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An Appreciation of Shelley
in the Postmodern Age
In his mature years, the great twentieth century poet W. B. Yeats
admitted that the primary influence upon his writing had been not
William Blake, much in vogue in his youth and remaining so then
and now among literary critics, but Shelley. He went on to say that,
“regarding those who do not agree that Percy Bysshe Shelley is a
very great poet, there is nothing that I can say to them.” In thinking
about writing this essay, I have more than once been tempted to
follow Yeats’s inclination. Moreover, I am not even qualified as a
literary critic, a telling hand-icap in an age of specialized skills and
knowledge, but only a failed scribbler, “an idle singer of an empty
day”, to borrow a line from Clough, a classicist-modernist beached
on the desolate sands of postmodernity. One major consideration,
however, has induced me to go ahead with this attempt. This is that
Shelley is of special significance today—inasmuch as any writer
who is not young and alive right now can continue to have any
significance, if only among the small and diminishing minority still
upholding a literary tradition—because he stands near to what would
be the antipodal extreme to the main elements of postmodern culture
and civilization. A consumption-driven, docile, unthinking mass,
happily worship-ping the idol of self-gratification erected before
them; a corporate hegemony and oligarchy ruling over a civilization
in which an all-pervading commercialization has poisoned the
fountains of life, and everything is an item to be bought or sold,
including matters of mind and spirit, even individuality itself; an
educated elite that thinks and feels in diminishingly human terms,
and their minds awash in an inform-ation glut that infests the world,
and makes the ability to discriminate among what matters and what
doesn’t perhaps the most crucially vanishing attribute; a humanity
which, except for one of the few healthy developments in
postmodern-ity, the environmental movement when truly genuine
and not hijacked by the corporate culture, has been long severed
from the harmony, physical and spirit-ual, with nature which existed
in the past, and nature itself in rapid ebb and dying; conventional
thinking and uncritical acceptance of custom or popular belief so
prevalent, although in numerous instances masked under a pretense
of being other than what it is; to all these things, and others I don’t
want to here enumer-ate, Percy Bysshe Shelley stands at the
opposing pole, and which is why the thoughts which live within his
poetry are so important today, if people would bother to read and
understand his work.
Now I realize that in writing about Shelley I shall be doing so
before a largely unsympathetic audience. That is because within the
canon of Dr F. R. Leavis, a primarily unfavourable and dismissive
view of Shelley prevails, and I believe that most of the readership of
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this magazine adhere to that canon. I will not attempt to counter his
arguments—as I have said, I’m not a literary critic—but will simply
present a different view of Shelley. By a broad excursion through his
works, I will try to some measure explain a poet whose writings have
so often been misconstrued and distorted. But if, reminded of the
assertion by Yeats quoted at the beginning, explanation is largely
futile, my more modest hope is that the reader will look upon this
essay in praise of Shelley as simply the confession of an aberration, a
depiction of a literary vice or addiction, and not as an attempt at
recommendation. Here I am reminded of the words of the recently
deceased Hunter S. Thompson, when he said, “I would not
recommend drugs, alcohol, and violence to anyone, but they always
worked for me.” This then may be regarded as the delineation of an
addiction to what it is not entirely inappropriate to describe as the
poetic equivalent of drugs, alcohol, and violence.
To begin. First, one must return to what is around us now, that is,
our contemporary culture and its expression in literature. The salient
characteristic of the bulk of writing today, largely amorphous but in
this quite distinct, is that it’s dead, inert. This was very astutely
anatomized by Brian Lee in Issue no. 9 of this magazine, in his essay
“Martin Amis and the Present State of Fiction”. It was this quality of
postmodern writing which Eliot, himself still a modernist,
preeminently both foreshadowed and represented, and hence his
importance in the poetry of the twentieth century. An excellent
analysis of Eliot and what he means, is the like-named essay, “What
Eliot Means”, again by Brian Lee, which appeared in one of the
antediluvian print ancestors of this magazine, before the floods of
postmodern night closed over it, Issue no. 8 of The Haltwhistle
Quarterly. Eliot, significantly, found Shelley’s ideas “repellent”:
Eliot was imbued with the spirit of what was coming, while his
contemporary, Yeats, holding quite the opposite view of Shelley,
looked backwards, to what was vanishing.
Now Shelley, though he could not have imagined our postmodern
future (could anyone have, at that time?), knew of states of mind and
of conditions similar to it. In a different context, but one in which the
effect on the mind is the same, he writes of his protagonist, “… His
wan eyes/ Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly/ As ocean’s moon
looks on the moon in heaven.” ( Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude ll.
200-202). His longest poem, The Revolt of Islam, written early in his
career, may perhaps be considered a failure in its totality, but
nonetheless contains numerous passages of splendid verse of a very
high order. An analysis or critique of this poem is outside the scope
or competence of this essay, and its naivety of purpose (as explained
by Shelley in the preface) or of idea, a characteristic of Shelley to
which Barrie Mencher confesses a dislike in the previous issue, may
indeed strike our jaded, knowing, and sophisticated sensibilities on a
dissonant note. In a previous age this kind of naivety might have
been called simplicity, and would not necessarily have been seen in
pejorative terms, just as the apparent simplicity of the ocean’s
surface does not preclude its profundity. This is one of the things that
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Yeats understood in Shelley. But for the purpose of this essay, that
is, Shelley in the context of postmodernity, what is striking in The
Revolt of Islam is its abundance of descriptions of and references to
benighted conditions, fallen states, and minds in chains. The poem’s
second Canto conveys the sense of a lost and glorious past in
juxtaposition to a fallen present: “… the wondrous fame/ Of the past
world, the vital words and deeds/ Of minds whom neither time nor
change can tame”; the poem’s protagonist wanders “through the
wrecks of days departed” and hears the sound of the sorrowing wind
echoing through its broken tombs and the ruins of the “dwellings of
a race of mightier men”. Of course, being a child of the early years
of the Enlightenment, he still entertains the naive hope that this
glorious past can be prelude to a more glorious future, saying, “Such
man has been, and such may yet become!/ Ay, wiser, greater,
gentler, even than they/ Who on the fragments of yon shattered
dome/ Have stamped the sign of power …”. Needless to say, all this
is so much water under the bridge now, but what is relevant here is
his portrayal of his present as a fallen state which manifests chiefly
as a mental condition. The narrative of human life is presented by
“Feeble historians of its shame and glory,/ False disputants on all its
hopes and fears,/ Victims who worshipped ruin …”; it is a world
where the natural world has ceased to live for its inhabitants, and
Earth, our bright home, its mountains and its waters,
……………………… and those fair daughters,
The clouds, of Sun and Ocean, who have blended
The colours of the air since first extended
It cradled the young world, none wandered forth
To see or feel: a darkness had descended
On every heart …
This vital world, this home of happy spirits,
Was as a dungeon to my blasted kind;
All that despair from murdered hope inherits
They sought, and in their helpless misery blind,
A deeper prison and heavier chains did find,
And stronger tyrants …
The narrator admits scant wonder that “men loathe their life”, and
that “… they learn/ To gaze on this fair world with hopeless
unconcern”. Significantly, he finds that this benighted condition
leads to sexual obsession, and talks of “… the hyaena lust, who,
among graves,/ Over his loathed meal, laughing in agony, raves.”
