Modern judgements SHELLEY MODERN JUDGEMENTS General Editor: P. N. FURBANK Dickens A. E. Dyson Henry James Tony Tanner Milton Alan Rudrum Walter Scott D. D. Devlin Shelley R. B. W oodings Swift A. NormanJeffares

IN PREPARATION Matthew Arnold P. A. W. Collins Freud F. Cioffi Marvell M. Wilding 0'Casey Ronald Ayling Pasternak Donald Davie and Angela Livingstone Pope Graham Martin Racine R. C. Knight Shelley MODERN JUDGEMENTS

edited by R. B. WOODINGS

Macmillan Education Selection and editorial matter @ R. B. W oodings 1968 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1968 Published by MACMILLAN AND CO LTD Little Essex Street London w c 2 and also at Bombay Calcutta and Madras Macmillan South Africa (Publishers) Pty Ltd Johannesburg The Macmillan Company ofAustralia Pty Ltd Melbourne The Macmillan Company ofCanada Ltd Toronto ISBN 978-0-333-01677-0 ISBN 978-1-349-15257-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15257-5 Contents

Acknowledgements 7 General Editor's Prefoce 9 Introduction II Chronology 29

FREDERICK A. POTTLE The Case ofShelley 35 c. E. PULOS Thelmportance ofShelley's Scepticism 52 NEVILLE ROGERS Shelley and the West Wind 58 GLENN o'MALLEY Shelley's 'Air-prism': the Synesthetic Scheme ofAlastor 72 HAROLD BLOOM The Quest: Alastor 87 HAROLD BLOOM The Witch ofAtlas 93 K. N. CAMERON The Political Symbolism of Prometheus Unbound 102 EARL R. WASSERMAN MythinShelley'sPoetry 130 D. J. HUGHES Potentiality in Prometheus Unbound 142 G. M. MATTHEWS A Volcano'sVoiceinShelley 162 JOSEPH RABEN Shelley as Translator 196 CARLOS BAKER The Evening Star: Adonais 213 M. WILSON Pavilioned upon Chaos: the Problem of Hellas 228 E. E. BOSTETTER ShelleyandtheMutinousFlesh 241 J. J. McGANN The Secrets of an Elder Day: Shelley after Hellas 253 6 Contents MANFRED WOJCIK lnDefenceofShelley 272

Select Bibliography 286 Notes on Contributors 288 Index 291 Acknowledgements

F. A. Pottle, 'The Case of Shelley', from Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, LXVn {1952) {The Modern Language Association of America); C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth (University of Nebraska Press); N. Rogers, 'Shelley and the West Wind', from the London Magazine, m v; Glenn O'Malley, 'Shelley's Air Prism: the Synthetic Scheme of Alastor', from Modern Philology, LV (1958) {University of Chicago Press); The Visionary Company (Doubleday & Co. Inc.; © Harold Bloom 1961); Kenneth N. Cameron, 'The Political Symbolism of Prometheus Unbound', from Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, LVIn (1943) {The Modern Language Association of America); Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley's 'Prometheus Unbound' (Johns Hopkins Press); D. J. Hughes, 'Poten• tiality in Prometheus Unbound', from Studies in Romanticism, XI (1963) {Boston University); G. M. Matthews, 'A Volcano's Voice in Shelley', from Journal of English Literary History, XXIV (1957) (Johns Hopkins Press); Joseph Raben, 'Milton's Influence on Shelley's Translation of Dante's "Matilda Gathering Flowers"', from Review of English Studies, NS XIV (1963) (The Clarendon Press); Carlos Baker, 'The Evening Star: Adonais', from Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision {Princeton University Press); M. Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry (Columbia University Press); Edward E. Hostetter, 'Shelley and the Mutinous Flesh', from Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1 (1959) {University of Texas Press); Jerome J. McGann, 'The Secrets of an Elder Day: Shelley after Hellas', from Keats-Shelley Journal, xv (1966} (The Keats-Shelley Association of America Inc.); Manfred Wojcik, 'In Defence of Shelley', from Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, no. 2 (1963) {VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften). The editor would like to thank Neville Rogers and Geoffrey Matthews for their suggestions, Peter Salus and Mihail Bogdan of Cluj University 8 Acknowledgements for providing reference details, and especially Nicholas Brooke for his kindness in reading and commenting on a version of the Introduction. He is grateful to Jane Lott for her very patient typing. General Editor's Preface

LITERARY criticism has only recendy come of age as an academic discipline, and the intellectual activity that, a hundred years ago, went into theological discussion, now finds its most natural oudet in the critical essay. Amid a good deal that is dull or silly or pretentious, every year now produces a crop of critical essays which are brilliant and pro• found not only as contributions to the understanding of a particular author, but as statements of an original way oflooking at literature and the world. Hence it often seems that the most useful undertaking for an academic publisher might be, not so much to commission new books of literary criticism or scholarship, as to make the best of what exists easily available. This at least is the purpose of the present series of anthologies, each ofwhich is devoted to a single major writer. The guiding principle of selection is to assemble the best modern criticism - broadly speaking, that of the last twenty or thirty years - and to include historic and classic essays, however :&mous, only when they are still influential and represent the best statements of their particular point of view. It will, however, be one of the functions of each editor's Introduction to sketch in the earlier history of criticism in regard to the author concerned. Each volume will attempt to strike a balance between general essays and ones on specialised aspects, or particular works, of the writer in question. And though in many instances the bulk of the articles will come from British and American sources, certain of the volumes will draw heavily on material in other European languages - most of it being translated for the first time. P. N. FURBANK

