DOCSLIB.ORG

From Poet to Poet Or Shelley's Inconsistencies in Keats's Panegyric

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
From Poet to Poet Or Shelley's Inconsistencies in Keats's Panegyric From Poet to Poet or Shelley’s Inconsistencies in Keats’s Panegyric: Adonais as an Autobiographical Work of Art by Caroline Bertonèche (Paris 3) Adonais, in short, is such an elegy as poet might be expected to write upon poet. The author has had before him his recollections of Lycidas, of Moschus and Bion, and of the doctrines of Plato; and in the stanza of the most poetical of poets, Spenser, has brought his own genius, in all its ethereal beauty, to lead a pomp of Loves, Graces, and Intelligences, in honour of the departed. (Leigh Hunt, “Unsigned Review of Adonais”, The Examiner, 7 juillet 1822)1 I have engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of John Keats, which will shortly be finished; and I anticipate the pleasure of reading it to you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it. It is a highly wrought piece of art, perhaps better in point of composition than anything I have written. (Lettre de Shelley à John et Maria Gisborne, 5 juin 1821, Complete Works, X 270) When Shelley said of Adonais, not long after its completion, that it was its most accomplished piece of art, “better in point of composition than anything [he] ha[d] written” while mentioning, in his Preface, the “feeble tribute of applause” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 392) it nonetheless represents, he does not to seem to want to hide his own sense of personal satisfaction, nor does he fail to confess certain obvious limitations in his work as a Romantic elegist. We must indeed respect him for his candour, here shrouded in paradox, as well as for the bold double- sidedness of this critical confession which, while putting forward a great poetic success, also openly discards the original objective of his elegy – the honourable tribute one pays to the memory of a dead poet, with a strong conviction that cannot bear the egotistical whims of a falsely humble writer. This leads us to one of our main theme and source of interest, that of the narcissistic elegist or the biographical art of an auto-elegiac poetic narrative which places the author in the foreground, on the same equally important plane as the form of the poem. In this new scheme of things, where tightly woven influences and formal intricacies often include a reader that needs to be educated and a tradition that needs to be improved, the status of the self-centred elegist and the funerary topoi he chooses to manipulate, superimposing individual purpose to collective grief, would then have more value than the simple object of mourning. “The canonizer is worthy of the saint”, says the Blackwood’s, as it tackles the ironic question, now tinged with an added layer of black humour, of the fellow poet’s canonisation and the illusions of posthumous grandeur for which a consecrated elegist has most daringly sacrificed a part of his revered subject: “Here an hour—a dead hour too—is to say that Mr. J. Keats died along with it! Yet this hour has the heavy business on its hands of mourning the loss of its fellow-defunct, and of rousing all its obscure compeers to be taught its own sorrow, &c. Mr. Shelley and his tribe have been panegyrised in their turn for power of language.” (Anon. 697) Yet this problematic substance of the post-Miltonian elegy, whose secular essence lies in its “dynamics of consolation”, also flaunts as many tokens of a heightened credibility as possible by relying on the new epic values of its modern historicism2. These values, we find them well- performed by an author-actor, first a hero then a playwright, who willingly takes up the entire stage, standing at the centre of the elegiac scene to better reveal himself to the public gaze. And, in the end, a multi-talented elegist does not fail to remind us that common beliefs are not strong enough for the entire body of a submerged plot to resurface on its own. Thus Lycidas’s pastoral orthodoxy, where Christ is silenced and its assistance denied, stems from a progressive re-evaluation of the religious concepts of life and death: “Weep no more, wofull shepherds 1 Quoted in Redpath (383). 2 On this theme, see William A. Ulmer’s seminal article, “Adonais and the Death of Poetry” (438). Bertonèche, Caroline.