Shelley’s depictions of fallen states are not limited to The Revolt
of Islam by any means, and such occur frequently in his poetry. Here
is one which, although evoked while he is contemplating the towers
and the palaces of a decadent Venice of the early nineteenth century,
I find has a certain contemporary resonance:
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Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms,
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering:
(Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, ll. 146-9)
The sense of a fallen world, indeed: it was in his bones. Part of
this sense was particular and not universal, being due to the shadow
cast over his time, for those who believed in human progress, by the
disastrous failure of the French Revolution. He saw this failure as,
firstly, the betrayal of its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity by
its partisans into blood-letting, fanaticism, and hate; and then as the
usurpation of the Revolution itself by Napoleon, of whom he has the
Earth declare, in Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of
Napoleon, “And weave into his shame, which like the dead/ Shrouds
me, the hopes that from his glory fled.” With the earlier defeat of
Napoleon, he also witnessed the restoration and the resumed
legitimacy of the old order. One may observe that this condition of
his time is not entirely unlike our own. For we live under the much
longer shadow cast by the final failure of the ideals of the
Enlightenment, an Enlightenment whose first manifestations in
history were the American and French Revolutions, and of whose
last diseased offshoot, Soviet-style communism, we have witnessed
the recent (in historical terms) demise. Into the vacuum created by
the decay and death of these ideals has flowed—what? The new
freedom of the savvy, option-rich consumer? Thus, when Shelley
describes the atmosphere of his time, it is possible to find a certain
resonance for our own, if one thinks in terms of this much larger and
longer shadow:
Alas! All hope is buried now.
But then men dreamed the age`d earth
Was labouring in that mighty birth,
Which many a poet and a sage
Has aye foreseen – the happy age
When truth and love shall dwell below
Among the works and ways of men;
Which on this world not power but will
Even now is wanting to fulfill.
…
Ah, smiles and joyance quickly died,
For public hope grew pale and dim
In an altered time and tide,
…
And in the streets men met each other,
And by old altars and in halls,
And smiled again at festivals.
But each man found in his heart’s brother
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Cold cheer; for all, though half deceived,
The outworn creeds again believed,
And the same round anew began,
Which the weary world yet ever ran.
(Rosalind and Helen, ll. 601-9, 691-3, 713-720.)
But the sense of a fallen world was deeper in him than as it
related to particular circumstances of time and place. One can
discern the beginning of a shift to a deeper dimension in The Tower
of Famine, written in Italy in 1820. Here, the metaphor evoked
would have been familiar to the founder of the religion he had
disavowed, and strikes close to the immemorial fault line upon
which the world has been erected. It is not made clear in the poem
whether the “Tower of Famine” referred to is meant as an actual
structure or a figurative one—typical of Shelley’s rapidity of
thought, and why he infuriates critics—but it is pictured as built
upon or standing amid “the towers and sacred domes”, “the bowers
of solitary wealth”, and that because of its presence everything
around it is dimmed, “so that the world is bare”; he then concludes
the poem by likening the image to “… a spectre wrapped in
shapeless terror/ Amid a company of ladies fair”, which becomes a
mirror of and absorbs their beauty and “the life of their sweet eyes”,
so that, like those who gaze upon the Gorgon, they are turned to
stone.
If Keats can be called the great poet of acceptance, Shelley is the
great poet of non-acceptance. Keats accepted life and the world as it
is; Shelley did not. Andor Gomme, in his essay “The Last of Old
England” in Issue no.13 of this magazine, quotes Leavis on Keats:
“… that strong grasp upon actualities—upon things outside himself,
that firm sense of the solid world, which makes Keats so different
from Shelley.” (Revaluation, p. 261) Now I’d contend that Shelley
had a perfectly clear idea of the actual world and of things outside
himself, as any reading of all his significant work (see Appendix at
the end of this essay), as opposed to selective examples to prove a
point, should show. Immediately violating my just stated injunction
(as lack of consistency is one of the numerous sins imputed to
Shelley, I, as his advocate, should properly manifest the same), I
would suggest that the Letter to Maria Gisborne, Part Three of Peter
Bell the Third, and, on another level, Act One of Prometheus
Unbound, should show that, in the American vernacular, he knew
‘where it’s at’. On the other hand, I’d agree with Leavis that a “firm
sense of the solid world” he had not. He lacked that sense because,
even though he knew quite well what this world was, he ultimately
did not accept it. This duality may have, to some, a surface
appearance of inconsistency; rather, it is complexity (masking as
simplicity in many cases) defying simple categorization. In the poem
above cited, Letter to Maria Gisborne, although full of minutely
observed and wittily crafted depictions of actual things and
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persons—especially lines 193-253, on London and his circle of
friends—he also writes to his respondent,
………………… – and how we spun
A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun
Of this familiar life, which seems to be
But is not: – or is but quaint mockery
Of all we would believe, and sadly blame
The jarring and inexplicable frame
Of this wrong world: …
(Op. cit., ll. 154-160.)
If one were to make a count of each of the adjectives used in his
works (a task fit for a computer, not a human), I feel pretty certain
that ‘strange’ would be at the top or very near it. A sense of the
world’s strangeness was always with him. This is most
unequivocally described in the sonnet “Lift not the painted veil”, in
which the person alluded to is thought to be Byron, but perhaps more
aptly characterizes himself. The world of ordinary life is described as
an illusion, “a painted veil”, behind which hope and fear are
continually weaving the shadows which the world calls substance.
The figure in the poem is depicted as seeking “things to love”, but
finding nothing in the world “the which he could approve”. He
moves among “the unheeding many”, striving for truth, and, “like
the Preacher”, never finding it.
This poet of the Romantic Age, in a very pure and radical form of
a general characteristic of the period, was ever seeking something
other than the common and familiar life around him, some ideal
situated elsewhere, not in the here and now. Sometimes he sought it
“… in whatever checks that Storm/ Which with the shattered present
chokes the past” (Epipsychidion, ll. 211-12); or, and in the same
poem, he was one of those “… to whom this world of life/ Is as a
garden ravaged, and whose strife/ Tills for the promise of a later
birth/ The wilderness of this Elysian earth” (Ibid, ll. 186-9); again,
the ideal might be in neither the past nor the future, but in what made
it seem “… as if the hour were one/ Sent from beyond the skies,/
Which scattered from above the sun/ A light of Paradise” (To Jane:
the Recollection, ll. 17-20); yet again, it may lie in the perfection of
ideal beauty, here an attribute of one of his female figures, a beauty
which made
The bright world dim, and everything beside
Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade:
No thought of living spirit could abide,
Which to her looks had ever been betrayed,
On any object in the world so wide,
On any hope within the circling skies,
But on her form, and in her inmost eyes.
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(The Witch of Atlas, ll. 138-144.)
But now follows an apparent contradiction of this characteristic
of Shelley exemplified in these excerpts. This is a poet who is
nothing if not manifold and to a superficial view in certain ways
contradictory, one of the reasons he has hardly been a favourite of
critics, and why out of this manifold and seemingly conflicting
nature can come a correlative ease, through drawing upon one of his
aspects, of constructing a negative critique and appraisal. Critics,
with their limiting strictures and reprovals! Like many writers —
though perhaps not so many in these deconstructionist times, and I
may well be in a distinct minority—one can easily wish for a return
to simpler and more innocent days, somewhat like the age imagined
at the beginning of The Witch of Atlas, which was presumed to exist,
Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,
Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth
All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learnèd rhyme
(Op. cit., ll. 49-54.)
