Percy Bysshe Shelley
Possible Lines of Approach
The place and role of the poet
The relation of the individual to the world and the natural world
The relationship between Shelley’s poetry and his political convictions
Shelley the formalist
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
Questions for Discussion
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
Possible Lines of Approach
Shelley’s connection to first-generation Romantic poets
•
Like all second-generation Romantics, Shelley was acutely aware of those who
came before him. A number of the works here ( “To Wordsworth,” Adonais, and
the essay A Defence of Poetry) can be used to facilitate discussion about Shelley’s
relation to those older poets.
The place and role of the poet
•
One of the overwhelming concerns of Romantic poets was the place of the poet in
society: what role should a poet play, and how could he best situate himself to play
it? In Alastor, Adonais, and most directly in A Defence of Poetry, Shelley engages
with these questions.
The relation of the individual to the world and the natural world
•
This theme appears in a number of Shelley’s works: Mont Blanc, Alastor, “Ode to
the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” and “Lift not the Painted Veil.” For Shelley, the
relationship between nature and the individual is often one of power. The instructor
could explore the power relationships in these poems, asking the class to consider
who holds power, why, and what difference it makes.
The relationship between Shelley’s poetry and his political convictions
•
Shelley used his poetry to voice political beliefs and hopes. He was also, for better
or worse, connected with those beliefs and hopes (considered radical in his time) in
the minds of contemporary critics and the general public. For this reason, he is one
of the best poets of the period to teach in any course that engages directly with
politics, or considers the ways in which the Romantic period is not so different
from our own. “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Mask of Anarchy,”
and Hellas, as well as The Defence of Poetry, can be used.
Shelley the formalist
•
Shelley is considered the master formalist of Romanticism; “Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty,” “Ozymandias,” and “England in 1819,” for example, depend on formal
elements for part of their effect. Discussion of Shelley’s form gives students a
chance to think about the role form plays in appreciating and understanding him.
Instructors may also like to ask students to explore possible tensions in works with
often radical content, whose author was an avowed rebel, but that cleave firmly to
formal strictures and in many cases use formal elements to achieve their effects.
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
Our selections begin with the sonnet “To Wordsworth” (1816). Two years before Shelley
wrote the poem, Mary Shelley recorded in her journal that “Shelley … brings home
Wordsworth’s Excursion, of which we read a part, much disappointed. He is a slave”
(14 September 1814). “To Wordsworth,” however, suggests Shelley harbored rather more
complex feelings about Wordsworth. On the one hand, as the first ten lines make plain,
Wordsworth had been a powerful positive figure in Shelley’s mind: his neo-Platonic
beliefs (see, for example, Ode [Intimations of Immortality], also in this volume of the
Broadview Anthology), his early liberal sympathies, and his clear vision were all guiding
lights for Shelley (“Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine / On some frail bark in
winter’s midnight roar”). On the other hand, these early sympathies only make
Wordsworth’s “fall” greater for Shelley—having been much, Shelley suggests,
Wordsworth’s present littleness is little indeed. The instructor may wish to tease out
several strands here. First, note Shelley’s different uses of the concept of isolation.
Wordsworth’s singularity produces an isolation that marks him out as powerful, worthy:
“Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood / Above the blind and battling multitude.” On
the other hand, the isolation that Shelley feels after having been “deserted” by the older,
more conservative Wordsworth is a painful state; this isolation somehow deepens
Shelley’s disgust with the older poet: “One loss is mine / Which thou too feel’st, yet I
alone deplore”; “thou leavest me to grieve, / Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease
to be.” In the last two lines of the poem, Shelley’s grieving seems curiously personal. The
instructor may wish to introduce some discussion of Wordsworth as a father figure, both
personal and poetic, for Shelley—after all, one can certainly argue that only deep
personal attachment could produce the savage anger of the poem’s closing lines.
In considering these closing lines, one might also discuss precisely what Shelley means.
How has Wordsworth “ceased to be”? The question seems facile (the obvious answer is
that, having deserted his early political and poetical creeds, Wordsworth has become
someone else for Shelley), but it brings up complex issues. What, for example, does
Shelley’s remark suggest about his own beliefs about the relationship between poetical
credo and self? Having abandoned the one, does a poet automatically abandon the other?