“From poet to poet or Shelley’s inconsistencies in Keats’s panegyric: Adonais as an 35 autobiographical work of art.” EREA 5.1 (Printemps 2007): 35-44. <www.e-rea.org> weep no more, / For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, / Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar (…) So Lycidas, sunk low but mounted high, / Through the dear might of him that walkt the waves (…) (v. 165-67, 172-73)” (163). As for Shelley’s elegy, Adonais, heir to Milton’s throne, like its Victorian counterpart, Thyrsis,3 it turns its dialectic of immortality in survival, “a Love in desolation masked”, into an iconic pretext for the omnipotent writer and his wider spectrum of visionary outbursts in terms of cultural and Romantic canonisation: “A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift – / (…) a Power / Girt round with weakness (…) On the withering flower / The killing sun smiles brightly (XXXII, 280-81, 286-87)” (400). Similarly, Shelley’s slippery slope of historicist displacements or misplacements provides him with a better grasp of the subjective sphere of elegiac memory. This all-encompassing power of influence he seems to exert over the rotations of history and the recollections of the dead, he acquires it fully when he learns how to master, with greatness, the historical meaning of his elegy. There, at this point in time and space, roles are inverted between a Keats reliving his youth as a traditional poet of canonical dimension and an Adonais which survives as a metonymic voice of both individual and monumental historicity. A descendant of Urania, “mighty Mother”4 called to her son’s bedside, both prone to the same sense of desertion and neglect, Shelley, bewitched by the former, henceforth restored to her proper rank of “historicist Muse”5, seems to be speaking out in her favour. But as he seems to disregard his long-lasting attachment to the contemporary memorial and the vivid influence of his deceased peer6, he can, from here onwards, entirely devote himself to the cult of narcissistic memory, that which links him back, as wished, to the last branch of this elegiac genealogy: O weep for Adonais—he is dead! Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep; For he is gone, where all things wise and fair Descend;—oh, dream not that the amorous Deep Will yet restore him to the vital air; Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair. (III, 19- 21 & 25-27, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 393). Shelley is here voluntarily following his elder’s footsteps. In Wordsworth, indeed, the contemplative and specular dilemmas of the first Narcissus of Romantic memory, renowned character (“the rememberer”) of the Prelude which likes to represent and commemorate a past that is both autobiographical, both cultural, emerge from a semblance of poetic aporia dressed in the simpler form of a myth with no outcome. It depicts this young hero with a tilted head who, unable to take his eyes off the riveting sight of “his own image”, still manages to stay out of danger and onto safe grounds. His obsessed gaze fixed on the few imperceptible shimmers of a quiet lake, another metaphor for his endless imagination, he now belongs to a protected category of bodies and spirits that no longer deserve to drown. The “discovery” of the self, further distanced from mortal sin, can therefore be sufficiently appreciated by the poet. And after having deprived the famous myth of its fatal ending, Wordsworth invites us to 3 We could add here that, in Matthew Arnold’s work, the elegist’s survival is dependent upon a repetitive and overwhelming struggle – as is illustrated by its chiasmic structure – against the unfair abandonment and desperate loss of the poet-friend: “There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here / Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair. / Despair I will not (…) (v.191-93)”. My emphasis. Haunted by the memory of Clough’s bohemian spirit, who has breathed elegiac motifs of Romantic wanderings and erudition into the mind of an attentive successor, Arnold makes sure to canonise this scholarly spectre by questioning, in the process, his own poetic resistance as well as the egotistical potentialities of such a speculative immortalisation: “Our Gypsy-Scholar haunts, outliving thee! / Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay, / Woods with anemonies in flower till May, / Know him a wanderer still; then why not me? (v.197-200)”. My emphasis. See Arnold, Matthew, “Thyrsis” (998). 4 “Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay, / When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies / In darkness? Where was lorn Urania / When Adonais died? (II, 10-13)”. (See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 392). 5 This expression, we owe it to William A. Ulmer (445). 6 “Keats’s actual death is actively forgotten in Shelley’s memorial act of writing Adonais”. (See Sandy 86). Bertonèche, Caroline.“From poet to poet or Shelley’s inconsistencies in Keats’s panegyric: Adonais as an 36 autobiographical work of art.” EREA 5.1 (Printemps 2007): 35-44. <www.e-rea.org> contemplate, with him, a sketched version of his new lyricism or what he conceives to be a poetics of infinite impossibilities: As one who hangs down-bending from the side Of a slow-moving boat upon the breast Of a still water, solacing himself With such discoveries as his eye can make (…) now is crossed by gleam Of his own image, by a sunbeam now, And motions that are sent he knows not whence, Impediments that make his task more sweet (IV, 246-49 & 258-61, Prelude 138).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Grave of John Keats Revisited