A2 w.s. Introduction

IN June 1822 Shelley once more became the centre of public contro• versy. This time, however, the cause was neither the publication of a new poem, nor the circulation of a new rumour, but the confirmation of news that the poet was dead. The notes heard so many times before in reviews and reports took on a firmer tone. Leigh Hunt, a resolute friend and early admirer of Shelley, lamented in the pages of the Morning Chronicle: 'God bless him! I cannot help thinking ofhim as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly he always appeared to me, and so seraphical a King of the elements.' But in their August notice the Courier, one of the Tory journals, announced bluntly: 'Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or no.' 1 The declarations have in common the same fervour, the fervour that drapes Shelley in the borrowed robes of either angel or atheist. For from the beginning Shelley attracted extreme comments, in just the same way as he used to stimulate them. The very mixture that is clearly marked in these comments by Hunt and the Courier writer, of almost personal abuse or moral justification, characterises nearly all of Shelley criticism, and makes him unique even among such a colourful gathering as the Romantic poets. Even today the strife still blazes. In 1950, for example, K. N. Cameron was able to write his study of Shelley's early development as social thinker and revolutionary poet, with an obstinate conviction of the rightness of the youthful writer's actions that turned a scornful eye on all who refused to confess it. He accounted for the 'power and beauty' of Queen Mab as 'the bitter and angry cry of a young revolutionary, its visionary penetration that of a man rising on the wave of a titanic historical struggle to see deep and far'. 2 Representing the alternative challenge

1 Both quotations from N.l. White, Shelley (1947) n 39o-1. a The Yotmg Shelley (New York, reprinted 1962) p. 267. 12 Introduction stands Douglas Bush, who, in the course of writing a scholarly study of the treatment of classical myth by nineteenth-century poets, could slip in some dismissive generalisations about the worth of Shelley's poetry, and facetiously offer the following critical comment on the well-known 'Life ofLife' lyric from Prometheus Unbound:

At this point all good Shelleyans face to the east, and regard any attempt to discern the meaning as both prosaic and profane; those who desire more in poetry than rapturous reverie, who ask that feeling shall have direction as well as intensity, must not enter the temple with thick-soled shoes.1

The inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that the middle path for the reader of Shelley is hard to come by - you're either for him or against him, and in either case his poetry represents a peak of accomplishment, whether ofsuccess or failure. Any brief review of Shelley criticism shows that moderation has never been one of its virtues. As a result of this, the various attacks and counter-attacks have achieved almost as much fame as their subject, frequently to the point where critical accuracy has been sacrificed to anecdote. What is signi£cant, however, is that the same issues have arisen as each new critical generation has tried to decide on its attitude to Shelley. For his poetry draws attention to certain constant problems in literary theory. Shelley's own theorising, and the nature ofhis poetic practice, brought him up against the apparent critical trespasses that he was committing: the yoking together of didacticism and aestheticism; the reliance on the precise, detailed word beside the emotive, general one; the unity of the personal and the mythic, self-communion and public expression. Since the treatment of these problems tends to pursue certain definable paths, Shelley criticism does display a firm unity over the past 140 years. This pattern, and, as a result, the motives behind much subsequent interpretation, is well illustrated in the fate of his poetry during the last century. Contrary to the usual account, Shelley was neither ignored nor out• rightly condemned by his earliest reviewers; and when adverse judge• ments were passed, these were frequently the result of contemporary social uncertainty. The Quarterly Review, challenged by The Revolt of Islam, took fright at the subversive opinions held by its author:

I Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (New York, 1937) pp. 147-8. Introduction 13 As far as in him lay, he has loosened the hold ofour protecting laws, and sapped the principles of our venerable polity; he has invaded the purity and chilled the unsuspecting ardour of our fireside intimacies; he has slandered, ridiculed and blasphemed our holy religion •••1

Not merely did Shelley criticise existing institutions, but he made radical proposals for their reform and even abolition, refusing to be restrained in what he wrote by the insistence of literary tradition or good taste. It is probably true that for most readers no very clear picture emerged, because they had been driven offby offensive remarks on the Church and State, and their representatives. Shelley was poten• tially dangerous, especially since, of all the Romantic poets, he was the one who most consistently maintained his anti-establishment position throughout his writing life, and who most completely integrated his political free-thinking with his general poetic concerns. Despite Shelley's protests in prefaces, much of his poetry was classified as 'didactic'. Accordingly, this became separable &om the purer poetry, which could, independently of the other, be welcomed back into the fold. This was the century's method of taming the poet. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, reviewing The Revolt of Islam, neatly executed the manoeuvre: 'As a philosopher, our author is weak and worthless; - our business is with him as a poet, and, as such, he is strong, nervous, original .. .'2 Under the flag of genuine literature, the poetryfideas dichotomy was launched, to the inevitable loss of both, and of the reader who required the whole man to be self• consistent. Thackeray's explanation points to the motive, and the sort of writing expected: 'The Revolt oflslam ••• is in my opinion a most beautiful poem- Tho' the story is absurd, & the republican sentiments in it conveyed ifpossible more absurd.'3 With 1839 and Mary Shelley's edition of the complete poems, there was a significant revival ofinterest in Shelley's poetry, and this account becomes increasingly prevalent. The shorter poems begin to glitter &om among the pages of pocket• book anthologies. The non-argumentative love lyrics were those that achieved the sacred heights, and thereupon the divorce of 'poet' and 'thinker' was decreed absolute. The inclusion of twenty-two poems in The Golden Treasury (and only Shakespeare and Wordsworth were 1 N. I. White, The Unextinguished Hearth (Durham, N.C., 1938) pp. 140-1. 2 1bid. p. 127. 3 Letter of 1829, quoted in Roland A. Duerksen, Shelleyan Ideas in VICtorian Likrature (The Hague, 1966} p. 24- 14 Introduction ahead in the anthology stakes) defined Shelley as 'the greatest lyric poet' {Bradley). Even such an editor as Richard Garnett, responsible for rescuing many unpublished fragments of verse from the manu• script notebooks, was smitten:

Where else shall we find the poet whose minor poems can be taken up in the mass and printed almost without retrenchment, in the perfect assurance that the result will be as truly a book of beauties as if the entire body ofhis writings had been sifted for the purpose?1

Backed by the lesson of the skylark's 'unpremeditated art', the praises swelled for Shelley's spontaneity, his dreaminess, his beautiful music. To the more astute the latter quality seemed to interfere with that very seriousness on which Shelley insisted, but it was rare for any reviewer to observe any serious threads running through the lyrics themselves. For the later Victorian age Shelley was secure in his niche as a lyric splendour, as was his statue, suitably emaciated and enfeebled by the burden of suffering, in the special shrine in University College, Oxford.2 Although now a distasteful curiosity, this reflects the Shelley perfected by these lyric selectors. The 'poet' did duty for the man, and the two were brought into dangerous agreement: for Francis Thompson, Shelley was 'this enchanted child', for Mathilda Blind, 'the singer ... whose everyday existence moved as well as his thoughts and words to the sound of celestial music' ; 3 above all, the impractical idealist. This identification relied heavily on the lyrics, and assumed that these most truly represented the poet. Once the biographers began to ferret about, of course, this edifice of perfection that graced Shelley was shown to be standing on hazardous foundations. The revelations produced by letters and documents could be shattering. Robert Browning, for example, on whom the 'sun-treader' had laid his indelible hand, felt it his duty to decline the Shelley Society's invitation to be their first president because his own moral convictions were so stoutly opposed to those by which Shelley had acted. On learning of

r Poems, selected from Percy Bysshe Shelley (188o) pp. xi-xii. 2 The statue, officially made public in 1893, had been intended for Shelley's grave in Rome. For details of this affair, see Sylva Norman, Flight of the Skylark (1954) pp. 258-60. 3 Shelley (1909) p. 30; A Selection from fhe poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Leipzig, 1872) p. xxxvii. Thompson wrote his essay in 1889. Introduction 15 the details concerning Shelley's desertion of his first wife, Browning was compelled to defend his own earlier self-identification:

I have just been reading Shelley's life, as Rossetti tells it,-and when I think how utterly different was the fancy I had of him forty years ago from the facts as they front one today, I can only avoid despising myself by remem• bering that I judged in pure ignorance and according to the testimony of untruthful friends. 1

It was this same nightmarish threat to previously credited convictions that produced Arnold's famous review of Dowden's two-volume Life of Shelley, which, based on many hitherto unpublished documents, came out in 1886. Arnold had the courage to plough through the sordid revelations, but his review regretted that these had ever been made public. Arnold longs to keep untarnished the poet of 'pureness and beauty', but he sees that the new details must be heeded. Having detailed Shelley's sins, Arnold analyses the root failure:

And I conclude that an entirely human inflammability, joined to an in• human want of humour and a superhuman power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley's abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behaviour to her and his defence of himself afterwards.z

The picture Arnold cherishes is that of a Shelley capable only of generous sentiments and noble, self-effacing deeds. The ambivalent reaction produced by these revelations fed back into his criticism, producing the famous summary:

The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is 'a beautiful and inej}ectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain' .3

But there were a few who were not shocked by such discoveries, and were even elated by them. These came from the ranks of those who

1 Letter of1870, in Letters of Robert Browning, ed. T. L. Hood (1933) p. 134. 2 Essays in Criticism, Second Series (reprinted 1908) p. 244. Arnold is quoting from his own Byron essay ofi881. 3 Ibid. PP· 2 5 I -2. 16 Introduction spurned the whole rhapsodic approach. When the citizens of Horsham, Shelley's birthplace, decided to open a library fund to honour his centenary, George Bernard Shaw flew into print, loudly proclaiming Shelley as the apostle of all that was pernicious, in politics and religion: 'if he was a sinner, he was a hardened sinner and a deliberate one'.1 In common with the young German poets of fifty years earlier, Shaw saw Shelley as an heroic opponent of hypocrisy and bourgeois respect• ability. To his writings he even owed his conversion to vegetarianism! Like anyone else, Shaw was standing by the example that his Shelley had set him. In the intense light of these paeons of praise, or the lowering clouds of infamy, the poet in Shelley was obscured. To an age trying to establish its own attitude to poetic language, Shelley's style became a centre of fierce contention. Looking back to his own youthful en• thusiasm, Ruskin was quite clear about the damage Shelley had worked:

In my nascent and vulgarly sensuous taste, liking riclmess and sweetness, by eyes and lips alike ..• Shelley was to me like a grocer's shop full of barley sugar- and I fed upon him like a fly, till I was sick and sticky. He clogged all my faculties and infested all my imagination - he is to me now comparable in memory only to a dream I had - ... a dream of putrid appleblossom with a smell which was to that of real appleblossom as that of rotten cabbage to fresh lettuce.z

Apart from the personal disturbance this indicates, Ruskin is belabour• ing the luxuriance and excess of language he imitated from Shelley, an excess that he saw blurred any distinguishing features of description. The language seduced the reader by its very powers of suggestion, although this might tum out to be the sole dimension the language possessed. This apparent contradiction, noted earlier, perplexed a critic as sympathetic to Shelley's ideas as G. H. Lewes, and the con• cluding paragraphs of his important article in the Westminster Review (1841) imply a limitation in Shelley's achievement:

one may note a certain want of objectivity - a want of plastic powers in his descriptions; you can never identify them ... We should characterise his mind as sensitive and reflective, rather than plastic and creative.3

