An Appreciation of Shelley in the Postmodern Ageand now among literary critics, but Shelley. He went...

WORDS IN EDGEWAYS - 16

An Appreciation of Shelley

in the Postmodern Age

In his mature years, the great twentieth century poet W. B. Yeats

admitted that the primary influence upon his writing had been not

William Blake, much in vogue in his youth and remaining so then

and now among literary critics, but Shelley. He went on to say that,

“regarding those who do not agree that Percy Bysshe Shelley is a

very great poet, there is nothing that I can say to them.” In thinking

about writing this essay, I have more than once been tempted to

follow Yeats’s inclination. Moreover, I am not even qualified as a

literary critic, a telling hand-icap in an age of specialized skills and

knowledge, but only a failed scribbler, “an idle singer of an empty

day”, to borrow a line from Clough, a classicist-modernist beached

on the desolate sands of postmodernity. One major consideration,

however, has induced me to go ahead with this attempt. This is that

Shelley is of special significance today—inasmuch as any writer

who is not young and alive right now can continue to have any

significance, if only among the small and diminishing minority still

upholding a literary tradition—because he stands near to what would

be the antipodal extreme to the main elements of postmodern culture

and civilization. A consumption-driven, docile, unthinking mass,

happily worship-ping the idol of self-gratification erected before

them; a corporate hegemony and oligarchy ruling over a civilization

in which an all-pervading commercialization has poisoned the

fountains of life, and everything is an item to be bought or sold,

including matters of mind and spirit, even individuality itself; an

educated elite that thinks and feels in diminishingly human terms,

and their minds awash in an inform-ation glut that infests the world,

and makes the ability to discriminate among what matters and what

doesn’t perhaps the most crucially vanishing attribute; a humanity

which, except for one of the few healthy developments in

postmodern-ity, the environmental movement when truly genuine

and not hijacked by the corporate culture, has been long severed

from the harmony, physical and spirit-ual, with nature which existed

in the past, and nature itself in rapid ebb and dying; conventional

thinking and uncritical acceptance of custom or popular belief so

prevalent, although in numerous instances masked under a pretense

of being other than what it is; to all these things, and others I don’t

want to here enumer-ate, Percy Bysshe Shelley stands at the

opposing pole, and which is why the thoughts which live within his

poetry are so important today, if people would bother to read and

understand his work.

Now I realize that in writing about Shelley I shall be doing so

before a largely unsympathetic audience. That is because within the

canon of Dr F. R. Leavis, a primarily unfavourable and dismissive

view of Shelley prevails, and I believe that most of the readership of


this magazine adhere to that canon. I will not attempt to counter his

arguments—as I have said, I’m not a literary critic—but will simply

present a different view of Shelley. By a broad excursion through his

works, I will try to some measure explain a poet whose writings have

so often been misconstrued and distorted. But if, reminded of the

assertion by Yeats quoted at the beginning, explanation is largely

futile, my more modest hope is that the reader will look upon this

essay in praise of Shelley as simply the confession of an aberration, a

depiction of a literary vice or addiction, and not as an attempt at

recommendation. Here I am reminded of the words of the recently

deceased Hunter S. Thompson, when he said, “I would not

recommend drugs, alcohol, and violence to anyone, but they always

worked for me.” This then may be regarded as the delineation of an

addiction to what it is not entirely inappropriate to describe as the

poetic equivalent of drugs, alcohol, and violence.

To begin. First, one must return to what is around us now, that is,

our contemporary culture and its expression in literature. The salient

characteristic of the bulk of writing today, largely amorphous but in

this quite distinct, is that it’s dead, inert. This was very astutely

anatomized by Brian Lee in Issue no. 9 of this magazine, in his essay

“Martin Amis and the Present State of Fiction”. It was this quality of

postmodern writing which Eliot, himself still a modernist,

preeminently both foreshadowed and represented, and hence his

importance in the poetry of the twentieth century. An excellent

analysis of Eliot and what he means, is the like-named essay, “What

Eliot Means”, again by Brian Lee, which appeared in one of the

antediluvian print ancestors of this magazine, before the floods of

postmodern night closed over it, Issue no. 8 of The Haltwhistle

Quarterly. Eliot, significantly, found Shelley’s ideas “repellent”:

Eliot was imbued with the spirit of what was coming, while his

contemporary, Yeats, holding quite the opposite view of Shelley,

looked backwards, to what was vanishing.

Now Shelley, though he could not have imagined our postmodern

future (could anyone have, at that time?), knew of states of mind and

of conditions similar to it. In a different context, but one in which the

effect on the mind is the same, he writes of his protagonist, “… His

wan eyes/ Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly/ As ocean’s moon

looks on the moon in heaven.” ( Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude ll.

200-202). His longest poem, The Revolt of Islam, written early in his

career, may perhaps be considered a failure in its totality, but

nonetheless contains numerous passages of splendid verse of a very

high order. An analysis or critique of this poem is outside the scope

or competence of this essay, and its naivety of purpose (as explained

by Shelley in the preface) or of idea, a characteristic of Shelley to

which Barrie Mencher confesses a dislike in the previous issue, may

indeed strike our jaded, knowing, and sophisticated sensibilities on a

dissonant note. In a previous age this kind of naivety might have

been called simplicity, and would not necessarily have been seen in

pejorative terms, just as the apparent simplicity of the ocean’s

surface does not preclude its profundity. This is one of the things that


Yeats understood in Shelley. But for the purpose of this essay, that

is, Shelley in the context of postmodernity, what is striking in The

Revolt of Islam is its abundance of descriptions of and references to

benighted conditions, fallen states, and minds in chains. The poem’s

second Canto conveys the sense of a lost and glorious past in

juxtaposition to a fallen present: “… the wondrous fame/ Of the past

world, the vital words and deeds/ Of minds whom neither time nor

change can tame”; the poem’s protagonist wanders “through the

wrecks of days departed” and hears the sound of the sorrowing wind

echoing through its broken tombs and the ruins of the “dwellings of

a race of mightier men”. Of course, being a child of the early years

of the Enlightenment, he still entertains the naive hope that this

glorious past can be prelude to a more glorious future, saying, “Such

man has been, and such may yet become!/ Ay, wiser, greater,

gentler, even than they/ Who on the fragments of yon shattered

dome/ Have stamped the sign of power …”. Needless to say, all this

is so much water under the bridge now, but what is relevant here is

his portrayal of his present as a fallen state which manifests chiefly

as a mental condition. The narrative of human life is presented by

“Feeble historians of its shame and glory,/ False disputants on all its

hopes and fears,/ Victims who worshipped ruin …”; it is a world

where the natural world has ceased to live for its inhabitants, and

Earth, our bright home, its mountains and its waters,

……………………… and those fair daughters,

The clouds, of Sun and Ocean, who have blended

The colours of the air since first extended

It cradled the young world, none wandered forth

To see or feel: a darkness had descended

On every heart …

This vital world, this home of happy spirits,

Was as a dungeon to my blasted kind;

All that despair from murdered hope inherits

They sought, and in their helpless misery blind,

A deeper prison and heavier chains did find,

And stronger tyrants …

The narrator admits scant wonder that “men loathe their life”, and

that “… they learn/ To gaze on this fair world with hopeless

unconcern”. Significantly, he finds that this benighted condition

leads to sexual obsession, and talks of “… the hyaena lust, who,

among graves,/ Over his loathed meal, laughing in agony, raves.”