But then, as one can’t very well go back to Homer’s Greece or to
Elizabethan England, one must make do with a great deal written
about literature, and not much of it now written worth the name. As I
said, it is possible, on the surface, to contradict the previously stated
view of Shelley that he could not accept the world as it was—and not
just the world created by humanity, as I shall later indicate—and that
indeed readings of his poetry can give many examples of an empathy
with the natural world of an intensity and depth shared by few other
poets. At the beginning of Alastor; Or, the Spirit of Solitude (the first
major work of his coming of age as a poet), he invokes the “great
Mother” (Nature), vowing that he had loved her, and her only, and
all the ways in which she manifests, by virtue of which love he asks
her to now favour his “solemn song”, awaiting her breath so that his
strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.
(Op. cit., ll. 46-9.)
For a few examples to illustrate this deep empathy, I would cite,
from A Summer Evening Churchyard, a description of the coming of
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evening (ll. 1-12); at an opposite pole of perception, from A Vision of
the Sea, the dissipation of a great ocean storm at sunrise (ll.115-132);
from Mont Blanc, a feeling of the vastness of a mountain landscape
and of geological time (ll. 57-75); then, showing the range of feeling
and perception, in The Sensitive Plant, Part First, one passes to the
exquisite and the delicate; lastly, from Adonais, a passage where the
inmost sense of spring has rarely been evoked so poignantly and
deeply:
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year;
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons’ bier;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
And the green lizard, and the golden snake,
Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.
Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean
A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed,
The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life’s sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love’s delight,
The beauty and the joy of their renewe`d might.
(Op. cit., ll. 154-171.)
So, a poet with an intense empathy with and love of the world
around him, who at the same time could not accept this firm and
solid world: is a synthesis between these two contradictory impulses
possible? A suggestion of a possible synthesis comes in Mont Blanc,
that seminal poem (along with the contemporan-eous Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty) written near the beginning of his career as a
mature poet, a career that only spans the years 1815 to 1822,
demarcated at one end by his juvenilia and at the other by his
premature death at sea. This poem was reviewed, from a different
perspective, by Barrie Mencher in Issue no. 14 of the magazine; my
treatment of it here is for the purpose of illuminating the
contradiction in Shelley referred to above. The poem, supposedly a
depiction of a wild and majestic alpine scene, does not begin with
the natural world at all; it begins with an abstract consideration of
the relative interplay of sense percep-tions of the external world with
interpretations originating from within the mind; this abstract
consideration is then presented as a metaphor of a feeble brook
within the woods among mountains, where certainty has vanished as
to the origin of the sound of rushing water that one hears, which
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might be emanating from the brook, from surrounding unseen
waterfalls, or some vast river bursting over its rocks: to this
uncertainty he adds, through a deliberate obscuring of the syntax, the
further ambiguity of what the brook represents in the image, whether
it is meant to portray thoughts emanating from the mind or external
sense perceptions —only then does he proceed to the depiction of the
natural scene before him, which he opens by likening to the
metaphor previously presented! The effect of this unorthodox
proceeding is to render what would otherwise be merely natural as
preternatural, with a heightened and intensified perception through
the removal of the veil of familiarity covering and dimming what we
see: this ‘removal of the veil’ is a common feature of Shelley’s
poetry, as stated explicitly in another and a later poem: “But life’s
familiar veil was now withdrawn,/ As the world leaps before an
earthquake’s dawn,/… As if the future and the past were all/
Treasured i’ the instant … .” (Ginevra, ll. 122-4, 130-1).
The poem then becomes an entranced contemplation, an intense
apprehension, of nature in its most solemn, majestic, and remote
aspects; of “Power in … his secret throne”, of “children of elder
time”, of “old and solemn harmony”; here, analogously as in the
poem of a year earlier, Alastor, where the poet regards the earliest
man-made monuments, “memorials of the world’s youth”, where on
those forms he “… ever gazed/ And gazed, till meaning on his
vacant mind/ Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw/ The
thrilling secrets of the birth of time”: yet here, it is nature’s secrets
he wishes to unlock, but finds himself musing on his “own separate
fantasy”, his individual, human mind, to wit, on the fundamental
relationship between the object observed and the observer, and the
nature of reality itself: his thoughts sometimes rest upon the scene
before him, and sometimes inhabit “the still cave of the witch
Poesy”, where the funda-mental inaccesibility of the sublime
magnificence and power before him is confessed in his “Seeking
among the shadows that pass by/ Ghosts of all thing that are, some
shade of thee,/ Some phantom, some faint image …”. What makes
this magnificence and power, this inaccesibility? What does he mean
when he says, “Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal/ Large
codes of fraud and woe …”? Is that which lies before him now,
indeed, all “the clear universe of things around”, the same if there is
no one to observe it, or is observed by a bird, a monkey, or is data
fed into a computer? Suggestions of answers to such questionings
can be found in the concluding fifth part of the poem:
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: – the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them: – Winds contend
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Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
(Op. cit., ll. 127-144.)
What indeed? The objective nature of empirical science, then
newly established, now ubiquitous and supreme. For Shelley, the
firm, solid, stark, objective world, untransformed or unillumined by
imagination, was never to be enough. Mont Blanc was composed in
1816, and his subsequent work illustrates and develops the principle
suggested, as in The Revolt of Islam (composed 1817): “The dawn of
mind, which … far illumines space,/ And clasps this barren world in
its own bright embrace” (op. cit., Canto V, ll. 2239-41). Note
“barren” to describe the world. Again, in the same poem, the narrator
says his song “Peopled with thoughts the boundless universe”,
thoughts which strove “Where’er they trod the darkness to disperse/
The cloud of that unutterable curse/ Which clings upon mankind …”
(Ibid, Canto II, ll. 928-33). In the postmodern blankness, in the
cultural desolation of our civilization now, this poet’s words may
have strange applicability. For him, it is not enough to be just the
passive and objective observer of a quiescent nature, to give back a
faithful rendering, grounded in the “firm and solid world”, of his
perceptions; he is ever seeking more than this, where, through
various conditions of “darkness wide and deep”, there is always a
hope which ultimately can find its basis neither in the individual nor
in the human condition, but only in the eternal cycles of nature of
which humanity is a part:
Such are the thoughts which, like the fires that flare
In storm-encompassed isles, we cherish yet
In this dark ruin – such were mine even there;
As in its sleep some odorous violet,
While yet its leaves with nightly dews are wet,
Breathes in prophetic dreams of day’s uprise,
Or, as ere Scythian frost in fear has met
Spring’s messengers descending from the skies,
The buds foreknow their life – this hope must ever rise.
(Ibid, Canto VII, ll. 3154-62.)