I 'Shaming the Devil about Shelley', reprinted in Pen Portraits and Reviews (193 x) p.249· • Cancelled 'passage ofPraeterita (x885-9), quoted in Duerksen, Shelleyan Ideas, p. 126. 3 XXXV (April 1841) 163. Introduction 17 Lewes clearly felt that it was on account of his ideas that Shelley had to be vindicated, but these remarks suggest that however much maturity of judgement he ascribed to the poet, this intensely subjective quality threatened to exclude the reader by making the actual ideas more elusive. Such criticism could easily become the basis for wholesale rejection, because it suggests either befuddlement in Shelley himself or else deception in his withholding what he actually thinks. Hazlitt, for example, complained that 'Mr. Shelley's style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science - a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions'. Even Hunt had felt that Shelley indulged in 'too great a sameness and gratuitousness of image and metaphor'. 1 All these critics were alarmed at the impenetrable surface that Shelley's language offered for analysis. The reader's only chance was to stand shoulder to shoulder with the poet in the intense inane. Once the phrase 'frenzied composition' had been patented, however, all was explained, and criticism was again confronted by the sublimity of Shelley's character. One limitation under which these earlier critics laboured was the shortage of published material. A Defence of Poetry and most of the prose fragments did not appear until 1841, by which date the critical approaches had begun to be defined. Other prose works, such as A Philosophical View of Reform and the translations from Plato, remained in manuscript until this century, and are still accessible only in limited editions. A Philosophical View demonstrates how seriously Shelley thought about politics, and how shrewd an analyst he was of the contemporary situation. The essay describes the changes that had affected the social organisation of the state and defmes that connection between commercial prosperity and deteriorating social standards that was to haunt the major Victorian thinkers. To the end ofhis life Shelley concentrated on these problems, and poems such as Prometheus Unbound and The Triumph of Life are as much political as they are philosophical in their intentions.z Amongst the Victorians, such aspects of Shelley were generally ignored. Yet the seriousness with which he attended to his role as poet is apparent from many of his writings. The documentation of this has, indeed, been one of the main achievements of modem Shelley scholar-

• Quoted in F. C. Mason, A Study in Shelley Criticism (Mercersburg, Pa, 1937) pp. 38, 74· a See the essay by K. N. Cameron in this volume, pp. 102-26. I8 Introduction ship. Fortunately the material for research is varied and relatively large, ranging from several hundred of Shelley's own letters and the corres• pondence of his friends, to the diary kept by his wife, which includes detailed entries of Shelley's reading. From this evidence scholars have been enabled to trace the poet's intellectual development and to show how his activities, literary and otherwise, fed into his poetry. By study• ing the books that Shelley read in the editions he consulted, and by considering the poems in the light of his known reading, many refer• ences and problems that previously eluded commentators have been explained. Essentially, this century has shown Shelley being treated with the scholarly respect that he merits. Certain landmarks stand out along the scholarship route. R. H. Fogle in The Ima,~ery of Keats and Shelley (1949) distinguished the recurrent features of Shelley's style and showed the coherent system to be found in these; in The Platonism of Shelley (1949) Professor Notopoulos demonstrated how Shelley had adapted the resources of Platonic imagery, with a firm appreciation of their origin- a survey that has been more recently substantiated from the evidence of Shelley's work• ing notebooks by Neville Rogers in Shelley at Work (1956); Carl Grabo, in a similar way, showed in A Newton among the Poets (1930) that Shelley's early enthusiasm for science remained with him to provide terms and definitions for his poetry; and in the last few years G. M. Matthews and Earl Wasserman have studied how repeated words are set firmly within Shelley's thought, and provide vital continuity within a developing argument. Many of the essays in this collection illustrate the same methods. Particular verbal devices or philosophic concerns are traced to their origin, and this association is then expanded to make a more general comment on Shelley's poetics. Simply by their insistence on the impor• tance of the detail in the poetry, such articles have assisted in stimulating a more alert response; and the explanations they provide, especially of the connection between the poetic form and Shelley's intentions, have helped to lay some of the spectres raised by earlier writers. But this very insistence on the scholarship that supports such readings does make for a distinct limitation, so that what is illuminated extends no further than the given footnotes and references. Reading through recent studies of Shelley, it is noticeable that the 'poetry' is taken as being the par• ticular aspect with which the critic is concerned. The remark made by Carlos Baker in his introduction to Shelley's Major Poetry exemplifies Introduction 19 the effect of this: 'Shelley's strength, which is also the measure of his weakness as an artist, consists more in the qualities of vision and insight than in the accepted disciplines of poetry.'1 Too easily the discovery of the reference from Plato or Milton becomes more enthralling than the design of the poem's imagery. This same partiality, to analysing the origin of words and ideas rather than the place they occupy in the poetry, has prevailed in the field of textual studies. Of the major English poets only Shelley still awaits a reliable edition, even though it has been known for many years that the texts generally available are strewn with errors. For any author who dies before he can see his work into print, this inaccuracy is likely to exist, especially when the subsequent editors have only very confused manuscripts from which to work. But the tackling of these editorial labours has been left for the 1960s, and only now are editions in preparation that will present for the first time a trustworthy text of many of the later poems and most of the lyrics. Considered with the brand of scholarship that Shelley has attracted, this suggests the critical position in which Shelley stands. For those already convinced of his stature the conclusions of subsequent research will reinforce their own convictions, but for the unconverted the poems are likely to remain as opaque as ever. But an even more significant result of this tendency has been that those writers who have considered Shelley through the methods of verbal analysis are the ones that have been listened to, and these are critics - such as Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks - who have condemned the poetry as sentimental, confused, and shallow. It is F. R. Leavis, however, whose words have made the most lasting impression, in his essay in Shelley which first appeared in Scrutiny (1935), and was subsequently reprinted in Revaluation (1936). The phrases he coined seemed to do justice for more than this phase of the critical tradition - 'his weak grasp on the actual', his lack of 'critical intelligence', that in his poetry 'recognition of the sense depends neither on thinking, nor on realisation of the metaphor, but on response to the sentimental commonplaces'. Lea vis admits the apparent grace of the poetry, but shows how deceptive this is. The poet is admonished for indulging in a self-concern that invariably turns the author into a pitiable victim. The fmal comment condemns alike his literary and personal sensibility:

I Shelley's Major Poetry: the Fabric ofa Vision (Princeton, 1948) p. 4- 20 Introduction The antipathy ofhis sensibility to any play of the critical mind, the uncon• geniality of intelligence to inspiration, these clearly go in Shelley, not merely with a capacity for momentary self-deception and uncertainties, but with a radical lack ofself-knowledge. I

Leavis illustrates this inadequacy by turning to the second section of 'Ode to theWest Wind':

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, Loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs ofHeaven and Ocean, Angels ofrain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface ofthine aery surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Ofsome fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Ofthe horizon to the zenith's height The locks ofthe approaching storm. Thou dirge Ofthe dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome ofa vast sepulchre Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Ofvapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: 0, hear !2

His argument is that the images employed in these lines are not selected for their particular relevance, but rather for their general effect in establishing a mood. Of the opening lines, for example, Leavis explains:

It is only the vague general sense ofwindy tumult that associates the clouds and leaves; and, accordingly, the appropriateness of the metaphor 'stream' in the first line is not that it suggests a surface on which, like leaves, the clouds might be 'shed', but that it contributes to the general 'streaming' effect in which the inappropriateness of'shed' passes unnoticed.3

But this is to misunderstand both the literal meaning, and the emotive effect for which Shelley is striving. As King-Hele recently pointed out, this cloudscape is very clearly detailed, composed as it is 'of two

1 Revaluation (1936) pp. 2o6, 212, 214, 221. z Shelley, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. G. M. Matthews (Oxford, 1964) p. xo6. a Revaluation, p. 205. Introduction :u different types of cloud, fractostratus and cirrus'.1 Such accuracy is essential to Shelley, because on the literal level he is describing the building-up ofcloud that heralds the oncoming storm. More generally, he is deliberately allowing his words to establish connections between each other because this depicts the emotional response to the storm. This section follows the same sequence of the other two opening stanzas, moving from the detail of the immediate visual event, here the scudding of the clouds, to the violence and destruction of the apoca• lyptic revelation. This movement towards climax is strongly emotive, but the emotion is only realised through the careful choice of words, and the repetition of the syntactical groupings. Shelley picks out related images, of height ('steep sky', 'aery surge', 'dim verge'), violence ('commotion', 'shook', 'locks of the approaching storm'), the elements {'sky', 'clouds', etc.), because he is describing how the scene takes shape round the single point of the storm. The stanza moves, typically in Shelley, from image to image, each drawing on the strength ofprevious definitions. The culmination is in terms of prayer, because it is only by the final lines that the real significance has been sufficiently grasped to allow the possibility of resolution in decision. This stanza demonstrates not only the organisation that runs through the whole 'Ode', but also, in a compressed form, the structure of Shelley's poetic method: how the imagery can enlarge its significance, how the words are exploited to assume a near symbolic force, how the subject is metaphorically treated to present a sequence ofmeanings. It is against this very method of thinking through metaphor that Leavis is 6nally protesting. But Shelley's whole outlook denies for him the possibility of using the concrete image to illustrate and qualify. For him, since the object as fact is unreliable, trust has to be established in the object as image. The language of poets, Shelley wrote, 'is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension' (p. 30).2 Words for Shelley do not define, but represent the quality of awareness. For this reason he believes that the poet's medium is more adequate than that available to other artists: 'For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagina• tion, and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instru• ments, and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which