Does Shelley use this poem not only to condemn Wordsworth but to trumpet forth his
own commitments and convictions?
One might also start to teach Shelley by analyzing the sonnets “Ozymandias” and
“England in 1819,” excellent texts to begin with because they bring together a number of
approaches. First, one might discuss the ways in which they connect to contemporary
cultural concerns. With “England in 1819” the connection is obvious; less obviously,
“Ozymandias” connects with Romantic interest in the exotic and Oriental (a comparison
with Byron’s Eastern tales might be useful here), as well as with travel to Eastern climes.
Next, one might consider them as political poems. Shelley’s Ozymandias would have
been associated in the minds of his readers with Napoleon, who had invaded Egypt, but
whose recent defeat had reinstated a conservative monarchy Shelley condemned. Thus,
the effacement of a tyrant has multiple valences here, suggesting that not only those
traditionally viewed as tyrants, but also those Shelley saw as tyrannical, should beware
the effacing hand of time. “England in 1819” makes this subtext its text, but the instructor
should linger over the “may” that ends the penultimate line: is it here an expression of
hope and opportunity, or of fear and hesitation?
As the position of “may” suggests, formal considerations play an important role in both
poems. It is traditional to observe that “England in 1819” is all one sentence, but the
instructor may also wish to point out that Shelley further plays with the sonnet form by
withholding his volta until the penultimate line; the result is increased pressure as the
seemingly endless list of ills pushes the reader onward, so that final “Burst” is a true
explosion. One may also remark on the tightly controlled rhyme scheme that drives what
appears to be a spontaneous utterance. Also worth noting is Shelley’s use of assonance
and alliteration to create effect (so that, for example, the sense of the Hanovers as dead
weight is emphasized through his use of the repeated “d” sounds). Finally, the instructor
may wish to help the students to see that Shelley’s decision to withhold the purpose of his
list of his country’s woes allows the reader to conjecture what that purpose might be: thus
the poem enacts one of the central tenets of democracy, the belief that all people are
capable of thinking for themselves, and should be encouraged to do so. As for
“Ozymandias,” Shelley’s remarkable manipulation of rhythm and structure is an
excellent discussion topic: the position of “trunkless” in the second line, where the
stressed/unstressed rhythm enacts the word itself; the emphasis on both “desert” and
“sand” in the third line, so the theme of ephemerality is emphasized early on; the
point/counterpoint endings of the second and third lines, so the “stone” of line two is
replaced by the ironic “sand” of line three; the monosyllabism of Ozymandias’s
proclamation, which gives it formally the power it claims verbally.
Mont Blanc also concerns itself with power, although students will almost certainly find
it less accessible than “Ozymandias.” It may help to begin by suggesting that the poem’s
difficult syntax and structure are in part a ploy to demonstrate Shelley’s own increasing
puzzlement in the face of the overwhelming scene before him. Consider the collection of
words that mark stanza 1 and the beginning of stanza 2: “ever / river / raves / Ravine /
Arve / cavern.” Differentiated by only a letter or two, they suggest the limits of language,
as contrasted with the might of the scene. Simultaneously, Shelley’s subtle but persistent
rhyme scheme suggests his power to retain control—to cede a certain might to nature but
still to control his reactions to the scene and, by extension, control the scene itself. The
poem’s main theme is this tussle over power, and the question of whether it lies within or
transcends the human consciousness. Shelley suggests strongly that power lies without
the mind—“Power dwells apart in its tranquillity / Remote, serene, and
inaccessible”—but the very act of writing a poem in which he delineates the power of the
natural world suggests the power of the human mind to determine and grant definition.
