceptical Shelley.

That's a project which has importance not only for Shelley studies, but it may even have some contemporary philosophical use and application. I'm not sure that Shelley managed to marry Platonic and Humean thought into a coherent philosophy. That's an extremely hard question to answer. He doesn't in the prose; but the late poetry has depths I certainly haven't plumbed yet, and nor does this book. There are still things to be learned from Shelley; and he had a knack for asking the right questions.

This book is a fine examination of one of the two major parts (the most important part, in my view, but not the _only_ part) of Shelley's thought.

Laon