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What, then, is this hope? Is it the hope at the end of the Ode to the
West Wind characterized as “foolhardy” by A.R. Gomme in his essay
in Issue no.13 of this magazine? (By the way, it is of some relevance
that in the first draft of that poem Shelley had the concluding line as
a statement, which he later crossed out and made into the question
which is its final form.) This hope is nothing but the necessity for
hope, whose source is the light that must exist within the mind which
seeks its kindred light within the world (I am paraphrasing from his
essay A Defense of Poetry), as long as we have any pretensions to
being alive—and many people who think they are alive today are
deluded on that score. As he puts it, “This truth is that deep well,
whence sages draw/ The unenvied light of hope …”, and,
……………………… ’tis like thy light,
Imagination! Which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human fantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning …
(Epipsychidion, ll. 184-5, 163-69.)
The “error” referred to above is the analytic and calculating mind
usurping the primacy of place which should belong to mind
redeemed by imagination. As he states in his A Defense of Poetry, “
we must feel what we perceive, and imagine what we know”. But it
is not that he is dogmatic in his theorising, for, as he says in the
essay, the poet’s task is “not to pose but to create”. Thus, near the
end of Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, when the poetic
mood which inspired him begins to depart, he does not pretend to
any kind of certainty as to its source, whether
Be it love, light, harmony,
Odour, or the soul of all
Which from Heaven like dew doth fall,
Or the mind which feeds this verse
Peopling the lone universe.
(Op. cit., ll. 315-19.)
Whatever it is, it is also the source of human liberty. Liberty is a
central concept of Shelley’s poetry, and it is a condition existing first
and foremost in the human mind; contingent upon this condition is
the possibility of action to trans-form the dispensations to be found
in the external world. Near the beginning of the long poem Julian
and Maddalo, the bell of the belfry tower of a lunatic asylum tolls to
summon the inmates to vespers. Julian (a poetic stand-in for Shelley)
observes wryly, “… As much skill as need to pray/ In thanks or hope
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for their dark lot have they/ To their stern maker …” (ll. 111-3).
Count Maddalo, drawn upon Shelley’s friend Lord Byron, although,
according to Shelley, inclined by pride to take the “darker side” of
arguments, is more religiously orthodox, and chides Julian for ever
being “a perilous infidel”. But he then goes on to comment on the
scene before them as an emblem of human mortality itself, and of the
futility of our hopes and our desires, which, like the madmen
summoned by the bell, gather around the soul and pray—“For what?
They know not …” Julian responds to Maddalo’s gloomy metaphor
by noting that the argument of futility applies only on the assumption
of human passivity, and, although there is no guarantee of liberation,
it is possible to struggle against the chains which bind the human
mind and spirit, against “… what degrades and crushes us. We
know/ That we have power over ourselves to do/ And suffer – what,
we know not till we try;/ But something nobler than to live and die
…” (ll. 184-7). An illustration of how this inward condition of
liberty in individuals manifests in the aggregate of human society is
provided in the sonnet “Political Greatness”, where he first describes
the effects upon society where this liberty is lacking due to tyranny,
tyranny that he says can be of two kinds, the one imposed by force
and the other by custom (ll. 9-10). Presumably, one may apply the
latter kind to postmodern mass civilization, for here one may say, as
in the sonnet (with allowances for poetic exaggeration), that
Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,
History is but the shadow of their shame,
Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts
As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,
Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery
Of their own likeness. . . .
Indeed. Opposed to this he places
………… Man who man would be,
Must rule the empire of himself; in it
Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.
(Op. cit., ll. 4-9, 10-14.)
To Shelley, liberty is a much more complex, existential, as well
as inclusive idea than mere political reformism; one may gather as
much from a reading of his Ode to Liberty, in which he has
transcribed the principle delineated in the sonnet presented above
into a long poem that views the genesis, the rises and the falls, and
the prospects of “man being himself alone” against the tapestry of
human history. Here is presented one of the most luminous examples
of Shelley in the multiple roles of lyric poet, social philosopher, and
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
political reformer fused into one, in a relatively shorter poem (as
opposed to long works such as Prometheus Unbound and Hellas) of
285 lines. This is not the proper place to cite from a poem whose
mood, tone, and language stand in striking contrast to those of the
postmodern muse, clashing as it does with the cautiously dim, the
prudently ambiguous, the scrupulously qualified, and the selfabsorbed (the last of which is one of the sins with which Leavis
charges this poet); nor is it really relevant, concerning itself as it
does with a process whose end, in Western civilization, we have
reached and which is therefore dated, namely, human history
(Francis Fukuyama was right in this regard as far as it related to the
West, wrong as it related to the rest of the world); all the same, it
may be possible to see a relation to our age in a section of the poem
where he addresses the personification of the idea which one would
grossly over-simplify by the mere denomination of ‘liberty’,
regarding the circumstances of a historical epoch conventionally
ascribed a length of five hundred years, which nonetheless is no
reliable predictor of the duration of its recurrence, an event
occasioning dismay in a few and unnoticed by most:
From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,
Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,
Or utmost islet inaccessible,
Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign,
Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks,
And every Naiad’s ice-cold urn,
To talk in echoes sad and stern
Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn?
(Op. cit., ll. 106-13.)
It is also perhaps pertinent where, near the poem’s end, he warns
of the distortion of then newly-dawning liberty into a proliferation of
“new wants” (ll. 241-255). Indeed, in the next stanza he explicitly
states that ‘liberty’, as it is conventionally understood, is not enough,
and, invoking the former, pleads “Come thou, but lead out of the
inmost cave/ Of man’s deep spirit, as the morning-star/ Beckons the
Sun from the Eoan wave,/ Wisdom …” (ll. 256-9). To which he
adds, as also not possible to be disjoined from ‘liberty’, the other
“rulers of eternal thought”, love, justice, memory of the past, and
hope of the future (ll. 261-7).
A charge typically levelled against Shelley by his detractors is
that he pursues airy idealisms and impalpable abstractions, which
have little connection to real life and the real world. As a matter of
fact, his wife Mary voiced just that objection with regard to his The
Witch of Atlas, after seeing it for the first time. However, a poet may
be forgiven the occasional sally into the realm of pure fantasy, as
that particular poem happens to be (though not entirely: it contains
some astute commentary on the human condition near the end).
Other poets, most notably Keats, seem to be far more easily forgiven
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
their weaknesses and indulgences, while Shelley positively draws
censure and reproof from the same critics so lenient regarding others.
Perhaps this is due to the abrasive and uncompromising nature of his
genius, which elicits strong reactions, positive or negative. As for the
criticism of escapism and flight from reality made against him, I
would suggest that, idealist though he was, he at the same time
perceived and realized, far more deeply than may superficially be
conceived, the actualities of this world. A hint in the direction of this
assertion may be given by how he concludes all of his longer works,
with the notable exception of Prometheus Unbound, which have a
narrative thread.. In The Revolt of Islam, the revolution fails; in
Julian and Maddalo, the chief character developed in the poem, who
holds views similar to Julian’s (a stand-in for Shelley), has gone
mad; in The Sensitive Plant, the paradisal garden runs to foulness
and decay; in his single completed play, The Cenci (Prometheus
Unbound and Hellas are lyrical dramas), justice most eminently does
not prevail; in Hellas, the Greeks lose their struggle for freedom, a
denouement which prompts the drama’s chorus to lament that ideals
such as liberty, virtue, love, and truth can be overcome by common
forces of the world like numbers, wealth, erring judgement, and
change (ll. 973-87). In Prometheus Unbound, that much-maligned
and misunderstood work which Yeats has stated should be numbered
“among the very few sacred texts of humanity”, and whose Act I is
surely, if anything is, a metaphorical representation of the essential
reality of this world, one of the Furies sent by Jupiter to torment him
taunts the chained Prometheus with this:
In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man’s estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.