One sees this, for instance, in stanza 3, where Shelley impresses meaning and importance
onto the mountain before him, acknowledging the value of such interpretation: “Thou
hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe … / which the
wise, and great, and good / Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.” These lines suggest a
mutuality of mind and nature that is also a theme of the poem, captured both in Shelley’s
earlier observation that his mind holds “an unremitting interchange / With the clear
universe of things around,” and in the work’s final question. This question is often
understood as rhetorical, but it is more enriching to view it as a legitimate query (a view
supported by the stress on “were,” which creates a genuinely questioning tone)—not an
affirmation that Mont Blanc is nothing without human thought but a suggestion that, in
fact, there may be some power and meaning that stands outside of such thought.
Instructors may wish to contrast Shelley’s treatment of the Alps with Byron’s in Childe
Harold III and Wordsworth’s in The Prelude, Book 6.
While not a neo-Platonist, Shelley was well-read in Plato and in classical philosophy, and
Mont Blanc offers an example of the Platonic dictum that man’s perceptions offer only
dim access to ideal forms. This belief is further adumbrated in To a Skylark. Most
obviously, the bird who sings “a flood of rapture so divine” is unseen, its essence
ungraspable by human perception: “What thou art we know not.” Yet it is this very
ungraspability that enables the imagination, which is stimulated to pour forth metaphors
and visions. Serial similes mark this poem (“Like a Poet hidden … Like a highborn
maiden … Like a rose embowered …”), demonstrations of the mental action that is the
response to unseen stimulus for Shelley. Consider the similar use of metaphor and simile
in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, where ungraspable Intellectual Beauty can only be
approached indirectly—“Like hues and harmonies of evening … / Like memory of music
fled,” but where, unlike in To a Skylark, the force Shelley seeks to access is as terrifying
as it is inspiring. The poem suggest that even as Intellectual Beauty is a haven—“Thy
light alone … / Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream”—it is also a fearful thing:
the “shadow of some unseen power.” The combination of terror and awe that Intellectual
Beauty inspires in Shelley is a running subtext in the poem, perhaps given clearest (and
most arresting) voice in the young Shelley’s encounter with it in the wood: “thy shadow
fell on me; / I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstacy!” The instructor may choose to
use this moment as a jumping-off point for a discussion of how precisely Shelley views
Intellectual Beauty: is it positive? negative? does his mixed reaction stem from awe or
fear, or both?
Again drawing attention to form, the instructor may find it useful to point out that the
poem is written in a combination of iambic pentameter (a meter traditionally used for
meditation, but also considered unstable because it contains an uneven number each of
stressed and unstressed syllables) and iambic tetrameter (a more stable meter because it
contains an even number of stressed/unstressed syllables, but one that for this reason
closes off rather than opens out), and thus formally enacts its thematic wavering between
tension and calm.
An ambiguity similar to that of the Skylark and Intellectual Beauty inheres in the west
wind in “Ode to the West Wind,” a poem in which duality is central. Most obviously, the
west wind is both “Destroyer and Preserver,” bringer of the destruction that will result in
fecundity. For Shelley, this destruction and fecundity take many forms: natural (leaves,
water), intellectual, personal, and political. A useful way to track the theme of the poem
is to point students toward the poem’s recurring image of leaves. These leaves are first
the dead leaves of autumn, are then transformed into the clouds of a storm, then find a
counterpart in the “sapless foliage” of the ocean, then become a contrast to Shelley
himself, and in the end are transformed into leaves of paper on which Shelley’s words
can be scattered “among mankind.” In all cases, they are symbols of potential change and
revolution.
Instructors may also wish to discuss the poem’s structure, which mirrors that of a psalm
and also a classical prayer to a deity: invocation (stanzas 1-3), lament over personal
failure (stanza 4), followed by prayer (stanza 5). Shelley chooses as his form terza rima,
employed by Dante in perhaps the best-known of Christian poems. The imagery of the
“Ode” also mingles classical and Christian traditions, from the “Maenad” of stanza 2, to
the persistent Biblical references (the waters are troubled as they are in Psalm 77; Shelley
wrestles with the wind as Jacob wrestled with the angel), to the curious amalgamation of
Shelley with Christ and the nightingale in his exclamation, “I fall upon the thorns of life!