    The Keats-Shelley Review ISSN: 0952-4142 (Print) 2042-1362 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yksr20 The Grave of John Keats Revisited Nicholas Stanley-Price To cite this article: Nicholas Stanley-Price (2019) The Grave of John Keats Revisited, The Keats- Shelley Review, 33:2, 175-193, DOI: 10.1080/09524142.2019.1659018 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09524142.2019.1659018 Published online: 18 Sep 2019. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yksr20 THE KEATS-SHELLEY REVIEW 2019, VOL. 33, NO. 2, 175–193 https://doi.org/10.1080/09524142.2019.1659018 ARTICLE The Grave of John Keats Revisited Nicholas Stanley-Price Advisory Committee, Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners, Rome ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Many visitors in the nineteenth century to the grave of John Keats in John Keats; Rome; Rome thought it ‘neglected’ or ‘solitary’ and ‘unshaded’.Today’scritics Protestant cemetery; poet’s often characterize the grave as ‘marginal’, both literally and metaphori- grave; Percy Bysshe Shelley; cally, while ignoring the city authorities’ proposal to demolish it in the Joseph Severn; Romantics 1880s. An analysis of the grave’s original setting and its subsequent renovations suggests instead that it enjoyed a privileged position. Historical descriptions, when considered together with visitors’ accounts – avaluablesourceifusedcritically– and little-known artists’ depictions of Keats’s grave prompt a re-assessment of ideas of its ‘marginality’ and ‘neglect’ in the nineteenth century. The grave lies quite alone, and is evidently much neglected.
    [Show full text]
  • Shelley's“Adonais” As a Pastoral
    | １ , ＳＨＥＬＬＥＹ’Ｓ“ＡＤＯＮＡＩＳ” ＡＳ Ａ ＰＡＳＴＯＲＡＬ ＥＬＥＧＹ（１） Terufumi KIDO This paper aims chieny to discuss some salient featuresof “Adonais” by Percy Bysshe Shelley as an English pastoral elegy such as John Milton’s “Lycidas” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis.”lt is we11-known that the poem was written to mourn over the premature death of John Keats in Rome in February， 1821.For a full understanding and appreciation of “Adonais” it may be desirable to have some knowledge of Greek myth centering on the Adonis legend， the tradition of pastoral elegy， Shelley’s view of Keats and his works， and Shelley’s antipathy toward his contemporary reviewer of literary creation. Although “Shelley’s selection ofthe word ‘Adonais’ remains a matter of conjecture” l there is an interesting and persuasivereference to the title.“The change from Adonis to Adonais was an inspired piece of word-coining. The extra vowel creates a richer and more gracious flavour. The long-drawn final synables add an elegiac undertone， and ‘Adonis’seerns curt and flat after‘Adonais.’The ダ ダmetrical problems too are eased by the extra stress － Adonais instead of Adonls. ダ ・ 。2 ltis certain that; the title“Adonais” comes from the name of a beautiful youth，Adonis beloved by Aphrodite， the goddess of love ，beauty and fertility in Greek myth. The Adonis legend is known as follows: When Adonis was killed by a wild boar， the grief of the goddess moved Persephone， Queen of Hades， to allow him to spend six months of the year on earth and six in the underworld.
    [Show full text]
  • Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters
    © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Chapter 1 Shelley’s Heart and Pepys’s Lobsters Biographies are full of verifiable facts, but they are also full of things that aren’t there: absences, gaps, missing evi- dence, knowledge or information that has been passed from person to person, losing credibility or shifting shape on the way. Biographies, like lives, are made up of con- tested objects—relics, testimonies, versions, correspon- dences, the unverifiable. What does biography do with the facts that can’t be fixed, the things that go missing, the body parts that have been turned into legends and myths? A few years ago, a popular biographer who had allowed doubts and gaps into the narrative of a historical subject was criticised for sounding dubious. “For ‘I think,’ read ‘I don’t know,’” said one of her critics crossly. But more recently, “biographical uncertainty” has become a re- spectable topic of discussion.1 Writers on this subject tend to quote Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot: You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a col- lection of holes tied together with string. For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press.