I Shelley, His Thought and Work (1962) p. zxs. :z All page references are to Shelley, A Difence of Poetry, ed. J. E. Jordan (New York, x¢s). 22. Introduction limit and interpose between conception and expression' (p. 32). As a poet Shelley defines his metaphors clearly, but then, by establishing connections among them, he focuses his attention on the new process, analogous as it is to the action he is trying to describe. In this way his language constantly depicts the action of process, how an external form reveals an inner shape, a shadow alerts to the substance, a frag• ment to the whole. Just as the mind can mould a unifying understand• ing from its fragmentary recognitions, so words can bind into one the variety of experience. These comments on the 'Ode' rely upon several interpretations, but such examples of close reading, concentrating upon how Shelley's poetry works, are hard to come by. This has meant that some of the contradictions pointed out in earlier criticism have remained to perplex the poems. But just as restricting has been the other facet of this modem scholarly concern with Shelley. By elaborating a thesis through the various turnings of ambiguity and contradiction in a poet's work distinct themes are clarified. But such a method applied to such a poet as Shelley can all too easily result in further fragmentation, with a greater concern for the critics' sources, whether a Buber or a Northrop Frye, than those of the poet. To identify tensions, especially unresolved ones, is helpful, as long as the pressure is not being exerted by the critics' own tools. Analysis of specific problems does contribute to the understanding of Shelley's poetry, but it does not explain the whole. In his poetry Shelley believed that he could handle several themes at once, and for this reason politics, love, the 'ideal world', are treated in the same lines. Shelley's allegiance, and he is remarkable in his period for this, was to those earlier writers who had believed in the validity of such a treatment, and especially with Spenser, Bacon, and Milton. He wanted to achieve a comprehensiveness of outlook that would embrace all experience, and a mode of expression that found its nearest parallel in the allegorical presentation of the Elizabethans. Even recent criticism has shied away from this principle, and the exploration of Shelley's ambiguities has often resulted in prising apart this very unity. That early poetry/ideas dichotomy, for example, still confuses commentaries on Prometheus Unbound. Too often this is panned for its poetry and praised for its ideas, or vice versa. The error in this stems from trying to consider lyrics such as 'Life of Life! thy lips enkindle' or 'To the deep, to the deep' as distinctive poems. For Shelley is making the lyric form serve as a unit within the total drama, and the language Introduction 23 is defined by this context. Once the analysis i:s in these terms, these heavily patterned stanzas are seen to be more than expressions of intense joy or grief. The opening Chorus of Act IV, for example, is important in the play's argument. For these spirits of the Dead Hours are fleeing the world that has been liberated by Prometheus from the terrors of death and grief that the human perspective has established. The simple rhymes of these verses are the dirge for this final death, and the imagery shows how such a false concept of time dissolves into a silence that has always been possible. This entire final act is used by Shelley to describe the changes that occur on the earth and in the natural forces that control it. This is just as much a part of the develop• ment of the poem as is that controversial interview between Asia and Demogorgon in the second act. The statement 'the deep truth is imageless' (rr iv u6} is not proof of Shelley's bafflement in the face of his own words, but a summary of Asia's relationship to Demogorgon. All the questions that she asks derive from her own understanding, for she represents here the human mind finding the words for what it knows. It is because men may witness the force of evil but not identifY it that Asia cannot frame any reply but 'He reigns' to her question of who made suffering. Demogorgon, although Necessity, is neutral in his moral power, only being able to enforce as agent what man has effectively brought to fruition. The fate of many nineteenth-century critics is a warning to those who insist on approaching Shelley armed with their own prejudices or pre-existing definitions. Shelley himself was well aware of the degree to which his poems threatened to be unpalatable to the reading public, and in The Cenci, for example, he tried to frame his own ideas within a popular form. Such attempts, however, were half-hearted, because he realised that it was only by being true to his vocation as poet that his writings could have any value or relevance. He believed passionately that his poems spoke to his own generation, just as he knew that the claims of the imagination had to be substantiated if that generation was to survive as anything more positive than a historical fact. To justify his particular techniques he was driven to explain his longer poems in prefaces, and to formulate his more general ideas on literature in his polemic A Defence of Poetry. Although this essay has to be a key docu• ment in any appreciation of his poetry, critics have generally been content to extract a few choice quotations from it, and to overlook the detailed argument because of the apparent excesses of the prose 24 Introduction style. Once this initial reaction is overcome, however, its value be• comes dear. Shelley begins A Defence with a very Coleridgean contrast between 'reason' and 'imagination'. He believes that the former is concerned with objects and words as definitions capable of scientific analysis, while the latter deals with thoughts that have been abstracted from the empirical context and reassembled according to the understanding of the mind. Imagination for Shelley evaluates all that is received by the senses, and the expression of this new knowledge is the task of poetry. Thus poetry is the result of the meeting of experience, as something restricted by definition and time, with its intellectual account and interpretation. Poetry is not imitative, therefore, because what it presents has no alternative form of existence. Instead, the poet creates a form modelled on human experience, as that is known to the senses, by giving substance to the workings of the mind, which is the process that makes for the comprehension of normal living. 'Their words', Shelley writes of poets, 'unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth' (p. 35). What is recorded by the sense responses is given meaning by being established as a significant shape in the world known to the understanding: poetry is 'the image of the combined effect of [the surrounding] objects, and of [the poet's] apprehension of them' (p. 27). Quite literally a poem be• comes 'the very image of life' because it is concerned with the very process by which form is given to thought. Although Shelley knows that poetry cannot be manufactured at will, he recognises that its existence insists on the shaping control of the mind. According to these terms, the poem is the sole record of the human understanding of the world as it exists, because it describes the actual growth of that awareness, depicting the gradual building-up of idea and concept until the whole poem has achieved its furthest expression, a self-sufficient order that finds no parallel in anything beyond itself- 'each containing within itself the principle ofits own integrity' (p. 25). This theory, with its total reliance on the assimilative and defining power of the mind, can hardly survive without a parallel account of the social system under which people live; for any pressures to which the mind is subjected will restrict the knowledge and expression that is possible. Under an authoritarian government both understanding and language will be defmed for the individual, and so forestall genuine creation. Both as cause and effect, freedom and poetry are vital to one Introdudion 25 another. This connection is clarified in A Defence in Shelley's analysis of the impact of the extension of scientific and economic thought:

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice .... We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry oflife: our calculations have outrun concep• tion; we have eaten more than we can digest. (p. 69)

Without the aid of imagination as interpreter, language is dead, with words becoming 'signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts' (p. 30). At that point the world exists only as a chaos of second-hand definitions. Thus Shelley's assertion that the poet is 'unacknowledged legislator of the world' means that he both establishes the terms needed for human understanding, because only he can remould and redefme words, and presents, through his own perceptions, a picture of the changing pattern of thought which will necessitate changes ultimately in society. The arts, and especially for Shelley poetry, are basic to any understanding oflife:

[poetry] purges from our inward sight the frlm of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. (pp. 74-5)

What is offered is an enlargement of the mind and its perceptive range, a process which will remove the individual 'out of the dull vapours of the little world of self' (p. 58). For Shelley this amounts to a defmition of human love, and in tum leads to a recognition of the individual's position within the particular historical situation. This last point explains why Shelley so often writes about the poet as representing the period in which he lives, because this is going to be one of the pressures that make for his particular language and thereby understanding. How• ever wide Shelley ranges in A D~(ence, his logic and analysis do impose a coherence on the many different ideas. Fundamentally, as Neville Rogers has argued, 'Shelley is ... the apostle of the power of the Mind' ,1 and it is this vocation that drives him to establish a unity over