I bleed.” Instructors may wish to explore why the atheist Shelley employs Christian
imagery in this way, and what it means that he blends it with classical imagery. Finally,
the poem’s political overtones should not be ignored. In the final two tercets nature
becomes society, and Shelley envisions a revolution that is both secular and quasireligious: “Scatter…. / my words among mankind! / … Be, through my lips … / The
trumpet of a prophecy!” In light of the state of England and Europe in 1819 and Shelley’s
own beliefs and hopes, this may not have been simply a figure of speech. Similarly,
instructors may wish to ask their students how they interpret the final question: is it a
rhetorical utterance of certainly, or a genuine question borne out of concern? How does
the text support either interpretation?
As “Ode to the West Wind” suggests, the role of the poet was an important topic for
Shelley. No work of his shows this more clearly than A Defence of Poetry, with its
famous final line, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The instructor
may wish to begin discussion of the Defence by comparing it to Wordsworth’s Preface to
Lyrical Ballads and the selections from Coleridge’s Lectures and Notes on Literature.
One might pay particular attention to Wordsworth’s declaration that a poet is a “man
speaking to men,” comparing it with Shelley’s definition of the poet as a “nightingale
who sits in darkness to cheer its own solitude,” and then comparing the readers that each
of these implies with the readers that Coleridge outlines in “Definition of Poetry.” Also
worth considering are the powers Shelley grants to poets: they are “legislators” not
because they are lawmakers, but rather because their imaginations shape our perceptions
of the world. This is a highly polemical statement, as is his assertion that “The most
unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a
beneficial change in opinion or institution is Poetry.” The question of whether and how
this is true is worth exploring. Certainly any class that considers questions of politics or
culture (e.g., high versus low culture) will be well served by examining Shelley’s
insistence that poetry “turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is
most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed.” This seems a noble
assertion, but there are advantages to a poetry that turns nothing to loveliness but rather
presents the wrongs of the world as they are (one might point to Wordsworth’s The Thorn
and The Ruined Cottage as two poems that achieve powerful effect precisely by not
adding beauty to their subjects). Furthermore, the statement assumes—as does the entire
Defence—that beauty and goodness are the highest possible goals, and that the
imagination and its creations are treasures. But there are arguments to be made against all
these assertions, and students and instructor may wish to make them.
The position of the poet is also a central theme in Shelley’s long elegy for Keats,
Adonais. One may take this poem as Shelley’s statement on poetic tradition, as well as on
the poet himself. Milton is mentioned early (thus suggesting that Shelley intended
comparisons to Lycidas), but he appears as Milton the renegade as well as Milton the
poet. Indeed, Shelley’s whole poem appears to be an exercise in transgression: Keats, the
lower-class poet, is placed on the same level as the poetical “sons of light,” mourned by a
noble poet (Byron, stanzas 27-30), and finally apotheosized (“The soul of Adonais, like a
star / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are”). All of this was guaranteed to
outrage conservatives. At the same time, Adonais is highly poetical—no man speaking to
men here—and conceives of poetry as a tradition, rather than as the breaking of tradition
usually associated with Romanticism. This curious paradox may make for fruitful
discussion. At the same time, students may wish to consider the poets Shelley introduces
into his poem, particularly his contemporaries, and what he does with them. Keats and
Byron were, after all, known figures with reputations (in Byron’s case, widely known and
with a very particular reputation), yet Shelley uses them as both symbols and
touchstones. The instructor may wish to look back to Byron, or to revisit this poem after
reading Keats, and ask what these men might have made of Shelley’s use of them.
Questions for Discussion
1.
Shelley the poet is often read in light of Shelley the man, and opinions about his
works are formed based on his private behavior. In a society in which the wall
between public and private is increasingly more porous, Shelley makes an
interesting case study. How should knowledge of his private behavior and beliefs
affect opinions about and readings of his works?
2.
In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley makes poetry a central moral force. His own poetry
is often highly political, directly or indirectly. Does it seem to you that poetry has
the power to be a moral force? Are Shelley’s goals for poetry hopeless?
3.
In “Ode to the West Wind,” why does Shelley pray to the wind, “Be thou me”?
Why not “Make me thou”?