    [Show full text]
  • Prometheus Unbound and the Gothic Novel 15
    From the Sublime to the Numinous A Study of Gothic Qualities in the Poetry and Drama of Shelley's Italian Period A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English in the University of Canterbury by Robert Percival University of Canterbury 2000 Contents Page Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction 1 I. Prometheus Unbound and the Gothic Novel 15 II. Prometheus Unbound and the Classical Gothic 29 III. Prometheus Unbound- Heroes and Villains 50 IV. The Cenci - An Absence of the Numinous 64 V. Leonardo's Medusa and the Limits of the Sublime 78 VI. The West Wind-Poet as Prophet and Enchanter 90 VII. Adonais - Flight from the City of Death 101 VIII. Adonais - The Hunter Hunted 112 IX. The Triumph ofLife - The Living Dead and the Car of Life 130 X. The Triumph ofLife - Rousseau, the Shape, and the "shape all light" 146 Conclusion 159 Bibliography - (Primary and Secondary Sources) 164 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my wife, Hannah, for her limitless patience, and for her unfailing practical and moral support, without which this thesis would never have been completed; and my supervisor, Dr Gordon Spence, for his continuing encouragement, his unobtrusive guidance, and the generous spirit in which he always shared his time and erudition. Abstract In this thesis I consider six poems which Shelley wrote in Italy, between 1818 and his death in 1822: Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery", "Ode to the West Wind", Adonais, and The Triumph ofLife.
    [Show full text]
  • Cain in Early Nineteenth-Century Literature: Traditional Biblical Stories Revised to Encompass Contemporary Advances in Science Kara Davis Iowa State University
    Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2012 Cain in early nineteenth-century literature: Traditional biblical stories revised to encompass contemporary advances in science Kara Davis Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Davis, Kara, "Cain in early nineteenth-century literature: Traditional biblical stories revised to encompass contemporary advances in science" (2012). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 12308. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/12308 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cain in early nineteenth-century literature: Traditional biblical stories revised to encompass contemporary advances in science by Kara Anne Davis A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Literature) Program of Study Committee: Dometa Wiegand Brothers, Major Professor Linda Shenk KJ Gilchrist Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2012 Copyright © Kara Anne Davis, 2012. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: “TO KNOW MORTAL NATURE’S NOTHINGNESS”: 11 REVISIONS OF IMMORTALITY IN BYRON’S CAIN CHAPTER 3: THE PHYSICALITY OF FAITH: 38 SENSING GOD IN NATURE IN “THE WANDERINGS OF CAIN” CHAPTER 4: “THIRD AMONG THE SONS OF LIGHT”: 62 THE INTERSECTION OF ASTRONOMICAL METAPHORS AND THE APOTHEOSIS OF JOHN KEATS IN SHELLEY’S ADONAIS CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 86 1 Introduction During the early nineteenth century, a number of authors sought to revise the traditional story of Cain, frequently using non-canonical sources to complete these revisions.
    [Show full text]
  • The Thanatic Corporeality of Edward Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial
    Chapter 4 of David J. Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877-1905 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), revised and expanded from an article of the same title published in Visual Culture in Britain 3.1 (April 2002): 53-76 4 "Hard Realism": The Thanatic Corporeality of Edward Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial Some have skeletons in their closets; Oxford has a corpse. Since its unveiling in 1893, Edward Onslow Ford's memorial to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley has been a disconcerting presence at University College (figs. 71, 77-81). Often met with derision, the Shelley Memorial has suf­ fered perennial undergraduate pranks, vandalism, and recurring attempts to bury - or at least move - this uneasy and awkward body. In art-historical accounts of the period, the work has been quietly passed over despite its importance to late Victorian sculpture and criticism.' All of this squeamishness, however, is precisely the point. Almost a century before the corpse would be explored by sculptors like Paul Thek, Robert Gober, or Marc Quinn Edward Onslow Ford brought the viewer face to face with thanatic corporeality. Ford used the commission for the ShelleyMemorial to formulate a polemical contribution to the on-going debates about the propriety and potential of sculptural verisimilitude. He employed the corpse as the embodiment of realism itself and made the figure of Shelley its poetic allegory. In this work he posited a highly self-conscious and self-reflexive articulation of verisimilitude and its overlap with the materiality of the sculptural object. Despite the fact that he would become one of the pillars of the sculptural renaissance in the 1880s and 1890s, Ford had little of the formal training in sculpture from which his col­ leagues benefited.