(Op. cit., Act I, ll. 618-631.)
In his last poem, The Triumph of Life, a similar theme is echoed:
“And much I grieved to think how power and will/ In opposition rule
our mortal day,/ And why God made irreconcilable/ Good and the
means of good …”(ll. 228-31).
So how does one pursue the very loftiest ideals while
concurrently fully conscious of the actual dispensations of the world
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
in which we live? Just as the poem Mont Blanc, in that seminal year
of 1816 near the beginning of his maturity as a poet, provided the
model for his subsequent work on the levels of cognition and
perception, so did his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty of the same year
give the pattern according to which he would reconcile aspiration
and reality. This, his most characteristic poem (not his greatest, but
certainly to be numbered among his ‘great’ poems), portrays, I think,
more than any other, what Shelley is all about: that is, if one were to
select among his works one that illustrates his peculiar and
idiosyncratic place, with his strengths and his weaknesses, in the
English poetical canon, this would be it. For this reason I want to
quote this poem of 84 lines almost in its entirety, and then venture
some comments and observations afterwards.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us, – visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, – where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, – why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given Therefore the names of God, and ghosts, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells – whose uttered charm might not avail to
sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone – like mist o’er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes Thou – that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!
Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not – lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
He goes on to relate how in vain he had sought the power that he
here invokes, until for the first time its “shadow” fell upon him; now,
in the poem, he calls as witness
……… the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned
bowers
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night –
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou – O awful Loveliness,
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past – there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm – to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
(Op. cit., ll. 1-48, 64-84.)
Now this poem can give some insight into why Shelley provokes
such disparate responses in his readers, and such contrasting
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
opinions on his worth from literary figures like Leavis and Yeats, by
comparing it with Wordsworth’s poem on a similar theme, his Ode:
Intimations of Immortality, which, published in 1807, obviously
influenced Shelley. (Indeed, he quotes a line from it in Alastor.)
Wordsworth’s poem presents thoughts, feelings, and ideas that most
can identify with, and provides comfort and reassurance in its
conclusions. He regrets the “visionary gleam” which, existing during
the period of one’s child-hood, in adulthood fades away. Yet to him
it is the earnest of our immortality, an indication that the child yet
remembers whence he came, which is “from God”, or “from afar”.
Furthermore, the very fact that the gleam once existed, of which the
recollection itself means that something of it still exists, is sufficient
to give him strength for his onward life, breeding in him “perpetual
benediction”. For it provides him with the truth—a truth he feels as
certainty—that the mortal world is not all, and that there is a greater
eternal world which existed before and which exists after death.
With this thought he again finds joy in the contemplation of nature,
even though it is not the joy that he once knew, and, though nature, a
“homely nurse” with “no unworthy aim” tries to make Man forget
“that imperial palace whence he came”, the memory and the
knowledge “Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,/ Are yet a
master-light of all our seeing”. He has found relief, as has the reader,
in the regret with which he began the poem, and finds, even in
human suffering, “soothing thoughts”. On the whole, a reading of
this poem (which I admit I do not do justice by paraphrasing)
imparts to the reader pleasure and deep emotion, and a truth that
solaces even those for whom the “visionary gleam” is not necessarily
proof of the existence of God or an afterlife. However, I must add,
although I recognize it as a great poem with some unforgettable lines
in it, it contains, through its very reassurance, the seeds of that smug
complacency which tarnished Wordsworth’s later years and
creations, and whose regrettable “dim stupidity” Shelley (rather
viciously) satirised in Part Seventh of Peter Bell the Third.
Whereas Wordsworth’s Ode presents the reader with a simple
dualism of a natural world of the here and now, and an eternal world
not present yet dimly recollected existing before and after death,
Shelley’s Hymn provides a view of life and the world not at all so
readily accessible to sympathy and understanding. I leave apart the
question of whether one accepts the Christian eschatology or not,
which Wordsworth did and Shelley didn’t, for I am considering the
poems from an ontological perspective only—in other words, this is
literary criticism (of a rather improvised sort) and not theology. In
Shelley’s poem, there are also two worlds, but they co-exist, and he
provides no simple answer regarding the nature of the shadowy other
world he adumbrates, nor any simple explanation as to the manner of
its co-existence with the here and now. Indeed, the measure of the
meaning and the power of this other world lies not in the grace that it
confers, but in its mystery (ll. 11-12). Furthermore, the
manifestations of this other world upon our own are inconstant and
cannot be relied upon, and seem coeval and innate with mutability
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
itself; seem only, because here too he provides no clear answer or
certainty. Apparently, the questing, restless nature of the mind of this
poet, of whom Leavis said, “in [him], feeling is divorced from
thought”, is such that he does not resist undermining his own
argument: although he posits the power represented in the poem as
an external force, he injects the ultimate doubt regarding its
existence when, invoking physical but not psychological
impossibility, he says of it, “Thou – that to human thought art
nourishment,/ Like darkness to a dying flame!” He can pretend to no
infallible conviction regarding its ultimate existence, and can only
plead that it not depart, as its “shadow” variously does, “… lest the
grave should be,/ Like life and fear, a dark reality.” Contrast this
with Wordsworth’s certainty and consoling joy in his poem, and one
can see why he can have far more popular appeal, and critics see that
appeal, than Shelley. But it is also possible to see why to a few, not
many, Shelley can have a peculiar attraction; the view of our
common, ordinary world’s simultaneous and unimmediate
magnificence corresponds, to a degree neither more or less, with that
actuality of the world perceived when one seeks more than the
immediately and comfortingly apparent, the conveniently adaptable,
the habitual and ready-made, whether supplied by custom, popular
belief, particular doctrine, or literary canon. In Shelley’s Hymn, the
physical manifestations of nature—“moonlight on a midnight
stream”, “mist o’er mountains driven” —are symbols of a shadowy,
higher reality not amenable to any kind of definite formulation. (In
this and some other poems he anticipates the later Symbolists.) It is
easy to see why this can seem like other-worldliness, that lack of a
firm grasp upon reality which is one of Leavis’s criticisms; but it is
precisely because of this attribute of his that there exists in Shelley
that intense empathy with nature, apparent in the Hymn and in the
poems cited as evidence of this quality in a preceding passage: he is
always striving to see more than what is only actually and
objectively there, seeking to remove “the veil of familiarity” which
bars the ordinary sense from that intense and higher communion
with the objective world possible only when that world has
undergone the transformation to the preternatural which is the aim,
though not necessarily and not always the achievement, of many of
his works. For this reason it is possible for some, that is, the admirers
of Shelley, like Yeats and Robert Browning, to see in his relation to
reality the very opposite to Leavis’s criticism in this regard.