Shelley’s depictions of fallen states are not limited to The Revolt

of Islam by any means, and such occur frequently in his poetry. Here

is one which, although evoked while he is contemplating the towers

and the palaces of a decadent Venice of the early nineteenth century,

I find has a certain contemporary resonance:


Sepulchres, where human forms,

Like pollution-nourished worms,

To the corpse of greatness cling,

Murdered, and now mouldering:

(Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, ll. 146-9)

The sense of a fallen world, indeed: it was in his bones. Part of

this sense was particular and not universal, being due to the shadow

cast over his time, for those who believed in human progress, by the

disastrous failure of the French Revolution. He saw this failure as,

firstly, the betrayal of its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity by

its partisans into blood-letting, fanaticism, and hate; and then as the

usurpation of the Revolution itself by Napoleon, of whom he has the

Earth declare, in Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of

Napoleon, “And weave into his shame, which like the dead/ Shrouds

me, the hopes that from his glory fled.” With the earlier defeat of

Napoleon, he also witnessed the restoration and the resumed

legitimacy of the old order. One may observe that this condition of

his time is not entirely unlike our own. For we live under the much

longer shadow cast by the final failure of the ideals of the

Enlightenment, an Enlightenment whose first manifestations in

history were the American and French Revolutions, and of whose

last diseased offshoot, Soviet-style communism, we have witnessed

the recent (in historical terms) demise. Into the vacuum created by

the decay and death of these ideals has flowed—what? The new

freedom of the savvy, option-rich consumer? Thus, when Shelley

describes the atmosphere of his time, it is possible to find a certain

resonance for our own, if one thinks in terms of this much larger and

longer shadow:

Alas! All hope is buried now.

But then men dreamed the age`d earth

Was labouring in that mighty birth,

Which many a poet and a sage

Has aye foreseen – the happy age

When truth and love shall dwell below

Among the works and ways of men;

Which on this world not power but will

Even now is wanting to fulfill.

…

Ah, smiles and joyance quickly died,

For public hope grew pale and dim

In an altered time and tide,

…

And in the streets men met each other,

And by old altars and in halls,

And smiled again at festivals.

But each man found in his heart’s brother


Cold cheer; for all, though half deceived,

The outworn creeds again believed,

And the same round anew began,

Which the weary world yet ever ran.

(Rosalind and Helen, ll. 601-9, 691-3, 713-720.)

But the sense of a fallen world was deeper in him than as it

related to particular circumstances of time and place. One can

discern the beginning of a shift to a deeper dimension in The Tower

of Famine, written in Italy in 1820. Here, the metaphor evoked

would have been familiar to the founder of the religion he had

disavowed, and strikes close to the immemorial fault line upon

which the world has been erected. It is not made clear in the poem

whether the “Tower of Famine” referred to is meant as an actual

structure or a figurative one—typical of Shelley’s rapidity of

thought, and why he infuriates critics—but it is pictured as built

upon or standing amid “the towers and sacred domes”, “the bowers

of solitary wealth”, and that because of its presence everything

around it is dimmed, “so that the world is bare”; he then concludes

the poem by likening the image to “… a spectre wrapped in

shapeless terror/ Amid a company of ladies fair”, which becomes a

mirror of and absorbs their beauty and “the life of their sweet eyes”,

so that, like those who gaze upon the Gorgon, they are turned to

stone.

If Keats can be called the great poet of acceptance, Shelley is the

great poet of non-acceptance. Keats accepted life and the world as it

is; Shelley did not. Andor Gomme, in his essay “The Last of Old

England” in Issue no.13 of this magazine, quotes Leavis on Keats:

“… that strong grasp upon actualities—upon things outside himself,

that firm sense of the solid world, which makes Keats so different

from Shelley.” (Revaluation, p. 261) Now I’d contend that Shelley

had a perfectly clear idea of the actual world and of things outside

himself, as any reading of all his significant work (see Appendix at

the end of this essay), as opposed to selective examples to prove a

point, should show. Immediately violating my just stated injunction

(as lack of consistency is one of the numerous sins imputed to

Shelley, I, as his advocate, should properly manifest the same), I

would suggest that the Letter to Maria Gisborne, Part Three of Peter

Bell the Third, and, on another level, Act One of Prometheus

Unbound, should show that, in the American vernacular, he knew

‘where it’s at’. On the other hand, I’d agree with Leavis that a “firm

sense of the solid world” he had not. He lacked that sense because,

even though he knew quite well what this world was, he ultimately

did not accept it. This duality may have, to some, a surface

appearance of inconsistency; rather, it is complexity (masking as

simplicity in many cases) defying simple categorization. In the poem

above cited, Letter to Maria Gisborne, although full of minutely

observed and wittily crafted depictions of actual things and


persons—especially lines 193-253, on London and his circle of

friends—he also writes to his respondent,

………………… – and how we spun

A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun

Of this familiar life, which seems to be

But is not: – or is but quaint mockery

Of all we would believe, and sadly blame

The jarring and inexplicable frame

Of this wrong world: …

(Op. cit., ll. 154-160.)

If one were to make a count of each of the adjectives used in his

works (a task fit for a computer, not a human), I feel pretty certain

that ‘strange’ would be at the top or very near it. A sense of the

world’s strangeness was always with him. This is most

unequivocally described in the sonnet “Lift not the painted veil”, in

which the person alluded to is thought to be Byron, but perhaps more

aptly characterizes himself. The world of ordinary life is described as

an illusion, “a painted veil”, behind which hope and fear are

continually weaving the shadows which the world calls substance.

The figure in the poem is depicted as seeking “things to love”, but

finding nothing in the world “the which he could approve”. He

moves among “the unheeding many”, striving for truth, and, “like

the Preacher”, never finding it.

This poet of the Romantic Age, in a very pure and radical form of

a general characteristic of the period, was ever seeking something

other than the common and familiar life around him, some ideal

situated elsewhere, not in the here and now. Sometimes he sought it

“… in whatever checks that Storm/ Which with the shattered present

chokes the past” (Epipsychidion, ll. 211-12); or, and in the same

poem, he was one of those “… to whom this world of life/ Is as a

garden ravaged, and whose strife/ Tills for the promise of a later

birth/ The wilderness of this Elysian earth” (Ibid, ll. 186-9); again,

the ideal might be in neither the past nor the future, but in what made

it seem “… as if the hour were one/ Sent from beyond the skies,/

Which scattered from above the sun/ A light of Paradise” (To Jane:

the Recollection, ll. 17-20); yet again, it may lie in the perfection of

ideal beauty, here an attribute of one of his female figures, a beauty

which made

The bright world dim, and everything beside

Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade:

No thought of living spirit could abide,

Which to her looks had ever been betrayed,

On any object in the world so wide,

On any hope within the circling skies,

But on her form, and in her inmost eyes.


(The Witch of Atlas, ll. 138-144.)

But now follows an apparent contradiction of this characteristic

of Shelley exemplified in these excerpts. This is a poet who is

nothing if not manifold and to a superficial view in certain ways

contradictory, one of the reasons he has hardly been a favourite of

critics, and why out of this manifold and seemingly conflicting

nature can come a correlative ease, through drawing upon one of his

aspects, of constructing a negative critique and appraisal. Critics,

with their limiting strictures and reprovals! Like many writers —

though perhaps not so many in these deconstructionist times, and I

may well be in a distinct minority—one can easily wish for a return

to simpler and more innocent days, somewhat like the age imagined

at the beginning of The Witch of Atlas, which was presumed to exist,

Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth

Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,

Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth

All those bright natures which adorned its prime,

And left us nothing to believe in, worth

The pains of putting into learnèd rhyme

(Op. cit., ll. 49-54.)