    [Show full text]
  • Keats and Mythology (1819-2019) Rome, 22-23 February 2019
    Keats and Mythology (1819-2019) Rome, 22-23 February 2019 ‘I wonder if school children are still taught, as I was, the ridiculous myth that Keats was killed by a bad review.’ (W.H. Auden, ‘Keats in his Letters’, Partisan review, 1951) This conference celebrating the bicentenary of Keats’s annus mirabilis, 1819, is organised by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association in collaboration with the Société d’Études du Romantisme Anglais and hosted at the British School at Rome with tours of the Keats-Shelley House and Non-Catholic Cemetery. The conference is supported by the Keats-Shelley Association of America’s Romantic Bicentennials fund and organised by Giuseppe Albano, Curator/Director of the Keats-Shelley House, Caroline Bertonèche, from the University of Grenoble Alpes and President of the SERA (Société d’Études du Romantisme Anglais), and Maria Valentini from the University of Cassino and Chair of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association in Rome. All papers will be given on Friday 22nd February, and participants remaining in Rome on Saturday 23rd February will be invited to take part in special tours of the Non-Catholic Cemetery, where Keats and Shelley are buried, and of the Keats-Shelley House, Keats’s final dwelling place, in order to mark the anniversary of Keats’s death. The conference includes the premiere performance of Bright Stars, a musical and literary exploration of some parallels in the lives of Franz Schubert and John Keats written and directed by Rory Stuart. All speakers and attendees must register in advance by contacting [email protected] / +39 06 678 42 35.
    [Show full text]
  • Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley MEMOIR OF SHELLEY. The life of Percy Bysshe Shelley is one which has given rise to a great deal of controversy, and which cannot, for a long time to come, fail to be regarded with very diverse sentiments. His extreme opinions on questions of religion and morals, and the great latitude which he allowed himself in acting according to his own opinions, however widely they might depart from the law of the land and of society, could not but produce this result. In his own time he was generally accounted an outrageous and shameful offender. At the present date many persons entertain essentially the same view, although softened by lapse of years, and by respect for his standing as a poet: others regard him as a conspicuous reformer. Some take a medium course, and consider him to have been sincere, and so far laudable; but rash and reckless of consequences, and so far censurable. His poetry also has been subject to very different constructions. During his lifetime it obtained little notice save for purposes of disparagement and denunciation. Now it is viewed with extreme enthusiasm by many, and is generally admitted to hold a permanent rank in English literature, though faulty (as some opine) through vague idealism and want of backbone. These are all points on which I shall here offer no personal opinion. I shall confine myself to tracing the chief outlines of Shelley's life, and (very briefly) the sequence of his literary work. Percy Bysshe Shelley came of a junior and comparatively undistinguished branch of a very old and noted family.
    [Show full text]
  • A Walk on the Oxford Poem Road Chris: Look!
    A Walk on the Oxford Poem Road (a Haibun read at the Sketches from the Poem Road Closing Celebration, in the Glass Tank, OBU, Friday 15 July 2016) (Isao rang a bell to signal changes in direction) Chris: Look! early summer is out stretching its legs in the sunshine. The wind is light and warm today. And in the Glass Tank gallery, Isao’s paper wind is blowing over the slates. We are 7 friendly writers and poets, including an artist, all eager to be out there in the wind and sunshine, walking like a group of humble Basho’s in our paper coats. Wendy: Take my hands, walk with me for part of our journey listen for the bird calling, notice one star. Chris: Isao, tell us about the Road… Isao: The Road is made of Poems you love. You want to see where they started, the place or the poet who started them. Chris: I’m already thinking of Shelley’s memorial in University College! Robert: O wild West Wind…wild spirit, which art moving everywhere… Dorothy: look at the pillars of the Oxford Brookes colonnade, new but with a patina of rust: we like the beauty of old age so much, we make the new look old! Chris: look at the bicycles locked under the roof garden, longing to escape! Dorothy: we thread our way to South Park, where there’s the smell of warm, rain-fed grass. A brown puddle. Inigo: the first part of a journey is to get to the point that it feels like the beginning of the journey 1 Robert: in spite of ourselves, we gasp at the towery city, branchy in between cranes, tipped into this basin, river-rounded honey pot.
