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A LIBERATING “VACANCY”: PRIVATIVE ADJECTIVES in the WORKS of PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY by Taras V. Mikhailiuk a Thesis Submitted

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A LIBERATING “VACANCY”: PRIVATIVE ADJECTIVES in the WORKS of PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY by Taras V. Mikhailiuk a Thesis Submitted A LIBERATING “VACANCY”: PRIVATIVE ADJECTIVES IN THE WORKS OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY by Taras V. Mikhailiuk A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English Middle Tennessee State University August 2013 Thesis Committee: Dr. Michael J. Neth, Chair Dr. Tom Strawman ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my wife, Kelly, our children Abigail and Ivan, and our extended family for their ceaseless love, care, and support throughout my research and writing. Apart from Kelly’s love, patience, and graciousness, this project would not have come to its completion. I also wish to thank Dr. Theodore Sherman, in whose class I had the freedom to pursue my interest in Shelley’s privatives in Adonais —little did I know then that this emerging interest would grow to result in a thesis-length work. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Tom Strawman, whose teaching, wisdom, and service as the second reader of my thesis I can never fully acknowledge. Finally, I am most indebted to Dr. Michael J. Neth for his exuberant teaching, advising, caring, and leading me on in this journey. Whatever love for the English Romantic poets I first felt and whatever I have been able to explore in the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, I owe it all to him—to his thoughtful kindness, deep insights, and enkindling and sustaining passion. ii ABSTRACT While scholars of Percy Bysshe Shelley have noted and analyzed the pervasiveness of privative epithets in his works, no one has attempted to examine their use in a number of his major works within the context of his theory of poetry and language. My study examines privative adjectives in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” Queen Mab , Laon and Cythna , and The Mask of Anarchy . My approach combines an analysis of how Shelley’s privatives articulate his political, religious, and moral concerns within individual works with an exploration of how his employment of privative adjectives reflects his larger theoretical views on the integral relationship between poetry and language. Shelley’s use of privatives is essential to his formulation of his larger revolutionary and poetic vision and his conceptualization of how the language of his poetry initiates, accompanies, and perpetuates the liberating progress of his revolutionary ideals in the human mind. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I ........................................................................................................................ 1 An Inner Void and the Pursuit of Change ....................................................................... 1 Why Privatives? A “Vacancy” in Shelley Criticism ....................................................... 2 The Present Study and the Larger Critical Discourse ..................................................... 5 Present Study: Major Arguments and Considerations .................................................... 7 Basic Categories and Method of Research ...................................................................... 8 Chapter Contents ........................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER II ..................................................................................................................... 11 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 11 “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”: Re-spelling the Idea of God ....................................... 12 “Mont Blanc”: “Unacknowledged” Legislations of Revolutionary Thought ............... 22 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 35 CHAPTER III ................................................................................................................... 37 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 37 Queen Mab : Reclaiming Humanity’s “Pathless Wilderness” ....................................... 38 Laon and Cythna : A “War of Earthly Minds” .............................................................. 52 The Mask of Anarchy : Words’ Revolutionary Replacement ......................................... 63 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 67 CHAPTER IV ................................................................................................................... 70 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 70 The Pioneering Work of Privatives to Facilitate a “Vacancy”...................................... 71 “Misuse of Words and Signs”: Shelley and a Poststructuralist Perspective ................. 75 Privatives as “A Subtler Language within Language” .................................................. 81 iv Privatives, Referentiality, and Meaning ........................................................................ 85 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 92 CHAPTER V .................................................................................................................... 95 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 95 Privatives in Buxton’s Reading of Shelley ................................................................... 95 Webb and Dawson: Further Considerations of Shelley’s Privatives .......................... 100 Hogle and Keach: Privatives and Shelley’s View of Language ................................. 106 Present Study: Key Considerations and Conclusions ................................................. 108 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 112 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 114 v 1 CHAPTER I An Inner Void and the Pursuit of Change “[H]as there not been and is there not in England,” Shelley writes in A Philosophical View of Reform , “a desire of change arising from the profound sentiment of the exceeding inefficiency of the existing institutions to provide for the physical and intellectual happiness of the people?” (20). In this passage, as he links a keen sense of dissatisfaction with the present political, moral, and religious actualities and a desire for change, the poet designates this intense awareness of a void in the fabric of human society as a kind of precondition fueling an impassioned desire for religious, political, and moral renovation, both individual and social. Timothy Clark points out that Shelley’s desire to engender such a void within the public mind to fuel an impulse for a revolutionary change reflects an important poetic function the poet articulates in On Life (89). It is the “duty of the reformer in political and ethical questions,” Shelley asserts, conceptualizing both his own role as a poet and the function of his poetic language, “to leave . a vacancy” ( On Life 507). The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how Shelley’s use of privative epithets—a prominent characteristic of his poetic language—constitutes an essential element in the critical junction of his theory of poetry and language and the revolutionary ideals he intends his poetic language to disseminate. Building upon Clark’s notion, we can say that Shelley’s privatives, as expressions of denial, absence, and negation, certainly help arouse initial discontent within human consciousness with the present state of things (Clark 89; Shelley, On Life 507). At the same time, on a more fundamental 2 level, Shelley’s use of privative adjectives seeks to facilitate the initial liberation of the mind from oppressive customary concepts and to engender the growth and progress of revolutionary ideals in the human imagination in order to bring about a total transformation of political, religious, and social conditions of human experience, both within and without. Just how the use of privative epithets in Shelley is essential to his revolutionary poetics is the subject of the following inquiry. Why Privatives? A “Vacancy” in Shelley Criticism Critical authority has long pointed to the prevalence of Shelley’s use of privatives throughout his work. The earliest exploration of Shelley’s privatives comprises a portion of B. W. A. Massey's 1923 monograph, The Compound Epithets of Shelley and Keats: Considered from the Structural, the Historical, and the Literary Standpoints. While helpful for data, Massey’s work did not focus only on privatives or explore the meaning behind their use. The next important study in this area was John Buxton’s essay "On Reading Shelley," published in 1970. In his essay, Buxton discussed Shelley’s use of privatives as a part of the poet’s overall intellectual and poetic Hellenism (specifically, the author argues, his Platonism), rather than his Englishness as a poet (111, 120-22, 125). The study closest to my research is a 1983 essay by Timothy Webb, entitled “The Unascended Heaven: Negatives in Prometheus Unbound. ” Looking back on Massey’s work and F. S. Ellis’ Shelley Concordance , Webb notes that Shelley’s privatives (Webb uses the term negatives ) are “deeply ingrained” throughout his work, and their uses “widespread,
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