But then, as one can’t very well go back to Homer’s Greece or to

Elizabethan England, one must make do with a great deal written

about literature, and not much of it now written worth the name. As I

said, it is possible, on the surface, to contradict the previously stated

view of Shelley that he could not accept the world as it was—and not

just the world created by humanity, as I shall later indicate—and that

indeed readings of his poetry can give many examples of an empathy

with the natural world of an intensity and depth shared by few other

poets. At the beginning of Alastor; Or, the Spirit of Solitude (the first

major work of his coming of age as a poet), he invokes the “great

Mother” (Nature), vowing that he had loved her, and her only, and

all the ways in which she manifests, by virtue of which love he asks

her to now favour his “solemn song”, awaiting her breath so that his

strain

May modulate with murmurs of the air,

And motions of the forests and the sea,

And voice of living beings, and woven hymns

Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.

(Op. cit., ll. 46-9.)

For a few examples to illustrate this deep empathy, I would cite,

from A Summer Evening Churchyard, a description of the coming of


evening (ll. 1-12); at an opposite pole of perception, from A Vision of

the Sea, the dissipation of a great ocean storm at sunrise (ll.115-132);

from Mont Blanc, a feeling of the vastness of a mountain landscape

and of geological time (ll. 57-75); then, showing the range of feeling

and perception, in The Sensitive Plant, Part First, one passes to the

exquisite and the delicate; lastly, from Adonais, a passage where the

inmost sense of spring has rarely been evoked so poignantly and

deeply:

Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,

But grief returns with the revolving year;

The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;

The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;

Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons’ bier;

The amorous birds now pair in every brake,

And build their mossy homes in field and brere;

And the green lizard, and the golden snake,

Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean

A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst

As it has ever done, with change and motion,

From the great morning of the world when first

God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed,

The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;

All baser things pant with life’s sacred thirst;

Diffuse themselves; and spend in love’s delight,

The beauty and the joy of their renewe`d might.

(Op. cit., ll. 154-171.)

So, a poet with an intense empathy with and love of the world

around him, who at the same time could not accept this firm and

solid world: is a synthesis between these two contradictory impulses

possible? A suggestion of a possible synthesis comes in Mont Blanc,

that seminal poem (along with the contemporan-eous Hymn to

Intellectual Beauty) written near the beginning of his career as a

mature poet, a career that only spans the years 1815 to 1822,

demarcated at one end by his juvenilia and at the other by his

premature death at sea. This poem was reviewed, from a different

perspective, by Barrie Mencher in Issue no. 14 of the magazine; my

treatment of it here is for the purpose of illuminating the

contradiction in Shelley referred to above. The poem, supposedly a

depiction of a wild and majestic alpine scene, does not begin with

the natural world at all; it begins with an abstract consideration of

the relative interplay of sense percep-tions of the external world with

interpretations originating from within the mind; this abstract

consideration is then presented as a metaphor of a feeble brook

within the woods among mountains, where certainty has vanished as

to the origin of the sound of rushing water that one hears, which


might be emanating from the brook, from surrounding unseen

waterfalls, or some vast river bursting over its rocks: to this

uncertainty he adds, through a deliberate obscuring of the syntax, the

further ambiguity of what the brook represents in the image, whether

it is meant to portray thoughts emanating from the mind or external

sense perceptions —only then does he proceed to the depiction of the

natural scene before him, which he opens by likening to the

metaphor previously presented! The effect of this unorthodox

proceeding is to render what would otherwise be merely natural as

preternatural, with a heightened and intensified perception through

the removal of the veil of familiarity covering and dimming what we

see: this ‘removal of the veil’ is a common feature of Shelley’s

poetry, as stated explicitly in another and a later poem: “But life’s

familiar veil was now withdrawn,/ As the world leaps before an

earthquake’s dawn,/… As if the future and the past were all/

Treasured i’ the instant … .” (Ginevra, ll. 122-4, 130-1).

The poem then becomes an entranced contemplation, an intense

apprehension, of nature in its most solemn, majestic, and remote

aspects; of “Power in … his secret throne”, of “children of elder

time”, of “old and solemn harmony”; here, analogously as in the

poem of a year earlier, Alastor, where the poet regards the earliest

man-made monuments, “memorials of the world’s youth”, where on

those forms he “… ever gazed/ And gazed, till meaning on his

vacant mind/ Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw/ The

thrilling secrets of the birth of time”: yet here, it is nature’s secrets

he wishes to unlock, but finds himself musing on his “own separate

fantasy”, his individual, human mind, to wit, on the fundamental

relationship between the object observed and the observer, and the

nature of reality itself: his thoughts sometimes rest upon the scene

before him, and sometimes inhabit “the still cave of the witch

Poesy”, where the funda-mental inaccesibility of the sublime

magnificence and power before him is confessed in his “Seeking

among the shadows that pass by/ Ghosts of all thing that are, some

shade of thee,/ Some phantom, some faint image …”. What makes

this magnificence and power, this inaccesibility? What does he mean

when he says, “Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal/ Large

codes of fraud and woe …”? Is that which lies before him now,

indeed, all “the clear universe of things around”, the same if there is

no one to observe it, or is observed by a bird, a monkey, or is data

fed into a computer? Suggestions of answers to such questionings

can be found in the concluding fifth part of the poem:

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: – the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them: – Winds contend


Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind’s imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

(Op. cit., ll. 127-144.)

What indeed? The objective nature of empirical science, then

newly established, now ubiquitous and supreme. For Shelley, the

firm, solid, stark, objective world, untransformed or unillumined by

imagination, was never to be enough. Mont Blanc was composed in

1816, and his subsequent work illustrates and develops the principle

suggested, as in The Revolt of Islam (composed 1817): “The dawn of

mind, which … far illumines space,/ And clasps this barren world in

its own bright embrace” (op. cit., Canto V, ll. 2239-41). Note

“barren” to describe the world. Again, in the same poem, the narrator

says his song “Peopled with thoughts the boundless universe”,

thoughts which strove “Where’er they trod the darkness to disperse/

The cloud of that unutterable curse/ Which clings upon mankind …”

(Ibid, Canto II, ll. 928-33). In the postmodern blankness, in the

cultural desolation of our civilization now, this poet’s words may

have strange applicability. For him, it is not enough to be just the

passive and objective observer of a quiescent nature, to give back a

faithful rendering, grounded in the “firm and solid world”, of his

perceptions; he is ever seeking more than this, where, through

various conditions of “darkness wide and deep”, there is always a

hope which ultimately can find its basis neither in the individual nor

in the human condition, but only in the eternal cycles of nature of

which humanity is a part:

Such are the thoughts which, like the fires that flare

In storm-encompassed isles, we cherish yet

In this dark ruin – such were mine even there;

As in its sleep some odorous violet,

While yet its leaves with nightly dews are wet,

Breathes in prophetic dreams of day’s uprise,

Or, as ere Scythian frost in fear has met

Spring’s messengers descending from the skies,

The buds foreknow their life – this hope must ever rise.

(Ibid, Canto VII, ll. 3154-62.)


What, then, is this hope? Is it the hope at the end of the Ode to the

West Wind characterized as “foolhardy” by A.R. Gomme in his essay

in Issue no.13 of this magazine? (By the way, it is of some relevance

that in the first draft of that poem Shelley had the concluding line as

a statement, which he later crossed out and made into the question

which is its final form.) This hope is nothing but the necessity for

hope, whose source is the light that must exist within the mind which

seeks its kindred light within the world (I am paraphrasing from his

essay A Defense of Poetry), as long as we have any pretensions to

being alive—and many people who think they are alive today are

deluded on that score. As he puts it, “This truth is that deep well,

whence sages draw/ The unenvied light of hope …”, and,

……………………… ’tis like thy light,

Imagination! Which from earth and sky,

And from the depths of human fantasy,

As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills

The Universe with glorious beams, and kills

Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow

Of its reverberated lightning …

(Epipsychidion, ll. 184-5, 163-69.)