All of the foregoing is not to say that an empathy with nature,
intense in its own way, does not also exist in Wordsworth’s Ode; but
there the poet’s relationship with nature is simple and direct, owing
to the distinct and separate existence of the natural and the eternal
worlds. There is no admixture of the eternal with the here and now,
except as recollection, which, according to the poem, is in childhood
sufficiently near to colour the child’s perception of the natural world,
and except as joyous consciousness of an eternal world’s assured
existence elsewhere. The “obstinate questionings” in the poem
regard the inferior nature and ephemerality of mortal existence,
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doubts whose resolution points to a certainty the poet possesses and
imparts. As well, it is interesting to compare the two poems by
looking at the respective responses the two poets take away from
their deep meditations upon existence. Wordsworth takes away a
joyful personal consolation, a consolation the reader can share,
because of which the poet says “And I again am strong”. In Shelley
the possibility of joy is of a different sort, where, addressing the
Spirit the poem invokes, he says of himself “… that never joy
illumed my brow/ Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free/ This
world from its dark slavery”; while, at the poem’s conclusion,
asserting of that same Spirit that its “spells” bound him “To fear
himself, and love all human kind”. This is joy and consolation of a
more remote sort for the reader, and it is scant wonder that Leavis
called Shelley self-absorbed, and described him as being defficient
in an interest in things outside himself. Regarding these matters,
being no literary critic, I can only shake my head, and am left only
with the hope that, like Hamlet, “I can still tell a hawk from a
handsaw”. These musings should be viewed in the context of my
description of the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty as Shelley’s most
charact-eristic poem, a statement I should perhaps modify to “his
most characteristic poem when at his best”. In the end, it is only our
best that endures, while it is to be hoped that our failings and lesser
expressions, be they those of Shelley, Leavis, Wordsworth, or Keats,
find forgiveness.
The foregoing discussion of Shelley’s Hymn leads towards
another of the major sources of misunderstanding—needless to say,
there are numerous such—of him by his critics. As a prime example
of what produces this misunderstanding, one may examine a passage
from his Epipsychidion, a poem that Shelley called “an idealized
history of my life and feelings”, and on which the major influence
was Dante’s Vita Nuova. Here, the poem’s narrator addresses his
lady loves:
Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth,
This world of love, this me; and into birth
Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart
Magnetic might into its central heart; . . .
He goes on to say that as the earth’s natural forces and elements,
such as waves, winds, tides, and storms are governed by the
influence of the sun and moon, his two loves should similarly govern
his “sphere of being”, alternating their presence and power through
night and day as do their celestial counterparts, and light it through
the seasons of spring to autumn “into the Winter of the tomb”. He
then adds a third female figure to the pantheon—critics have
variously ventured to attach the identities of real persons to the
figures in the poem, but Shelley himself wrote “the Epipsychidion is
a mystery”, and that it does not deal in “real flesh & blood”—a third
figure whom he addresses as a “… Comet beautiful and fierce,/ Who
drew the heart of this frail Universe/ Towards thine own …” He
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
beseeches this new celestial object, which had gone astray, to “float
into our azure heaven again”, and become as the morning and the
evening star, to which is promised that
The living Sun will feed thee from its urn
Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn
In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn
Will worship thee with incense of calm breath
And lights and shadows; as the star of Death
And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild
Called Hope and Fear – upon the heart are piled
Their offerings, – of this sacrifice divine
A World shall be the altar.
(Op. cit., ll. 345-383.)
Now, at first glance, it is possible to see this as a monstrous
example of self-centredness, of an egregious egotism, where the
narrator presumes to appropri-ate the earth itself, indeed, to absorb
the entire universe, as nothing more than a representation of his own
self, and as the grand theatre existing but for the play of his own
thoughts and feelings. Let us then take the following passage from
his essay On Life, written about a year to a year-and-a-half before the
composition of the above-cited poem: “… the existence of distinct
individual minds similar to that which is employed in now
questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The
words, I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference sub-sisting
between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely
marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one
mind. Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the
monstrous presumption, that I, the person who now write and speak,
am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words I, and you and
they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and
totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attributed to
them.”
Looked at in this light, the above-cited passage of the poem
expresses not the concentration of all externality within the confines
of the narrator’s ego, but, quite the contrary, the subsuming of the
narrow self within the boundless external world, a boundlessness
commensurate with and coexisting with the narrator’s love, whose
effect is a divine unity of which “a world shall be the altar”.
Shelley’s central poetic doctrine is the distending of individual mind
towards the universal; his detractors have taken to interpret this as
the absorption of world into self. Thus, in these lines from his elegy
on Keats, Adonais, it would presumably be palpably absurd to infer
that he means to represent Keats’s spirit as having become or
absorbed the universe; it would be of the same absurdity to impute
the implications of a like egotism to Shelley himself when he is
engaged in writing about himself or some poetic stand-in. Here are
the lines on Keats:
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He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where’er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.
(Op. cit., ll. 370-387.)
This is the expression of a world-view which can be unsettling in its
import, and may be one of the reasons for its distorted interpretation;
in it, “The One remains, the many change and pass” (l. 460), and is
manifested as
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; . . . . .
(Ibid, ll. 478-485.)
Incidentally, this elegy on Keats was not just some gratuitous
occasion for the writing of fine verse: although it is true that in
Keats’s fate and reception by the critics he saw similarities to his
own, his regard for Keats (not known to him personally) can be seen
in his Preface : “It is my intention to subjoin (to this poem) a
criticism upon the claims of its lamented object to be classed among
the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age. My
known repugnance to the narrow principles of taste on which several
of his earlier compositions were modelled prove at least that I am an
impartial judge. I consider the fragment of Hyperion as second to
nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years.” It is
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
to be regretted that the same candour is seldom displayed by Keats’s
partisans and Shelley’s detractors of later times, including our own.
To return to the consideration of the world-view elucidated in
Adonais, perhaps the most radical expression of it can be found in
the lyrical drama Hellas. In the following passage the Turkish
Sultan, having summoned the seer Ahasuerus to prophesy the future
prospects of his dominion, reproaches him for his apparent disdain of
worldly things, a disdain he presumes does not exempt his own
exalted person, supreme ruler of the Ottoman Empire that he is.
After some remarks concerning the place of humility and pride in the
world, Ahasuerus says,
………………… Sultan! Talk no more
Of thee and me, the Future and the Past;
But look on that which cannot change – the One,
The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds – this Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision; – all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The Future and the Past are idle shadows
Of thought’s eternal flight – they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be.
(Op. cit., ll. 762-781.), ll. 762-781.)
The Sultan responds by saying Ahasuerus’s words cast doubt upon
all things he had taken as certainties, and render everything futile.
But Ahasuerus answers that the Sultan has misconceived him, and
that “all is contained in each”, whereby all that has been or will be is
infinite in proportion to the minuteness of the present. The meaning
is not that the universe is an illusion created by individual mind, but
the reverse. I am moved to add here, regarding the above passage,
that the three lines beginning with “Whose outwall . . .” contain a
towering idea, strikingly expressed.
Having hoped to cast a somewhat different light on Shelley than
the filtered one received by the followers of Leavis, I was gratified to
see an effort that went some ways towards a partial rehabilitation, by
one of Leavis’s self-confessed adherents, Barrie Mencher, through
his articles on Mont Blanc in the October 2005 issue, and on The
Triumph of Life in the last issue (January). His examinations of the
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
aforementioned two poems are illuminating and stand by themselves.