1 Shelley at Work (Oxford, 1'956) p. 305. Introduction thought and experience. This view of the mind and poetry is most succinctly summarised in a verse fragment from a projected poem provisionally entitled 'Address to the Human Mind', conjecturally ascribed to 1820:

Thou living light that in thy rainbow hues Clothest this naked world; and over Sea And Earth and air, and all the shapes that be In peopled darkness of this wondrous world The Spirit of thy glory dost diffuse ••• thou Vital Flame Mysterious thought that in this mortal frame Ofthings with unextinguished lustre bumest Now pale and faint now high to Heaven upcurled ••• So soon as from the Earth formless and rude One living step had chased drear Solitude Thou wert, Thought; thy brightness charmed the lids OfthevastsnakeEtemity, who kept The tree of good and evil. 1 Significantly, it is not so much to later critics that one turns to fmd a clear understanding of these ideas and their implications, but to the poets and novelists whose work was influenced by Shelley. Among the Victorians the impressive roll-call includes Browning, Hardy, Gissing, and Shaw, and in this century poets as different as Yeats and Ginsberg have acknowledged his authority. None of these writers imitated Shelley, though scores of lesser poets plagiarised and copied his lyric style, but they found in him the challenge through which they worked out their own uncertainties. If in their youth they enthused over Shelley, their mature work represents the adaptation into their own style of the qualities they had admired. Shelley is a very difficult poet, in part because he expects so much from his readers. In a recent essay this point was made by Jolm Holloway, who analysed his own dissatisfaction in these terms:

[Shelley's poetry] is difficult because there is, with trying regularity, a tension and an eagerness about it that leads the reader hardly to expect the control which he very often finds. One might almost put this point by saying that Shelley's sensibility was too emphatically unified to be alto-

' The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. T. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1904) p.628. Introduction 27 gether tolerable. No one ought to feel so passionately, so intensely as this, and yet move in thought with such virtuosity ••. over his work seen as a whole, the price is a fatiguing intensity of intellectual and emotional response, within a range which is fatiguing in its narrowness.'

This range is wider, I think, than Holloway allows, but Shelley's very theory must impose this concentration. Continually his poetry is struggling to express itself through the very shaping of language, which means that the fmished product still remains a part of that very shaping process. Such poetry cannot readily be paraphrased, nor can its arguments be directly analysed to ease the difficulties of following what Shelley writes. His poetic search does head increasingly towards reconciling the external and the spiritual realities, but even in The Triumph of Life the fmal vision is something independent of the reality the senses recognise. The aim is to create the state of maximum alert• ness, for only that can make sense of the various human urges. The effort expected of the reader is to follow the involved syntax and im• agery, and not to be content with grasping the appearance of meaning. Trollope's heroine, Lizzie Eustace, in The Eustace Diamonds (1870), was not alone when she realised that although she might forget and mis• understand the details of a Shelley line, the resulting mis-quotation still sounded impressive! The very ambivalence that runs through Shelley criticism indicates that there are real problems. His poems can be diffuse, his imagery can be slipped in without adequate preparation, he can be led on by a burst of feeling that drags understanding many lines behind. Yet frequently the problem antedates this, lying in the phrases and traditional responses that clutter round Shelley's name: that famous adolescent adulation does not prepare for an attitude of close reading any more than the Scythrop portrait offered by Peacock is conducive to thoughts of moral determination. The essays and articles reprinted in this volume do not provide a code for the poetry's difficulties, nor do they primarily exemplify the type of critical analysis that Shelley requires. This is a task that criticism has still to undertake. But through the interpretations that they offer of par• ticular poems and the demonstration of the genesis of some of the recurrent themes, they indicate the nature of the poetry that Shelley wrote. Above all, they stress how .the texture and details of the poetry

1 Selected Poems ofShelley (196o) p. xxxiii. 28 Introduction are expressive of Shelley's imagination. To appreciate this the reader has to make a conscious effort, because so much that Shelley took for granted is no longer common experience: his Augustan training in language is far removed from our own schooling, as is his constant reliance on the classical poets and their mythologies from the literary traditions with which most readers are now acquainted. But only when this effort is made can his poetry become a part of our literary experience, and so contribute to that understanding of human con• sciousness about which Shelley so frequently wrote: Every man's mind is ••. modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. 1 R. B. WOODINGS

1 Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in The Complete Poetical Works, p. 203. Chronology

Dates of publication are given in parentheses afier the title. All quotations are from The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones (Oxford, 1964}.