The “error” referred to above is the analytic and calculating mind

usurping the primacy of place which should belong to mind

redeemed by imagination. As he states in his A Defense of Poetry, “

we must feel what we perceive, and imagine what we know”. But it

is not that he is dogmatic in his theorising, for, as he says in the

essay, the poet’s task is “not to pose but to create”. Thus, near the

end of Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, when the poetic

mood which inspired him begins to depart, he does not pretend to

any kind of certainty as to its source, whether

Be it love, light, harmony,

Odour, or the soul of all

Which from Heaven like dew doth fall,

Or the mind which feeds this verse

Peopling the lone universe.

(Op. cit., ll. 315-19.)

Whatever it is, it is also the source of human liberty. Liberty is a

central concept of Shelley’s poetry, and it is a condition existing first

and foremost in the human mind; contingent upon this condition is

the possibility of action to trans-form the dispensations to be found

in the external world. Near the beginning of the long poem Julian

and Maddalo, the bell of the belfry tower of a lunatic asylum tolls to

summon the inmates to vespers. Julian (a poetic stand-in for Shelley)

observes wryly, “… As much skill as need to pray/ In thanks or hope


for their dark lot have they/ To their stern maker …” (ll. 111-3).

Count Maddalo, drawn upon Shelley’s friend Lord Byron, although,

according to Shelley, inclined by pride to take the “darker side” of

arguments, is more religiously orthodox, and chides Julian for ever

being “a perilous infidel”. But he then goes on to comment on the

scene before them as an emblem of human mortality itself, and of the

futility of our hopes and our desires, which, like the madmen

summoned by the bell, gather around the soul and pray—“For what?

They know not …” Julian responds to Maddalo’s gloomy metaphor

by noting that the argument of futility applies only on the assumption

of human passivity, and, although there is no guarantee of liberation,

it is possible to struggle against the chains which bind the human

mind and spirit, against “… what degrades and crushes us. We

know/ That we have power over ourselves to do/ And suffer – what,

we know not till we try;/ But something nobler than to live and die

…” (ll. 184-7). An illustration of how this inward condition of

liberty in individuals manifests in the aggregate of human society is

provided in the sonnet “Political Greatness”, where he first describes

the effects upon society where this liberty is lacking due to tyranny,

tyranny that he says can be of two kinds, the one imposed by force

and the other by custom (ll. 9-10). Presumably, one may apply the

latter kind to postmodern mass civilization, for here one may say, as

in the sonnet (with allowances for poetic exaggeration), that

Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,

History is but the shadow of their shame,

Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts

As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,

Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery

Of their own likeness. . . .

Indeed. Opposed to this he places

………… Man who man would be,

Must rule the empire of himself; in it

Must be supreme, establishing his throne

On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy

Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.

(Op. cit., ll. 4-9, 10-14.)

To Shelley, liberty is a much more complex, existential, as well

as inclusive idea than mere political reformism; one may gather as

much from a reading of his Ode to Liberty, in which he has

transcribed the principle delineated in the sonnet presented above

into a long poem that views the genesis, the rises and the falls, and

the prospects of “man being himself alone” against the tapestry of

human history. Here is presented one of the most luminous examples

of Shelley in the multiple roles of lyric poet, social philosopher, and


political reformer fused into one, in a relatively shorter poem (as

opposed to long works such as Prometheus Unbound and Hellas) of

285 lines. This is not the proper place to cite from a poem whose

mood, tone, and language stand in striking contrast to those of the

postmodern muse, clashing as it does with the cautiously dim, the

prudently ambiguous, the scrupulously qualified, and the self-

absorbed (the last of which is one of the sins with which Leavis

charges this poet); nor is it really relevant, concerning itself as it

does with a process whose end, in Western civilization, we have

reached and which is therefore dated, namely, human history

(Francis Fukuyama was right in this regard as far as it related to the

West, wrong as it related to the rest of the world); all the same, it

may be possible to see a relation to our age in a section of the poem

where he addresses the personification of the idea which one would

grossly over-simplify by the mere denomination of ‘liberty’,

regarding the circumstances of a historical epoch conventionally

ascribed a length of five hundred years, which nonetheless is no

reliable predictor of the duration of its recurrence, an event

occasioning dismay in a few and unnoticed by most:

From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,

Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,

Or utmost islet inaccessible,

Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign,

Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks,

And every Naiad’s ice-cold urn,

To talk in echoes sad and stern

Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn?

(Op. cit., ll. 106-13.)

It is also perhaps pertinent where, near the poem’s end, he warns

of the distortion of then newly-dawning liberty into a proliferation of

“new wants” (ll. 241-255). Indeed, in the next stanza he explicitly

states that ‘liberty’, as it is conventionally understood, is not enough,

and, invoking the former, pleads “Come thou, but lead out of the

inmost cave/ Of man’s deep spirit, as the morning-star/ Beckons the

Sun from the Eoan wave,/ Wisdom …” (ll. 256-9). To which he

adds, as also not possible to be disjoined from ‘liberty’, the other

“rulers of eternal thought”, love, justice, memory of the past, and

hope of the future (ll. 261-7).

A charge typically levelled against Shelley by his detractors is

that he pursues airy idealisms and impalpable abstractions, which

have little connection to real life and the real world. As a matter of

fact, his wife Mary voiced just that objection with regard to his The

Witch of Atlas, after seeing it for the first time. However, a poet may

be forgiven the occasional sally into the realm of pure fantasy, as

that particular poem happens to be (though not entirely: it contains

some astute commentary on the human condition near the end).

Other poets, most notably Keats, seem to be far more easily forgiven


their weaknesses and indulgences, while Shelley positively draws

censure and reproof from the same critics so lenient regarding others.

Perhaps this is due to the abrasive and uncompromising nature of his

genius, which elicits strong reactions, positive or negative. As for the

criticism of escapism and flight from reality made against him, I

would suggest that, idealist though he was, he at the same time

perceived and realized, far more deeply than may superficially be

conceived, the actualities of this world. A hint in the direction of this

assertion may be given by how he concludes all of his longer works,

with the notable exception of Prometheus Unbound, which have a

narrative thread.. In The Revolt of Islam, the revolution fails; in

Julian and Maddalo, the chief character developed in the poem, who

holds views similar to Julian’s (a stand-in for Shelley), has gone

mad; in The Sensitive Plant, the paradisal garden runs to foulness

and decay; in his single completed play, The Cenci (Prometheus

Unbound and Hellas are lyrical dramas), justice most eminently does

not prevail; in Hellas, the Greeks lose their struggle for freedom, a

denouement which prompts the drama’s chorus to lament that ideals

such as liberty, virtue, love, and truth can be overcome by common

forces of the world like numbers, wealth, erring judgement, and

change (ll. 973-87). In Prometheus Unbound, that much-maligned

and misunderstood work which Yeats has stated should be numbered

“among the very few sacred texts of humanity”, and whose Act I is

surely, if anything is, a metaphorical representation of the essential

reality of this world, one of the Furies sent by Jupiter to torment him

taunts the chained Prometheus with this:

In each human heart terror survives

The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear

All that they would disdain to think were true:

Hypocrisy and custom make their minds

The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.

They dare not devise good for man’s estate,

And yet they know not that they do not dare.

The good want power, but to weep barren tears.

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;

And all best things are thus confused to ill.