    [Show full text]
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)
    Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) Biography: ercy Bysshe Shelley, (born Aug. 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, Eng.— died July 8, 1822, at sea off Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]), English Romantic poet whose P passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language. Shelley was the heir to rich estates acquired by his grandfather, Bysshe (pronounced “Bish”) Shelley. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a weak, conventional man who was caught between an overbearing father and a rebellious son. The young Shelley was educated at Syon House Academy (1802–04) and then at Eton (1804–10), where he resisted physical and mental bullying by indulging in imaginative escapism and literary pranks. Between the spring of 1810 and that of 1811, he published two Gothic novels and two volumes of juvenile verse. In the fall of 1810 Shelley entered University College, Oxford, where he enlisted his fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg as a disciple. But in March 1811, University College expelled both Shelley and Hogg for refusing to admit Shelley’s authorship of The Necessity of Atheism. Hogg submitted to his family, but Shelley refused to apologize to his. 210101 Bibliotheca Alexandrina-Library Sector Compiled by Mahmoud Keshk Late in August 1811, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the younger daughter of a London tavern owner; by marrying her, he betrayed the acquisitive plans of his grandfather and father, who tried to starve him into submission but only drove the strong-willed youth to rebel against the established order.
    [Show full text]
  • Shelley's Editing Process in the Preface to <I>Epipsychidion</I>
    The Keats-Shelley Review ISSN: 0952-4142 (Print) 2042-1362 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yksr20 Shelley's Editing Process in the Preface to Epipsychidion Michael Laplace-Sinatra To cite this article: Michael Laplace-Sinatra (1997) Shelley's Editing Process in the Preface to Epipsychidion , The Keats-Shelley Review, 11:1, 167-181 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/ksr.1997.11.1.167 Published online: 18 Jul 2013. Submit your article to this journal View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yksr20 Download by: [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal] Date: 07 February 2016, At: 08:47 SHELLEY'S EDITING PROCESS IN THE PREFACE TO EPIPSYCHIDION by Michael Laplace-Sinatra Prefaces are often disregarded by readers who, more often than not, start without taking time to peruse them first. Sir Walter Scott knew this perfectly well, and he wrote about it, very wittily, in 'A PostScript Which Should Have Been a Preface', the last chapter of his novel Waverley written in 1814: 'most novel readers, as my own conscience reminds me, are apt to be guilty of the sin of omission respecting the same matter of prefaces' .1 Scott refers to novel readers but poetry readers are also 'guilty of the sin of omission', maybe even more so in so far as they may wish, understandably enough, to read only poetry and not a prose introduction. Many critics include prefaces in their analysis, but most of the time only as a means of interpreting the work they precede.
    [Show full text]
  • Bibliography
    Bibliography Allott , Miriam (ed.) ( 1982 ), Essays on Shelley (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Angeli , Helen Rossetti ( 1911 ), Shelley and His Friends in Italy (London: Methuen). Arditi , Neil (2001 ), ‘T. S. Eliot and The Triumph of Life ’, Keats-Shelley Journal 50, pp. 124–43. Arnold , Matthew ( 1960 –77), The Complete Prose Works , ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Bainbridge , Simon ( 1995 ), Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Baker , Carlos ( 1948 ), Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Bandiera , Laura ( 2008 ), ‘Shelley’s Afterlife in Italy: From 1922 to the Present’, in Schmid and Rossington ( 2008 ), pp. 74–96. Barker-Benfield , Bruce ( 1991), ‘Hogg-Shelley Papers of 1810–12’, Bodleian Library Record 14, pp. 14–29. Barker-Benfield , Bruce ( 1992 ), Shelley’s Guitar: An Exhibition of Manuscripts, First Editions and Relics to Mark the Bicentenary of the Birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792– 1992 (Oxford: Bodleian Library). Beatty, Bernard ( 1992 ), ‘Repetition’s Music: The Triumph of Life ’, in Everest ( 1992 a), pp. 99–114. Beavan , Arthur H . ( 1899 ), James and Horace Smith: A Family Narrative (London: Hurst and Blackett). Behrendt , Stephen C . ( 1989 ), Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Bennett , Betty T ., and Curran, Stuart (eds) ( 1996 ), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Bennett , Betty T ., and Curran , Stuart (eds) ( 2000), Mary Shelley in Her Times (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Bieri, James (1990 ), ‘Shelley’s Older Brother’, Keats-Shelley Journal 39, pp. 29–33. Bindman , David , Hebron , Stephen , and O’Neill , Michael ( 2007 ), Dante Rediscovered: From Blake to Rodin (Grasmere: Wordsworth Trust).
    [Show full text]