I do however find it necessary to make some remarks regarding his
observations on Shelley in general. To begin with, I certainly concur
in his opinion that Leavis makes too much out of Shelley’s
narcissism, and exhibits a lack of fairness in at the same time
ignoring it where one of his favourites is concerned, D. H. Lawrence.
While also agreeing with Mr Mencher that Leavis’s “moral outrage”
occasioned by one of Shelley’s very minor poems is all out of
proportion, I would go further than the point at which he stops by
allowing that such “moral outrage” can be understood. Perhaps it can
be understood, but it is highly irresponsible in a serious literary
critic. What, after all, is Shelley’s sin that has provoked this
“outrage”? Philandering. Or, at worst, disloyalty to his wife Mary by
loving another woman (Jane Williams), a love that probably did not
progress beyond the platonic stage. Well, one can debate the
morality of this, and although I could say it has little relevance to the
totality of a writer’s literary compositions, let one acknowledge
Leavis’s view that the two should not be separated. But if that is the
case, what about, for example, Shakespeare? He hardly appears to
have been the model husband, but I note no “moral outrage” on
Leavis’s part. A good many other examples could be cited, but the
real question is where would the universally and impartially applied
judgement of writers’ worth—as opposed to the partial and selective
judgement applied to Shelley—influenced by their marital fidelity
conduct to? Does it mean that Rimbaud, tainted with considerably
more than an extra-marital fling, cannot be seen as a poet of the
highest genius? Or is it not rather that the critic, in the mind that he
brings to the judgement of a literary work, may join morality with
literature (allowing the argument in the case of the critical doctrine
of Leavis), while the poet, especially the poet of genius, by his very
nature strives in his work to transcend himself, go beyond himself,
so that the man and the poet are not the same?
As an aside to the foregoing, it is worth noting that applying the
term ‘disloyalty’ to Shelley’s behaviour may be using a rather
narrow concept for one who wrote “Love is like understanding, that
grows bright,/ Gazing on many truths …” (Epipsychidion, ll. 162-3).
It is also not without relevance to note that in numerous places in his
poetry he condemns mere sexual lust, not least because he considers
it to degrade women. For example, in The Revolt of Islam, “She told
me what a loathsome agony/ Is that when selfishness mocks love’s
delight” (Canto VII, ll. 2875-6); again, from the same poem, “And
made them slaves to soothe his vile unrest,/ And minister to lust its
joys forlorn” (Canto II, ll. 979-80).
Now, although aiming at some rehabilitation of Shelley among
the disciples of Leavis, the limited extent to which Mr Mencher is
willing to go in that direction is evinced in his considering, it would
seem, only the Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Mont Blanc, The
Triumph of Life, and (perhaps) Adonais as those among Shelley’s
compositions worthy to stand alongside those of Wordsworth and
Keats. I can think of numerous others, for which I would refer the
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reader to the Appendix at the end of this article, ignoring for this
purpose the fragments and incomplete poems there also listed . As
well, his characterisations of Prometheus Unbound and Hellas as
“purely academic”, and as no more than “convenient vehicles for
Shelley’s political reformism” grossly undervalues these works.
Regarding Hellas, he views only the final chorus as deserving
consideration. Well, although I’d hold Hellas in its entirety as so
deserving, among the magnificent choruses alone, some others I
would proffer are the one at the poem’s beginning, “Breathe low,
low/ The spell of the mighty mistress now”; the chorus starting as
“Worlds on worlds are rolling ever/ From creation to decay”; and
that unrivalled depiction of a violent thunderstorm within the
semichorus beginning with “Thou voice which art/ The herald of the
ill in splendour hid”.
Mr Mencher goes on to conclude that from a reading of Leavis’s
treatment of the three poets, it is clear that Shelley’s achievement is
decidedly inferior to that of Wordsworth or Keats. Well, this may be
clear to him from a reading of Leavis, but it is not clear to me from a
reading of Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats. And, although averse to
engage in what is the literary equivalent of name-dropping, yet being
impelled to do so inasmuch as it may legitimately be asked what my
qualifications are for the former assertion, a query to which I would
be bound to respond “none”, Mr Mencher’s conclusion is also not
clear to Yeats. Here I would display the inherent prejudice of writers
against critics, in inclining towards the opinion of a great poet on
another poet, as opposed to that of a great literary critic (a
qualification I have no grounds for doubting, even though believing
him fallible in this particular case).
Mr Mencher also says that he finds much of Shelley almost
unreadable. I’m not quite sure what he means by this, but it hardly
qualifies as criticism. It tells about his taste in poetry, a taste to
which he is surely entitled. I could say that I find most of Eliot
unreadable (which I do), and most of postmodern poetry (which is
also true), but these statements also would not constitute criticism.
He complains about the unclear referents of Shelley’s pronouns. I
find that in almost all instances these referents can be made out, and
where they cannot, can be inferred; reading Shelley requires some
work, due to the rapidity of his thought process, displaying in this
once again that he is more the poets’ poet than the critics’. One
reason that Mr Mencher does advance for the to him unreadability of
much of Shelley—apart from the red herring of the unclear referents
of pronouns—is what he describes as “Miltonic solemnity of tone
allied with relative naivety of idea”. His aversion to these qualities
merely indicates that his literary taste is in large part postmodern (I
say only “in large part”, and not entirely, because if the latter were
true he would not be an adherent of the doctrines of Leavis). If
“Miltonic solemnity of tone” constituted a valid objection to reading
the literature of the past, a great deal of it could be ruled out as
suitable for our times. Back then life was a serious affair, taken
seriously, often manifested in consequential acts and expressions
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upon a grand stage, rather than flippantly ironic articulations of
conditional and trivial selves in a theme park. As for what Mr
Mencher calls “relative naivety of idea”, I would rather say
“simplicity of great ideas”. This has already been touched upon in
relation to The Revolt of Islam and the Ode to Liberty. But Mr
Mencher does concede that Shelley is a much more various poet than
either Keats or Wordsworth, and for him and others with a dislike for
or seeking a foil to weightiness, a fine and at times exquisitely
crafted wit and fancy can be found in works such as The Witch of
Atlas, Letter to Maria Gisborne, The Cloud, and Peter Bell the
Third.
Although, as I believe, a great poet for all time, who ought to be
recognized as such as long as some semblance of English is still
spoken, Shelley has special significance in the postmodern culture in
which we live. At a time when the perception of the world is
collapsing into the little orbit of the self, and the reaction to that
world diminishing to expressions ever more petty, confined, and
sordid; when writing in general is characterized by either an ironic
detachment or a clinical cold-hearted objectivity; when cognition
itself manifests increasingly in a mechanistic, computer-jargon form
belonging to the tools of a human invention originally designed to
serve, and now transforming to enslave, the humanity which created
it: to these contemporary tendencies, Shelley’s poetry, in a unique
manner in ways I have attempted to describe, stands in magnificent
antithesis. His poetry at its best is infused with the sense of a much
larger, fathomless, and far more mysterious world. This sense acts as
a background against which whatever he depicts, whether natural
scenes or personal emotions, is imbued with an energy that ever
strives against its limits, and a purity and depth of thought and
feeling which can only have its source in that continuous quest for
what is beyond and larger than the moment, the immediate, and the
self. I realize that Leavis’s conclusions on Shelley are just about the
opposite. To a degree he might be right about Shelley’s lapses: for,
being human, lapses he certainly had, and his work is assuredly not
flawless. But whether these faults and lapses are as spots on the sun
which do not impair its original golden brilliance (in general, the
view of Yeats and Robert Browning), or as clouds which
occasionally may veil, but do not obscure it, or a fog through which
only at times that sun’s shafts can penetrate (Leavis’s view,
apparently), or some gradation between any of these, the reader, if
willing not to lean for a conclusion on the casuistry of a particular
critical orthodoxy, must ultimately decide through reading Shelley’s
work, something I have tried to induce those who have read this far
in this amateurish attempt at criticism to do; furthermore, this
reading of Shelley ought to be one from which, as it often is in
selections and anthologies, owing perhaps to reasons of
misunderstanding previously discussed, his best and most significant
work is not excluded. What, in my view, constitutes such I have
listed in the Appendix.