Many are strong and rich, and would be just,

But live among their suffering fellow-men

As if none felt: they know not what they do.

(Op. cit., Act I, ll. 618-631.)

In his last poem, The Triumph of Life, a similar theme is echoed:

“And much I grieved to think how power and will/ In opposition rule

our mortal day,/ And why God made irreconcilable/ Good and the

means of good …”(ll. 228-31).

So how does one pursue the very loftiest ideals while

concurrently fully conscious of the actual dispensations of the world


in which we live? Just as the poem Mont Blanc, in that seminal year

of 1816 near the beginning of his maturity as a poet, provided the

model for his subsequent work on the levels of cognition and

perception, so did his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty of the same year

give the pattern according to which he would reconcile aspiration

and reality. This, his most characteristic poem (not his greatest, but

certainly to be numbered among his ‘great’ poems), portrays, I think,

more than any other, what Shelley is all about: that is, if one were to

select among his works one that illustrates his peculiar and

idiosyncratic place, with his strengths and his weaknesses, in the

English poetical canon, this would be it. For this reason I want to

quote this poem of 84 lines almost in its entirety, and then venture

some comments and observations afterwards.

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats though unseen among us, – visiting

This various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, -

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,

It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening, -

Like clouds in starlight widely spread, -

Like memory of music fled, -

Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

Of human thought or form, – where art thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

Ask why the sunlight not for ever

Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,

Why fear and dream and death and birth

Cast on the daylight of this earth

Such gloom, – why man has such a scope

For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

To sage or poet these responses given -

Therefore the names of God, and ghosts, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavour,

Frail spells – whose uttered charm might not avail to

sever,

From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone – like mist o’er mountains driven,

Or music by the night-wind sent


Through strings of some still instrument,

Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart

And come, for some uncertain moments lent.

Man were immortal, and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.

Thou messenger of sympathies,

That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes -

Thou – that to human thought art nourishment,

Like darkness to a dying flame!

Depart not as thy shadow came,

Depart not – lest the grave should be,

Like life and fear, a dark reality.

He goes on to relate how in vain he had sought the power that he

here invokes, until for the first time its “shadow” fell upon him; now,

in the poem, he calls as witness

……… the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned

bowers

Of studious zeal or love’s delight

Outwatched with me the envious night –

They know that never joy illumed my brow

Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free

This world from its dark slavery,

That thou – O awful Loveliness,

Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene

When noon is past – there is a harmony

In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

Thus let thy power, which like the truth

Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

Its calm – to one who worships thee,

And every form containing thee,

Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind

To fear himself, and love all human kind.

(Op. cit., ll. 1-48, 64-84.)

Now this poem can give some insight into why Shelley provokes

such disparate responses in his readers, and such contrasting


opinions on his worth from literary figures like Leavis and Yeats, by

comparing it with Wordsworth’s poem on a similar theme, his Ode:

Intimations of Immortality, which, published in 1807, obviously

influenced Shelley. (Indeed, he quotes a line from it in Alastor.)

Wordsworth’s poem presents thoughts, feelings, and ideas that most

can identify with, and provides comfort and reassurance in its

conclusions. He regrets the “visionary gleam” which, existing during

the period of one’s child-hood, in adulthood fades away. Yet to him

it is the earnest of our immortality, an indication that the child yet

remembers whence he came, which is “from God”, or “from afar”.

Furthermore, the very fact that the gleam once existed, of which the

recollection itself means that something of it still exists, is sufficient

to give him strength for his onward life, breeding in him “perpetual

benediction”. For it provides him with the truth—a truth he feels as

certainty—that the mortal world is not all, and that there is a greater

eternal world which existed before and which exists after death.

With this thought he again finds joy in the contemplation of nature,

even though it is not the joy that he once knew, and, though nature, a

“homely nurse” with “no unworthy aim” tries to make Man forget

“that imperial palace whence he came”, the memory and the

knowledge “Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,/ Are yet a

master-light of all our seeing”. He has found relief, as has the reader,

in the regret with which he began the poem, and finds, even in

human suffering, “soothing thoughts”. On the whole, a reading of

this poem (which I admit I do not do justice by paraphrasing)

imparts to the reader pleasure and deep emotion, and a truth that

solaces even those for whom the “visionary gleam” is not necessarily

proof of the existence of God or an afterlife. However, I must add,

although I recognize it as a great poem with some unforgettable lines

in it, it contains, through its very reassurance, the seeds of that smug

complacency which tarnished Wordsworth’s later years and

creations, and whose regrettable “dim stupidity” Shelley (rather

viciously) satirised in Part Seventh of Peter Bell the Third.

Whereas Wordsworth’s Ode presents the reader with a simple

dualism of a natural world of the here and now, and an eternal world

not present yet dimly recollected existing before and after death,

Shelley’s Hymn provides a view of life and the world not at all so

readily accessible to sympathy and understanding. I leave apart the

question of whether one accepts the Christian eschatology or not,

which Wordsworth did and Shelley didn’t, for I am considering the

poems from an ontological perspective only—in other words, this is

literary criticism (of a rather improvised sort) and not theology. In

Shelley’s poem, there are also two worlds, but they co-exist, and he

provides no simple answer regarding the nature of the shadowy other

world he adumbrates, nor any simple explanation as to the manner of

its co-existence with the here and now. Indeed, the measure of the

meaning and the power of this other world lies not in the grace that it

confers, but in its mystery (ll. 11-12). Furthermore, the

manifestations of this other world upon our own are inconstant and

cannot be relied upon, and seem coeval and innate with mutability


itself; seem only, because here too he provides no clear answer or

certainty. Apparently, the questing, restless nature of the mind of this

poet, of whom Leavis said, “in [him], feeling is divorced from

thought”, is such that he does not resist undermining his own

argument: although he posits the power represented in the poem as

an external force, he injects the ultimate doubt regarding its

existence when, invoking physical but not psychological

impossibility, he says of it, “Thou – that to human thought art

nourishment,/ Like darkness to a dying flame!” He can pretend to no

infallible conviction regarding its ultimate existence, and can only

plead that it not depart, as its “shadow” variously does, “… lest the

grave should be,/ Like life and fear, a dark reality.” Contrast this

with Wordsworth’s certainty and consoling joy in his poem, and one

can see why he can have far more popular appeal, and critics see that

appeal, than Shelley. But it is also possible to see why to a few, not

many, Shelley can have a peculiar attraction; the view of our

common, ordinary world’s simultaneous and unimmediate

magnificence corresponds, to a degree neither more or less, with that

actuality of the world perceived when one seeks more than the

immediately and comfortingly apparent, the conveniently adaptable,

the habitual and ready-made, whether supplied by custom, popular

belief, particular doctrine, or literary canon. In Shelley’s Hymn, the

physical manifestations of nature—“moonlight on a midnight

stream”, “mist o’er mountains driven” —are symbols of a shadowy,

higher reality not amenable to any kind of definite formulation. (In

this and some other poems he anticipates the later Symbolists.) It is

easy to see why this can seem like other-worldliness, that lack of a

firm grasp upon reality which is one of Leavis’s criticisms; but it is

precisely because of this attribute of his that there exists in Shelley

that intense empathy with nature, apparent in the Hymn and in the

poems cited as evidence of this quality in a preceding passage: he is

always striving to see more than what is only actually and

objectively there, seeking to remove “the veil of familiarity” which

bars the ordinary sense from that intense and higher communion

with the objective world possible only when that world has

undergone the transformation to the preternatural which is the aim,

though not necessarily and not always the achievement, of many of

his works. For this reason it is possible for some, that is, the admirers

of Shelley, like Yeats and Robert Browning, to see in his relation to

reality the very opposite to Leavis’s criticism in this regard.

