The invitation to Writing Magazine poets to be inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley gave an opportunity to commemorate the 200-year anniversary of his death. This invitation was accepted by writers who celebrated the people who surrounded him, wrote of the darker aspects of his life, acknowledged the themes of his poems and wrote responses to them, or looked behind the printed word to work out where poems had begun, and used the same inspiration to reflect something in their own experience. There were acrostics and syllabic poems, complex and straightforward ones, poems that yelled and poems that murmured.
It’s always useful to read and digest any advice offered before entering a competition. It was a shame that one entry of a delightful poem excluded itself by being all about the wrong poet, with no reference to Shelley. Several entries would have benefited from the advice that poems should be
