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Chaos and Control in the Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats

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Chaos and Control in the Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats Durham E-Theses 'The Life We Image': Chaos and Control in the Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats CALLAGHAN, MADELEINE,FRANCESCA How to cite: CALLAGHAN, MADELEINE,FRANCESCA (2010) 'The Life We Image': Chaos and Control in the Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/138/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 ‗The Life We Image‘ Chaos and Control in the Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats Madeleine Callaghan PhD in English Studies Durham University 2010 1 Table of Contents Declaration, statement of copyright, and acknowledgements………………………….... 2 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………... 3 Note on texts……………………………………………………………………………... 4 Introduction: ―Between contraries man runs his course‖…………………………….. 5-30 Section One: Poetics Chapter One: ―Doubly Serious‖: Byron‘s Ambivalent Poetics……………………... 31-56 Chapter Two: Veiled Meaning: Shelley‘s Poetics…………………………………... 57-85 Chapter Three: ―The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins‖: Yeats‘s Self-divided Poetics………………………………………………….......... 86-114 Section Two: The Concept of the Hero Chapter Four: ―Thoughts unspeakable‖: Interpretative Heroism in Cain and The Giaour……………………………………………………………... 115-146 Chapter Five: ―That is the usual method, but not mine‖: Childe Harold‟s Pilgrimage and Don Juan………………………………............ 147-168 Chapter Six: ―This soul out of my soul‖: The Trial of the Hero in Shelley‘s Epipsychidion………………………………………………………….. 169-197 Chapter Seven: ―His Mute Voice‖: The Two Heroes of Adonais………………... 198-218 Chapter Eight: ―My poems, my true self‖: Self-fashioning in ―The Tower‖………………………………………………...... 219-241 Chapter Nine: ―Lock, stock and barrel:‖ ―Adam‘s Curse,‖ ―In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz‖ and ―The Municipal Gallery Revisited‖ through the Lens of ―The Tower‖………….. 242-272 Conclusion: ―How Beautiful an Order‖………………………………………….. 273-274 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….... 275-305 2 Declaration No material in this thesis has been previously submitted for a degree at this or any other University. The work is solely that of the author, Madeleine Callaghan, under the supervision of Professor Michael O‘Neill. An excerpt from chapter six, in an earlier form, has been published as ―This soul out of my soul: The Trial of the Hero in Shelley‘s Epipsychidion,‖ Grasmere 2008: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference, compiled by Richard Gravil (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009): 146-54. Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the Author. No quotation from it should be published in any format, including electronic and the Internet, without the author‘s prior written consent. All information derived from this thesis must be acknowledged appropriately. Acknowledgements I wish to thank my supervisor, Professor Michael O‘Neill, for his guidance and support. I also wish to thank my parents, Margaret and Martin Callaghan, for their kindness, understanding, and unstinting love throughout my thesis, and my life. 3 Abstract The tension between experiential chaos and artistic control is a constant if varying presence, and acts as a fertile, dangerous, but ultimately enriching principle, in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. Each poet is highly self-conscious about this tension, a self- consciousness traceable to their Romantic and post-Romantic understanding of the nature of poetry. Situating itself in the present post-McGannian critical landscape, my thesis looks at poetry through the lens of a new formalism. The thesis valorises aesthetic subtleties and lays emphasis on poetry‘s performative intelligence. The Introduction describes in detail the approach, method, and contents of the thesis. Section one examines the poetics of Byron, Shelley and Yeats, focusing on how each poet figures his attempted control of the potentially chaotic text. The first chapter, on Byron‘s poetics, centres on Don Juan, Beppo and Childe Harold‟s Pilgrimage and argues for the presence of a coherent poetics in his oeuvre. Chapter two, on Shelley‘s poetics, examines A Defence of Poetry and its relationship with Shelley‘s poetry, giving particular attention to Alastor and ―Mont Blanc.‖ Chapter three examines the self-consciousness of Yeats‘s poetics, and explores the way in which he makes poetry express his effort towards mastery while retaining the chaos that permits creative freedom in The Wanderings of Oisin, the Byzantium poems, and ―Easter 1916.‖ The struggle to assert poetic control is a form of heroism, and the second section examines the concept of the hero in works by each of the poets. I illustrate how traditional critical accounts of the poets underestimate the complexity that governs their versions of heroism. Chapter four, on Cain and The Giaour, and chapter five, on Don Juan and Childe Harold‟s Pilgrimage, trace Byron‘s evolving challenge to any straightforward notion of heroism. Chapter six views Shelley‘s Epipsychidion as a climactic exploration of the poet-as-hero, while chapter seven explores Adonais‘s radical refiguring of the heroic and the elegiac. Chapters eight and nine focus on ―The Tower,‖ on Yeats‘s creation of a uniquely personal, yet carefully impersonal, poetic monument to the poet-hero. The chaos of the actual, from which Byron, Shelley, and Yeats create their poetry, wars constantly with, but also paradoxically enables, the control they attempt to establish. It is their staging of the quarrel between chaos and control that not only provides them with the material out of which they make poetry but also means that their practice foreshadows and at times outflanks our critical constructions. 4 Note on Texts Lord George Gordon Byron, Byron‟s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (London: Murray, 1973-1996). Abbreviated hereafter as BLJ. All quotations from Byron‘s letters (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition. Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991). Hereafter Byron‟s Prose. All quotations from Byron‘s prose (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition. Lord George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed., introd. and notes by Jerome McGann, Oxford World‘s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Hereafter McGann. All quotations from Byron‘s poetry (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon P, 1964). Hereafter Shelley‟s Letters. All quotations from Shelley‘s letters (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed., introd. and notes Zachary Leader and Michael O‘Neill, Oxford World‘s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003). Hereafter Leader and O‟Neill. All quotations from the poetry and prose of Shelley (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly and Deirdre Toomey, 4 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1986-2007). Hereafter Yeats‟s Letters. All quotations from Yeats‘s letters (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition. W. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats: The Major Works, ed. with introd. Edward Larrissy, Oxford World‘s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). Hereafter Larrissy. All quotations from Yeats‘s poetry (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition. The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version, (London: The British and Foreign Bible Society, 1957). All quotations from the Bible will be from this edition. 5 Introduction: “Between contraries man runs his course” I. The movement between chaos and artistic control dominates the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. ―Control,‖ according to this thesis, has largely positive but occasionally negative associations: positive when it informs the poet‘s ability to express his individual poetic ―rage for order,‖1 negative when it suggests too facile or authoritarian a formal conquest of experience. ―Chaos‖ suggests the following entwined notions: that ―reality‖ is more various than we think it is, to adapt Louis MacNeice‘s words from ―Snow,‖ and yet that it is the material from which the poet forms his experience.2 As Coleridge puts it in his sonnet to Bowles, chaos is that over which the creative Logos sweeps, as ―the great Spirit erst with plastic sweep / Moved on the darkness of the unformed deep‖ (13-14).3 This sense of chaos as vital, as both necessary and living, sparks the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats into abundant life. Chaos in this light makes the achievements of artistic control more impressive and substantial. Embodied in the words of a poem, chaos is itself paradoxically creative, and bears witness to Yeats‘s conviction that ―the desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.‖4 Chaos is both all that threatens artistic control and all that licenses it to manifest itself with the greatest power. This potent paradox creates the dramatic effect of the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats, as each writer combines force with fluidity to animate ―the life we image.‖ The close of Prometheus Unbound illustrates the understanding of the interplay between chaos and control that runs through the thesis. Here Demogorgon offers the following advice: 1 Wallace Stevens, ―The Idea of Order at Key West,‖ The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens ([1954] New York: Alfred A.
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