All of the foregoing is not to say that an empathy with nature,

intense in its own way, does not also exist in Wordsworth’s Ode; but

there the poet’s relationship with nature is simple and direct, owing

to the distinct and separate existence of the natural and the eternal

worlds. There is no admixture of the eternal with the here and now,

except as recollection, which, according to the poem, is in childhood

sufficiently near to colour the child’s perception of the natural world,

and except as joyous consciousness of an eternal world’s assured

existence elsewhere. The “obstinate questionings” in the poem

regard the inferior nature and ephemerality of mortal existence,


doubts whose resolution points to a certainty the poet possesses and

imparts. As well, it is interesting to compare the two poems by

looking at the respective responses the two poets take away from

their deep meditations upon existence. Wordsworth takes away a

joyful personal consolation, a consolation the reader can share,

because of which the poet says “And I again am strong”. In Shelley

the possibility of joy is of a different sort, where, addressing the

Spirit the poem invokes, he says of himself “… that never joy

illumed my brow/ Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free/ This

world from its dark slavery”; while, at the poem’s conclusion,

asserting of that same Spirit that its “spells” bound him “To fear

himself, and love all human kind”. This is joy and consolation of a

more remote sort for the reader, and it is scant wonder that Leavis

called Shelley self-absorbed, and described him as being defficient

in an interest in things outside himself. Regarding these matters,

being no literary critic, I can only shake my head, and am left only

with the hope that, like Hamlet, “I can still tell a hawk from a

handsaw”. These musings should be viewed in the context of my

description of the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty as Shelley’s most

charact-eristic poem, a statement I should perhaps modify to “his

most characteristic poem when at his best”. In the end, it is only our

best that endures, while it is to be hoped that our failings and lesser

expressions, be they those of Shelley, Leavis, Wordsworth, or Keats,

find forgiveness.

The foregoing discussion of Shelley’s Hymn leads towards

another of the major sources of misunderstanding—needless to say,

there are numerous such—of him by his critics. As a prime example

of what produces this misunderstanding, one may examine a passage

from his Epipsychidion, a poem that Shelley called “an idealized

history of my life and feelings”, and on which the major influence

was Dante’s Vita Nuova. Here, the poem’s narrator addresses his

lady loves:

Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth,

This world of love, this me; and into birth

Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart

Magnetic might into its central heart; . . .

He goes on to say that as the earth’s natural forces and elements,

such as waves, winds, tides, and storms are governed by the

influence of the sun and moon, his two loves should similarly govern

his “sphere of being”, alternating their presence and power through

night and day as do their celestial counterparts, and light it through

the seasons of spring to autumn “into the Winter of the tomb”. He

then adds a third female figure to the pantheon—critics have

variously ventured to attach the identities of real persons to the

figures in the poem, but Shelley himself wrote “the Epipsychidion is

a mystery”, and that it does not deal in “real flesh & blood”—a third

figure whom he addresses as a “… Comet beautiful and fierce,/ Who

drew the heart of this frail Universe/ Towards thine own …” He


beseeches this new celestial object, which had gone astray, to “float

into our azure heaven again”, and become as the morning and the

evening star, to which is promised that

The living Sun will feed thee from its urn

Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn

In thy last smiles; adoring Even and Morn

Will worship thee with incense of calm breath

And lights and shadows; as the star of Death

And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild

Called Hope and Fear – upon the heart are piled

Their offerings, – of this sacrifice divine

A World shall be the altar.

(Op. cit., ll. 345-383.)

Now, at first glance, it is possible to see this as a monstrous

example of self-centredness, of an egregious egotism, where the

narrator presumes to appropri-ate the earth itself, indeed, to absorb

the entire universe, as nothing more than a representation of his own

self, and as the grand theatre existing but for the play of his own

thoughts and feelings. Let us then take the following passage from

his essay On Life, written about a year to a year-and-a-half before the

composition of the above-cited poem: “… the existence of distinct

individual minds similar to that which is employed in now

questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The

words, I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference sub-sisting

between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely

marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one

mind. Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the

monstrous presumption, that I, the person who now write and speak,

am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words I, and you and

they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and

totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attributed to

them.”

Looked at in this light, the above-cited passage of the poem

expresses not the concentration of all externality within the confines

of the narrator’s ego, but, quite the contrary, the subsuming of the

narrow self within the boundless external world, a boundlessness

commensurate with and coexisting with the narrator’s love, whose

effect is a divine unity of which “a world shall be the altar”.

Shelley’s central poetic doctrine is the distending of individual mind

towards the universal; his detractors have taken to interpret this as

the absorption of world into self. Thus, in these lines from his elegy

on Keats, Adonais, it would presumably be palpably absurd to infer

that he means to represent Keats’s spirit as having become or

absorbed the universe; it would be of the same absurdity to impute

the implications of a like egotism to Shelley himself when he is

engaged in writing about himself or some poetic stand-in. Here are

the lines on Keats:


He is made one with Nature: there is heard

His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;

He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

Spreading itself where’er that Power may move

Which has withdrawn his being to its own;

Which wields the world with never-wearied love,

Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear

His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there,

All new successions to the forms they wear;

Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight

To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;

And bursting in its beauty and its might

From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.

(Op. cit., ll. 370-387.)

This is the expression of a world-view which can be unsettling in its

import, and may be one of the reasons for its distorted interpretation;

in it, “The One remains, the many change and pass” (l. 460), and is

manifested as

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

That Beauty in which all things work and move,

That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love

Which through the web of being blindly wove

By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst; . . . . .

(Ibid, ll. 478-485.)

Incidentally, this elegy on Keats was not just some gratuitous

occasion for the writing of fine verse: although it is true that in

Keats’s fate and reception by the critics he saw similarities to his

own, his regard for Keats (not known to him personally) can be seen

in his Preface : “It is my intention to subjoin (to this poem) a

criticism upon the claims of its lamented object to be classed among

the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age. My

known repugnance to the narrow principles of taste on which several

of his earlier compositions were modelled prove at least that I am an

impartial judge. I consider the fragment of Hyperion as second to

nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years.” It is


to be regretted that the same candour is seldom displayed by Keats’s

partisans and Shelley’s detractors of later times, including our own.

To return to the consideration of the world-view elucidated in

Adonais, perhaps the most radical expression of it can be found in

the lyrical drama Hellas. In the following passage the Turkish

Sultan, having summoned the seer Ahasuerus to prophesy the future

prospects of his dominion, reproaches him for his apparent disdain of

worldly things, a disdain he presumes does not exempt his own

exalted person, supreme ruler of the Ottoman Empire that he is.

After some remarks concerning the place of humility and pride in the

world, Ahasuerus says,

………………… Sultan! Talk no more

Of thee and me, the Future and the Past;

But look on that which cannot change – the One,

The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,

Space, and the isles of life or light that gem

The sapphire floods of interstellar air,

This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,

With all its cressets of immortal fire,

Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably

Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them

As Calpe the Atlantic clouds – this Whole

Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,

With all the silent or tempestuous workings

By which they have been, are, or cease to be,

Is but a vision; – all that it inherits

Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;

Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less

The Future and the Past are idle shadows

Of thought’s eternal flight – they have no being:

Nought is but that which feels itself to be.

(Op. cit., ll. 762-781.), ll. 762-781.)

The Sultan responds by saying Ahasuerus’s words cast doubt upon

all things he had taken as certainties, and render everything futile.