1792 4 August Born at Horsham in Sussex, the son of Timothy Shelley, a landowner and Whig M.P. 1804-IO At Eton College, where he wrote Zastrozzi (1810) and Original Poetry ofVictor and Cazire (I 810 ). 1810 October Went as an undergraduate to University College, Oxford. St Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian published. 1811 March Sent down from Oxford with his friend T. J. Hogg, for publishing The Necessity ofAtheism. August Eloped with Harriet Westbrook, and married her in Edinburgh. 'The ease & simplicity of her habits, the unas• suming plainness of her address, the uncalculated connexion of her thought & speech, have ever formed in my eyes her greatest charms.' (Dec. 1812). 1812 February Sailed to Ireland to campaign for the Irish with Address to the Irish People, and Proposals for an Association. Returned to England in April. 'My schemes of organising the ignorant I confess to be ill-timed: I cannot conceive that they were dangerous •• .'(March 1812). Summer Writing and revising Queen Mab (1813), which he com• pleted by June, 1813. 'The Past, the Present, & the Future are the grand & comprehensive topics of this Poem' (March 1813). September In Tremadoc, assisting to raise a fund for the repair of the embankment. October Met Godwin regularly, having read his Political Justice as an undergraduate. 1813 June His daughter Ianthe born. 30 Chronology 1814 Spring A Refutation ofDeism published. June Peace in Europe. July After an acquaintance of just over a month, eloped with Mary Godwin to the Continent, travelling through France, Switzerland and Holland. 'My attachment to Mary neither could nor ought to have been overcome .... We met with passion, she has resigned all for me' (Sept. r 814). September Returned to England, and faced serious debts. November Birth ofHarriet's second child, Charles. rSrs January Death of his grandfather; Shelley is given an annuity, thus removing his financial problems. February Premature birth, and death, ofMary's child. June Battle ofWaterloo. Autumn Writing Alastor (r8r6). 'These writings which I have hither• to published, have been little else than visions which imper• sonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be, or maybe' (May r8r9). r8r6 January Birth ofhis son William. May Left for Switzerland with Mary and Claire Clairmont, where he met Byron. September Returned to England. October Suicide ofFanny Imlay, Mary's half-sister. December Harriet 'found drowned' in the Serpentine. Mary and Shelley married. Became friendly with Leigh Hunt, through whom he met Keats, Horace Smith, etc. r817 January-March Chancery proceedings over Harriet's children, who were fmally removed from his care. 'I only feel persecution bitterly, because I bitterly lament the depravity and mistake ofthose who persecute' (Sept. r8r7). March A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote written and published. Settled at Marlow, by the Thames. Introduced to the study ofPlato by Peacock. Working on Laon and Cythna (officially published as The Revolt of Islam in January r8r8). 'It is an experiment on the temper of the public mind, as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live ••• The poem Chronology 31 •.• is narrative, not didactic .•• I would only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue, and be incited to those enquiries which have led to my moral and political creed' (Preface). September Birth ofhis daughter Clara. November An Address to the People ott the Death of the Princess Charlotte written and published. IBIS March Departed for Italy, never to return to England. Settled at Leghorn. ' ... no sooner had we arrived in Italy than the loveliness of the earth & the serenity of the sky made the greatest difference in my sensations - I depend on these things for in the smoke of cities & the tumult of human• kind & the chilling fogs & rain of our own country I can hardly be said to live' (April r8r8). July Translated Plato's Symposium (pub. 1831 complete). August Reunion with Byron in Venice. September Began Prometheus Unbound, and completed Act r in October. Death of Clara. November Until January, travelling through southern Italy. I8I9 February Journeyed to Rome. March-April Working on Acts rr and rn of Prometheus Unbound. 'I consider Poetry very subordinate to moral & political science, & if I were well, certainly I should aspire to the latter; for I can conceive a great work, embodying the dis• coveries ofall ages, & harmonising the contending creeds by which mankind have been ruled' (Jan. 1819 ). May Writing The Cenci (I 820), which was finished in August. June Death of William. ' •.. it seems to me as if, haunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover my cheerfulness again' (June r8rg). Political unrest and agitation in England. Peterloo Massacre (Aug. r6). September The Mask of Anarchy (1832) written. 'These are, as it were, the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is approach• ing' (Sept. r8rg). October In Florence; composed 'Ode to theWest Wind'. November Percy, his heir, born. Peter Bell the Third written. Winter Working on A Philosophical View of Reform (1920). 'The great thing to do is to hold the balance between popular impatience and tyrannical obstinacy; to inculcate with Chronology fervour both the right of resistance and the duty of for• bearance. You know my principles incite me to take all the good I can get in politics, for ever aspiring to something more. I am one of those whom nothing will finally satisfy, but who am ready to be partially satisfied by all that is practicable' (Nov. 1819). 1819 December Wrote Act IV of Prometheus Unbound (1820). '[My Pro• metheus] is in my judgement, of a higher character than any• thing I have yet attempted; and is perhaps less an imitation ofany thing that has gone before it' (Sept. 1819). 1820 January Travelled to Pisa. Spring Wrote 'Ode to Liberty', in part inspired by the Spanish revolution. June At Leghorn, where he wrote 'Ode to a Skylark'. August Composed The Witch ofAtlas (1824). October Wrote Swellfoot the Tyrant (182o), based on the trial for infidelity of Queen Caroline. December Friendship with Emilia Viviani begun. 1821 January Joined at Pisa by Edward and Jane Williams. February Wrote Epipsychidion. 'It is an idealised history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness ofwhat is perhaps eternal' (June 1822). February-March Working on A Defence ofPoetry (pub. 1840). April Heard ofKeats' death in Rome (Feb. 23). April-May Writing Adonais (1819). 'My elegy on him is finished: I have dipped my pen in consuming fire to chastise his destroyers; otherwise the tone of the poem is solemn & exalted' (June 1821). October Writing Hellas (1.822). 'The poem of Hellas, written at the suggestion of the events of the moment, is a mere impro- vise, and derives its intent ..• solely from the intense sympathy which the author feels with the cause he would celebrate' (Preface). Winter Working on his historical tragedy Charles I. 1822 January Arrival ofTrelawney. March Translating Goethe and Calderon. April Moved to Lerici. Chronology 33 May-July At work on The Triumph of Life (1824). 'I feel too little certainty of the future, and too little satisfaction with regard to the past, to undertake any subject seriously and deeply. I stand, as it were, upon a precipice, which I have ascended with great, and cannot descend without greater, peril, and I am content if the heavens above me is calm for the passing moment' (June 1822). 8July Drowned at sea when the Don juan foundered, sailing back to Lerici from Leghorn, where Shelley had been seeing the Hunts. August His body cremated at Lucca. 1823 January Burial at Rome. 1824 Posthumous Poems appeared, edited by Mary Shelley. 1839 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mary Shelley. Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mary Shelley.

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