4.
Music is an important trope for Shelley, recurring in many of his works (“To a
Skylark,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” A Defence of Poetry, even indirectly in
the nightingale reference in “Ode to the West Wind”). How does Shelley use
images of/references to music in his works? What makes it such an effective or
evocative symbol for him?
5.
Shelley is interested in both change (“Mutability,” “Hellas,” “Ode to the West
Wind,” “The Mask of Anarchy”) and durability (Mont Blanc, poetry in the
Defence). Discuss his different uses of these contradictory states. What interests
him about each? What meaning or importance does he find in change? In
durability?
6.
Consider Shelley’s attitude toward inspiration. “Ode to a Skylark,” for instance,
suggests that although he burns to be inspired he also fears the loss of inspiration,
or fears that it may never come. Does this contradictory attitude appear in other of
his poems? How does it play out in his poetry (say, in Adonais)?
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
Reporting Shelley’s death, the Tory newspaper The Courier smirked, "Shelley, the writer
of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or no."
This negative linking of Shelley the poet and Shelley the man was a hallmark of Shelley
criticism in his own lifetime. Scarcely a review appeared that did not bemoan the
intrusion of his “pernicious” ideas into his poetry: in a review of The Cenci in 1820, The
Literary Gazette began by announcing, “Of all the abominations which intellectual
perversion, and poetical atheism, have produced in outtimes, this tragedy appears to us to
be the most abominable”; a year later, reviewing Queen Mab, The Literary Chronicle and
Weekly Review wrote that “Mr. Shelley furnishes one of the most striking and melancholy
instances of the perversion, or rather prostitution of genius, that we have ever met with.”
As the second of these remarks suggests, however, reviewers recognized Shelley’s poetic
talent even as they deplored the sentiments he expressed in his poems. During his
lifetime, Shelley’s poems were received as the productions of a greatly talented but
wrong-headed writer: reviewing Alastor in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, John
Gibson Lockhart spoke of Shelley as a “gifted but wayward young man,” but also held
him up as “a poet, almost in the very highest sense of that mysterious word, … a great
man.” In a review of Rosalind and Helen, also in Blackwood’s, John Wilson advanced his
conviction that “Mr. Shelley is a true poet,” while at the same time bemoaning the
“strange perversion of moral principle” the poem exhibited.
Part of the reason behind the negative critical reactions was Shelley’s membership in the
so-called “Cockney School,” a group created by the critical press and consisting of Leigh
Hunt, John Keats, and sundry others including Shelley. Associated with flowery, sensual
writing, the Cockney School was vilified by critics who decried the tendency of its
“members” to depend on emotion and sensual experience for poetic effect. Hunt was
indeed a friend and supporter of Shelley, and, not surprisingly, gave his works
consistently high praise: reviewing The Cenci, for instance, he described him as “a bold,
elemental imagination, and a framer of ‘mighty lines.’” As the above comments show,
though, Shelley also received strong praise from critics other than Hunt; indeed, the
general feeling was that it was a great loss to poetry that such talent was annexed to such
beliefs.
After Shelley’s death, a different sort of Shelley emerged in criticism. Victorian critics
saw Shelley as a great poet and a bold thinker, whose radicalism was in fact a recognition
of the need for reform. Matthew Arnold captured something of this opinion in his famous
remark that Shelley was a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his
luminous wings in vain.” Other Victorians felt his impact without finding it impotent: in
his poem “Memorabilia,” Robert Browning uses a fictional encounter with Shelley as an
example of the way in which a momentary brush with genius can change an entire life.
Twentieth-century critics have found Shelley equally powerful, and dealt with him from
several angles: as a philosophical poet, both as a Neo-Platonist (James Notopoulous’s
The Platonism of Shelley, Durham: Duke UP, 1949) and, more recently, as a skeptic
(Stuart Curran’s Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, San Marino: Huntington, 1975), a Marxist
(Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, London: Sidgwick, 1980), and a self-deconstructor (Tilottama
Rajan’s Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980),
among others.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Emily Bernhard Jackson of the
University of Arkansas for the preparation of the draft material.