But Ahasuerus answers that the Sultan has misconceived him, and

that “all is contained in each”, whereby all that has been or will be is

infinite in proportion to the minuteness of the present. The meaning

is not that the universe is an illusion created by individual mind, but

the reverse. I am moved to add here, regarding the above passage,

that the three lines beginning with “Whose outwall . . .” contain a

towering idea, strikingly expressed.

Having hoped to cast a somewhat different light on Shelley than

the filtered one received by the followers of Leavis, I was gratified to

see an effort that went some ways towards a partial rehabilitation, by

one of Leavis’s self-confessed adherents, Barrie Mencher, through

his articles on Mont Blanc in the October 2005 issue, and on The

Triumph of Life in the last issue (January). His examinations of the


aforementioned two poems are illuminating and stand by themselves.

I do however find it necessary to make some remarks regarding his

observations on Shelley in general. To begin with, I certainly concur

in his opinion that Leavis makes too much out of Shelley’s

narcissism, and exhibits a lack of fairness in at the same time

ignoring it where one of his favourites is concerned, D. H. Lawrence.

While also agreeing with Mr Mencher that Leavis’s “moral outrage”

occasioned by one of Shelley’s very minor poems is all out of

proportion, I would go further than the point at which he stops by

allowing that such “moral outrage” can be understood. Perhaps it can

be understood, but it is highly irresponsible in a serious literary

critic. What, after all, is Shelley’s sin that has provoked this

“outrage”? Philandering. Or, at worst, disloyalty to his wife Mary by

loving another woman (Jane Williams), a love that probably did not

progress beyond the platonic stage. Well, one can debate the

morality of this, and although I could say it has little relevance to the

totality of a writer’s literary compositions, let one acknowledge

Leavis’s view that the two should not be separated. But if that is the

case, what about, for example, Shakespeare? He hardly appears to

have been the model husband, but I note no “moral outrage” on

Leavis’s part. A good many other examples could be cited, but the

real question is where would the universally and impartially applied

judgement of writers’ worth—as opposed to the partial and selective

judgement applied to Shelley—influenced by their marital fidelity

conduct to? Does it mean that Rimbaud, tainted with considerably

more than an extra-marital fling, cannot be seen as a poet of the

highest genius? Or is it not rather that the critic, in the mind that he

brings to the judgement of a literary work, may join morality with

literature (allowing the argument in the case of the critical doctrine

of Leavis), while the poet, especially the poet of genius, by his very

nature strives in his work to transcend himself, go beyond himself,

so that the man and the poet are not the same?

As an aside to the foregoing, it is worth noting that applying the

term ‘disloyalty’ to Shelley’s behaviour may be using a rather

narrow concept for one who wrote “Love is like understanding, that

grows bright,/ Gazing on many truths …” (Epipsychidion, ll. 162-3).

It is also not without relevance to note that in numerous places in his

poetry he condemns mere sexual lust, not least because he considers

it to degrade women. For example, in The Revolt of Islam, “She told

me what a loathsome agony/ Is that when selfishness mocks love’s

delight” (Canto VII, ll. 2875-6); again, from the same poem, “And

made them slaves to soothe his vile unrest,/ And minister to lust its

joys forlorn” (Canto II, ll. 979-80).

Now, although aiming at some rehabilitation of Shelley among

the disciples of Leavis, the limited extent to which Mr Mencher is

willing to go in that direction is evinced in his considering, it would

seem, only the Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Mont Blanc, The

Triumph of Life, and (perhaps) Adonais as those among Shelley’s

compositions worthy to stand alongside those of Wordsworth and

Keats. I can think of numerous others, for which I would refer the


reader to the Appendix at the end of this article, ignoring for this

purpose the fragments and incomplete poems there also listed . As

well, his characterisations of Prometheus Unbound and Hellas as

“purely academic”, and as no more than “convenient vehicles for

Shelley’s political reformism” grossly undervalues these works.

Regarding Hellas, he views only the final chorus as deserving

consideration. Well, although I’d hold Hellas in its entirety as so

deserving, among the magnificent choruses alone, some others I

would proffer are the one at the poem’s beginning, “Breathe low,

low/ The spell of the mighty mistress now”; the chorus starting as

“Worlds on worlds are rolling ever/ From creation to decay”; and

that unrivalled depiction of a violent thunderstorm within the

semichorus beginning with “Thou voice which art/ The herald of the

ill in splendour hid”.

Mr Mencher goes on to conclude that from a reading of Leavis’s

treatment of the three poets, it is clear that Shelley’s achievement is

decidedly inferior to that of Wordsworth or Keats. Well, this may be

clear to him from a reading of Leavis, but it is not clear to me from a

reading of Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats. And, although averse to

engage in what is the literary equivalent of name-dropping, yet being

impelled to do so inasmuch as it may legitimately be asked what my

qualifications are for the former assertion, a query to which I would

be bound to respond “none”, Mr Mencher’s conclusion is also not

clear to Yeats. Here I would display the inherent prejudice of writers

against critics, in inclining towards the opinion of a great poet on

another poet, as opposed to that of a great literary critic (a

qualification I have no grounds for doubting, even though believing

him fallible in this particular case).

Mr Mencher also says that he finds much of Shelley almost

unreadable. I’m not quite sure what he means by this, but it hardly

qualifies as criticism. It tells about his taste in poetry, a taste to

which he is surely entitled. I could say that I find most of Eliot

unreadable (which I do), and most of postmodern poetry (which is

also true), but these statements also would not constitute criticism.

He complains about the unclear referents of Shelley’s pronouns. I

find that in almost all instances these referents can be made out, and

where they cannot, can be inferred; reading Shelley requires some

work, due to the rapidity of his thought process, displaying in this

once again that he is more the poets’ poet than the critics’. One

reason that Mr Mencher does advance for the to him unreadability of

much of Shelley—apart from the red herring of the unclear referents

of pronouns—is what he describes as “Miltonic solemnity of tone

allied with relative naivety of idea”. His aversion to these qualities

merely indicates that his literary taste is in large part postmodern (I

say only “in large part”, and not entirely, because if the latter were

true he would not be an adherent of the doctrines of Leavis). If

“Miltonic solemnity of tone” constituted a valid objection to reading

the literature of the past, a great deal of it could be ruled out as

suitable for our times. Back then life was a serious affair, taken

seriously, often manifested in consequential acts and expressions


upon a grand stage, rather than flippantly ironic articulations of

conditional and trivial selves in a theme park. As for what Mr

Mencher calls “relative naivety of idea”, I would rather say

“simplicity of great ideas”. This has already been touched upon in

relation to The Revolt of Islam and the Ode to Liberty. But Mr

Mencher does concede that Shelley is a much more various poet than

either Keats or Wordsworth, and for him and others with a dislike for

or seeking a foil to weightiness, a fine and at times exquisitely

crafted wit and fancy can be found in works such as The Witch of

Atlas, Letter to Maria Gisborne, The Cloud, and Peter Bell the

Third.

