University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2016 Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self and Poetry in The Major Works Brent Steven Robida University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Robida, Brent Steven, "Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self and Poetry in The Major Works. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3739 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Brent Steven Robida entitled "Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self and Poetry in The Major Works." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Allen R. Dunn, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Nancy Henry, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Stephen Blackwell Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Shelley’s Delusive Flames: Self and Poetry in The Major Works A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Brent Steven Robida May 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Brent Robida All rights reserved. ii DEDICATION For my mother Janet Robida and for my father Steven Robida. Not only is this dissertation for you, Mom and Dad, but it is also by you. I never could have spent so much time educating myself without first having received from you the only lesson worth learning—Love. Thank you. And for Grandma. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a great deal to my committee. I am truly humbled by their passion, intelligence and professionalism, not to mention the time and effort they invested into the successful completion of this study. My discussions with Allen Dunn during the last several years have brought into focus my dim instincts of Shelley and poetry. Perhaps it is cheap praise to call a man brilliant who is so used to hearing it, but his brilliance warms as well as illumines, a very rare thing. Nancy Henry has been a model of professionalism and pragmatism. She made me feel equal to the task that was before me. Her close readings of my drafts helped to shape them into writing I am proud of, and I am indebted to her for recommending that I be funded for another year. Gerard Cohen- Vrignaud offered me reassurance, encouragement, and motivation, when I was in sore need of all three. His attentiveness to my work, ideas and how I felt about this project have demonstrated to me the kind of mentor I hope one day to become. My brief but memorable discussions with Stephen Blackwell about the great Russian authors reminded me why I fell in love with this stuff in the first place. I am jealous he gets to read Tolstoy for a living. I must thank my brothers also, Andrew and Matt Robida. They have each taught me a lot over the years and I’m much better for it. Friendship makes this life a garden, and I have made lasting ones while working toward the end of this project. I want to thank Andy, a great friend with whom I’ve experienced some unforgettable times. Debra, thank you. You always supported me, even when I fell short. Paige, your patience and passion have helped me so much. Even if you didn’t realize it, your soothing words and kind eyes reminded me to leave the dark nights of the soul to the poets, where they belong. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation explores Percy Shelley’s ethical commitments in several of his major works. Its primary claim is that Shelley’s poetry is involved in the regulation and education of desire. As a fundamentally antinomian poet, Shelley grapples time and again with how moral progress will be guided absent the regulatory influences of law and religion. My dissertation offers an answer to this central impasse affecting scholarship on the ethical world Shelley imagines and attempts to realize through poetry. It argues for a dialectical movement observable in Shelley’s work of the programmatic breakdown, rather than fulfillment, of hope. This study reconsiders the process of how Shelley’s notion of the liberated self, best represented in Prometheus Unbound, overcomes what he calls in “Mont Blanc,” “Large codes of fraud and woe.” I claim that Shelley’s poetry tends toward the enlargement of human agency by addressing the constraints of volition and passion. Consumed with self-interest and human passion, what Shelley names in Laon and Cythna the “dark idolatry of self” runs athwart the aesthetic and political telos of his poetry—the collectivization and inclusiveness of the self. Yet I argue that such a self-conversion from exclusionary self-interest to inclusive self-liberation becomes possible only through failure and limitation, humility and forgiveness. My aim is to show how Shelley speaks in his poetry from the end of history in order to translate the political and social abstractions of utopian discourse into a “vital alchemy” of living poetry. The immanent moment when selfishness converts to altruism marks some of the most powerful events in Shelley’s work as well as some of the most bleak. In this study I reveal the dialectical process behind them. The retreat to the self, a frequent narrative trope of the Romantic period, becomes in Shelley a re-treatment of the self’s relation to desire and society. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Apart from the Law: The Structure of Freedom in Shelley’s Poetry………………..1 CHAPTER ONE From “Silent Eloquence” to a “Swoon of Joy”: History and Futurity in Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna…………………………………………………………………………………….26 Laon and Cythna and the Wake of Broken Progress…………………………………………………….60 CHAPTER TWO Lyrical Morality……………………………………………………………………...87 “Ode to the West Wind” and the Moral Limits of the Poem…………………………………………...109 CHAPTER THREE Self and Love in The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound…………………………135 Prometheus Unbound and the Necessity of Love’s Wreck…………………………………………….164 CHAPTER FOUR As Yet to Come: Beginning Again at The Triumph of Life……………………….183 CONCLUSION The Future of Shelley………………………………………………………………...217 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………………….224 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………………..234 vi INTRODUCTION Apart from the Law: The Structure of Freedom in Shelley’s Poetry He tramples upon all received opinions, on all the cherished luxuries and superstitions of mankind. He bids them cast aside the chains of custom and blind faith by which they have been encompassed from the very cradle of their being, and become the imitators and ministers of the Universal God. —Shelley, Essay on Christianity The following study examines several central notions in the work of the English Romantic poet, Percy Shelley. Chief among these are notions of history, the future, ethics, love, poetry and the self. This study began when I started to explore the different ways that Shelley uses temporality in his poetry. As I attended to how time worked in his major poems, it became clear that his sense of history and the future, while always exerting significant formal and thematic pressures, was often inconsistent and at odds with his system of ethics and theory of the self. It was as if in his prose writings on politics, love, and the self he was saying one thing that in his poetry could never become audible, at least not for very long. How was this possible? I realized my struggle to answer this question was indicative of a decision that all scholars of Shelley must make regarding the privileging either of his poetry or prose. While each chapter of this dissertation addresses major Shelley poems, I derive from his letters, biographical accounts of his life, and the intellectual and moral system he outlines in his prose, valuable evidence and contributions to my argument. Whether Shelley’s poetry or prose offers us a better centerpiece for his thinking, I choose not to distinguish. Each in my view illuminates the other. Yet the contradictions in how Shelley tries to understand historical and individual progress are less an effect of the genre through which he explores these challenging issues than they are a more troubling sign of the impossibility of progress itself in his poetry and this period. 1 Furthermore, a trajectory can be traced from his early to later works in which his vision of future good for individuals and communities undergoes significant changes. Convictions of gradualist social improvement eventually give way to dreams of apocalyptic change. What ultimately constituted the most difficult challenge of this dissertation was trying to get to the core of Shelley’s thought in spite of its persistent avoidance of any stable core. Ironically, it was this desire to pluck out the heart of Shelley’s mystery that led me to formulate the thesis of this study. For Shelley the aim of progress is freedom, the idea of humanity liberated from all past and present, moral and political, impasses, what he calls “Large codes of fraud and woe.” The problem with this goal is that a paradox ensues, because what Shelley names “codes of fraud and woe” are the very laws and values binding together the culture he critiques and the morals he derides.