Before concluding, there are three topics I want to touch upon
WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16
briefly, two of them controversial, as, needless to say, are many
things about this poet and his work. The first of these are Shelley’s
views against religion. I’ll let Shelley speak for himself. Here is an
extract from the Preface to The Revolt of Islam, his most antireligious poem, apart from the juvenile Queen Mab: “The erroneous
and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being,
for instance, is spoken against, but not the Supreme Being itself. The
belief which some superstitious persons whom I have brought upon
the stage entertain of the Deity, as injurious to the character of his
benevolence, is widely different from my own.” I should add here
that Shelley’s idea of a Supreme Being was never anthropomorphic,
and gradually develops from the atheism of his youth to the idea of a
spirit which pervades the universe or is in fact the universe itself.
Now here are his views on the founder of the Christian religion, and
the later implementation of his teachings:
One came forth of gentle worth
Smiling on the sanguine earth;
His words outlived him, like swift poison
Withering up truth, peace, and pity.
Look! where round the wide horizon
Many a million-peopled city
Vomits smoke in the bright air.
Hark that outcry of despair!
’Tis his mild and gentle ghost
Wailing for the faith he kindled:
Look again, the flames almost
To a glow-worm’s lamp have dwindled . . .
(Prometheus Unbound, Act I, ll. 546-557.)
This brings me to the second topic, his Prometheus Unbound,
considered by most of his admirers as his greatest work, and by his
detractors as an idle daydream with little grounding in reality. As
stated earlier in this essay, Act I is a metaphor for reality, for the
world as it is. The rest of the poem develops to what the world might
become, presupposing a radical change in human nature. Those who
call this work an idle daydream would be of the view that human
nature cannot so change, and unfortunately they are probably right.
The poem presents the problem and the possibility, and it is in this
context, not in that of prophecy or fatuous hope, that the work should
be considered.
The third subject for brief mention here is his last poem, The
Triumph of Life. To the valuable points made by Mr Mencher in the
last issue, I just have a few of my own remarks to add. I would agree
with him that this could be viewed as his best poem, differing only in
holding Prometheus Unbound to be on about the same level. But
how different these two poems are—or are they? Although a span of
less than three years separates their composition, the ironically titled
The Triumph of Life might almost be taken as a retraction of
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Prometheus Unbound. And yet it is perhaps not so different from the
first Act of the latter. A hauntingly enigmatic poem, not quite
finished, the revolving and repeating cycles central to its theme are
replicated in the structure of the poem itself, and the mysterious
second part, beginning with line 308, “…. Now listen: – In the April
prime”, seems to repeat the first part of the poem, but upon other and
deeper levels. The poem does not provide an answer to its central
question, “what is life?”, and it is with that very question that it ends.
Although Shelley ought not to have been aware of his impending
death, as it was accidental, he could have written here, at the end of
his life, a no more fitting poem.
Nicholas Somlo
APPENDIX: SHELLEY’S WORKS: A SELECTION
What follows here is a listing of what I consider his best and better
poems. These are not all great poems by any means, and certainly
they are not all free of faults; but all, I believe, are worthy of a great
poet. Included as well are fragments and incomplete poems (noted as
such), in cases where I think they contain at least something worth
retaining. I have listed the poems by year of composition, and have
used (as is the case throughout this essay) Mary Shelley’s
posthumous edition of her husband’s poems of 1824, and her 1839
edition of the Collected Poems. Long poems—I have used Mrs.
Shelley’s classification of what constitutes such—are in capitals.
Before 1815
None. Queen Mab is rightly relegated to Shelley’s juvenilia, as
deemed by Shelley himself, except for his later rehandling of a part
of it as a fragment titled The Daemon of the World.
1815
ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE
Mutability (This is actually much superior to the poem of the same
title written in 1821.)
On Death (The revision of an earlier version written before 1815.)
A Summer Evening Churchyard
1816
The Sunset
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Mont Blanc
1817
THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, Cantos I-V, VII-IX
PRINCE ATHANASE. A FRAGMENT
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Lines: “That time is dead for ever”
Ozymandias
1818
JULIAN AND MADDALO. A CONVERSATION
To the Nile
The Past
Lines written among the Euganean Hills
Invocation to Misery
Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples
Sonnet: “Lift not the painted veil”
The Woodman and the Nightingale (Incomplete.)
Marenghi (Incomplete.)
Apostrophe to Silence (Fragment.)
1819
PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. A LYRICAL DRAMA
Ode to Heaven
Ode to the West Wind
An Exhortation
On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci
The Birth of Pleasure
THE MASK OF ANARCHY (I cite it here not for being poetry of a
high order, but as the best example of his popular political verse.)
PETER BELL THE THIRD (Again, cited here not for being high
poetry, but for containing some fine satirical verse, chiefly from Part
the Third onward.)
Wedded Souls (Fragment.)
“Is it that in some brighter sphere” (Fragment.)
A Tale Untold (Fragment.)
1820
LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE
THE WITCH OF ATLAS
The Sensitive Plant
A Vision of the Sea
The Cloud
To a Skylark
Ode to Liberty
Arethusa
Hymn of Apollo
The Question
The Two Spirits: An Allegory
Ode to Naples
Autumn: A Dirge
Liberty
The Tower of Famine
An Allegory: “A Portal as of shadowy adamant”
The World’s Wanderers
Sonnet: “Ye hasten to the grave!”
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Orpheus (Incomplete.)
Death (Line missing.)
To the Moon (Fragment.)
1821
EPIPSYCHIDION
ADONAIS
HELLAS. A LYRICAL DRAMA
Dirge for the Year
To Night
Time
Song: “Rarely, rarely, comest thou”
Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon
Sonnet: Political Greatness
Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear
Ginevra
The Boat on the Serchio (Incomplete.)
Three Fragments written for Hellas
To-morrow (Fragment.)
“When soft winds and sunny skies” (Fragment.)
“O thou immortal deity” (Fragment.)
1822
To Jane: The Invitation
To Jane: The Recollection
With a Guitar, to Jane
To Jane: “The keen stars were twinkling”
THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE (Some lines missing.)
The Zucca (Incomplete.)
The Isle (Fragment.)
PLAYS
The Cenci (1819)
Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (1822)
PROSE WORKS
On Love (1818)
On Life (1819)
A Defense of Poetry (1821)