Although, as I believe, a great poet for all time, who ought to be

recognized as such as long as some semblance of English is still

spoken, Shelley has special significance in the postmodern culture in

which we live. At a time when the perception of the world is

collapsing into the little orbit of the self, and the reaction to that

world diminishing to expressions ever more petty, confined, and

sordid; when writing in general is characterized by either an ironic

detachment or a clinical cold-hearted objectivity; when cognition

itself manifests increasingly in a mechanistic, computer-jargon form

belonging to the tools of a human invention originally designed to

serve, and now transforming to enslave, the humanity which created

it: to these contemporary tendencies, Shelley’s poetry, in a unique

manner in ways I have attempted to describe, stands in magnificent

antithesis. His poetry at its best is infused with the sense of a much

larger, fathomless, and far more mysterious world. This sense acts as

a background against which whatever he depicts, whether natural

scenes or personal emotions, is imbued with an energy that ever

strives against its limits, and a purity and depth of thought and

feeling which can only have its source in that continuous quest for

what is beyond and larger than the moment, the immediate, and the

self. I realize that Leavis’s conclusions on Shelley are just about the

opposite. To a degree he might be right about Shelley’s lapses: for,

being human, lapses he certainly had, and his work is assuredly not

flawless. But whether these faults and lapses are as spots on the sun

which do not impair its original golden brilliance (in general, the

view of Yeats and Robert Browning), or as clouds which

occasionally may veil, but do not obscure it, or a fog through which

only at times that sun’s shafts can penetrate (Leavis’s view,

apparently), or some gradation between any of these, the reader, if

willing not to lean for a conclusion on the casuistry of a particular

critical orthodoxy, must ultimately decide through reading Shelley’s

work, something I have tried to induce those who have read this far

in this amateurish attempt at criticism to do; furthermore, this

reading of Shelley ought to be one from which, as it often is in

selections and anthologies, owing perhaps to reasons of

misunderstanding previously discussed, his best and most significant

work is not excluded. What, in my view, constitutes such I have

listed in the Appendix.

Before concluding, there are three topics I want to touch upon


briefly, two of them controversial, as, needless to say, are many

things about this poet and his work. The first of these are Shelley’s

views against religion. I’ll let Shelley speak for himself. Here is an

extract from the Preface to The Revolt of Islam, his most anti-

religious poem, apart from the juvenile Queen Mab: “The erroneous

and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being,

for instance, is spoken against, but not the Supreme Being itself. The

belief which some superstitious persons whom I have brought upon

the stage entertain of the Deity, as injurious to the character of his

benevolence, is widely different from my own.” I should add here

that Shelley’s idea of a Supreme Being was never anthropomorphic,

and gradually develops from the atheism of his youth to the idea of a

spirit which pervades the universe or is in fact the universe itself.

Now here are his views on the founder of the Christian religion, and

the later implementation of his teachings:

One came forth of gentle worth

Smiling on the sanguine earth;

His words outlived him, like swift poison

Withering up truth, peace, and pity.

Look! where round the wide horizon

Many a million-peopled city

Vomits smoke in the bright air.

Hark that outcry of despair!

’Tis his mild and gentle ghost

Wailing for the faith he kindled:

Look again, the flames almost

To a glow-worm’s lamp have dwindled . . .

(Prometheus Unbound, Act I, ll. 546-557.)

This brings me to the second topic, his Prometheus Unbound,

considered by most of his admirers as his greatest work, and by his

detractors as an idle daydream with little grounding in reality. As

stated earlier in this essay, Act I is a metaphor for reality, for the

world as it is. The rest of the poem develops to what the world might

become, presupposing a radical change in human nature. Those who

call this work an idle daydream would be of the view that human

nature cannot so change, and unfortunately they are probably right.

The poem presents the problem and the possibility, and it is in this

context, not in that of prophecy or fatuous hope, that the work should

be considered.

The third subject for brief mention here is his last poem, The

Triumph of Life. To the valuable points made by Mr Mencher in the

last issue, I just have a few of my own remarks to add. I would agree

with him that this could be viewed as his best poem, differing only in

holding Prometheus Unbound to be on about the same level. But

how different these two poems are—or are they? Although a span of

less than three years separates their composition, the ironically titled

The Triumph of Life might almost be taken as a retraction of


Prometheus Unbound. And yet it is perhaps not so different from the

first Act of the latter. A hauntingly enigmatic poem, not quite

finished, the revolving and repeating cycles central to its theme are

replicated in the structure of the poem itself, and the mysterious

second part, beginning with line 308, “…. Now listen: – In the April

prime”, seems to repeat the first part of the poem, but upon other and

deeper levels. The poem does not provide an answer to its central

question, “what is life?”, and it is with that very question that it ends.

Although Shelley ought not to have been aware of his impending

death, as it was accidental, he could have written here, at the end of

his life, a no more fitting poem.

Nicholas Somlo

APPENDIX: SHELLEY’S WORKS: A SELECTION

What follows here is a listing of what I consider his best and better

poems. These are not all great poems by any means, and certainly

they are not all free of faults; but all, I believe, are worthy of a great

poet. Included as well are fragments and incomplete poems (noted as

such), in cases where I think they contain at least something worth

retaining. I have listed the poems by year of composition, and have

used (as is the case throughout this essay) Mary Shelley’s

posthumous edition of her husband’s poems of 1824, and her 1839

edition of the Collected Poems. Long poems—I have used Mrs.

Shelley’s classification of what constitutes such—are in capitals.

Before 1815 None. Queen Mab is rightly relegated to Shelley’s juvenilia, as

deemed by Shelley himself, except for his later rehandling of a part

of it as a fragment titled The Daemon of the World.

1815 ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE

Mutability (This is actually much superior to the poem of the same

title written in 1821.)

On Death (The revision of an earlier version written before 1815.)

A Summer Evening Churchyard

1816 The Sunset

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

Mont Blanc

1817 THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, Cantos I-V, VII-IX

PRINCE ATHANASE. A FRAGMENT


Lines: “That time is dead for ever”

Ozymandias

1818 JULIAN AND MADDALO. A CONVERSATION

To the Nile

The Past

Lines written among the Euganean Hills

Invocation to Misery

Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples

Sonnet: “Lift not the painted veil”

The Woodman and the Nightingale (Incomplete.)

Marenghi (Incomplete.)

Apostrophe to Silence (Fragment.)

1819 PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. A LYRICAL DRAMA

Ode to Heaven

Ode to the West Wind

An Exhortation

On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci

The Birth of Pleasure

THE MASK OF ANARCHY (I cite it here not for being poetry of a

high order, but as the best example of his popular political verse.)

PETER BELL THE THIRD (Again, cited here not for being high

poetry, but for containing some fine satirical verse, chiefly from Part

the Third onward.)

Wedded Souls (Fragment.)

“Is it that in some brighter sphere” (Fragment.)

A Tale Untold (Fragment.)

1820 LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE

THE WITCH OF ATLAS

The Sensitive Plant

A Vision of the Sea

The Cloud

To a Skylark

Ode to Liberty

Arethusa

Hymn of Apollo

The Question

The Two Spirits: An Allegory

Ode to Naples

Autumn: A Dirge

Liberty

The Tower of Famine

An Allegory: “A Portal as of shadowy adamant”

The World’s Wanderers

Sonnet: “Ye hasten to the grave!”


Orpheus (Incomplete.)

Death (Line missing.)

To the Moon (Fragment.)

1821 EPIPSYCHIDION

ADONAIS

HELLAS. A LYRICAL DRAMA

Dirge for the Year

To Night

Time

Song: “Rarely, rarely, comest thou”

Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon

Sonnet: Political Greatness

Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear

Ginevra

The Boat on the Serchio (Incomplete.)

Three Fragments written for Hellas

To-morrow (Fragment.)

“When soft winds and sunny skies” (Fragment.)

“O thou immortal deity” (Fragment.)

1822 To Jane: The Invitation

To Jane: The Recollection

With a Guitar, to Jane

To Jane: “The keen stars were twinkling”

THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE (Some lines missing.)

The Zucca (Incomplete.)

The Isle (Fragment.)

PLAYS

The Cenci (1819)

Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (1822)

PROSE WORKS On Love (1818)

On Life (1819)

A Defense of Poetry (1821)

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An Appreciation of Shelley in the Postmodern Ageand now among literary critics, but Shelley. He went...

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