Shelley

Michael O'Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317896357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Attacked by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis, Shelley's poetry has, over the last few decades, enjoyed a revival of critical interest. His radical politics and arrestingly original poetic strategies have been studied from a variety of perspectives - formalist, deconstructionist, new historicist, feminist and others. Of all the Romantics, Shelly has benefited most from the so-called 'theoretical revolution', as is borne out by the wide range of recent critical work represented in this volume. The 134 essays selected analyse many of Shelley's finest poems, including Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and The Triumph of Life. Michael O'Neill's informed Introduction explores the contours of this debate. Detailed headnotes to the individual essays, explanations of difficult terms, and a further reading section provide invaluable guides to the reader. This collection illuminates the enduring and contemporary significance of the work of a major poet.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315844930-1

To write this Introduction in 1992, the bicentenary of Shelley’s birth, is to be aware of the resurgence of interest in his poetry over the last thirty years or so. The belated establishment of sound texts – or, on occasions, the clarification of how difficult it is to establish a reliable text for a work by Shelley – is both symptom and cause of this upturn in the poet’s reputation. The high regard in which Shelley’s poetry is held also reflects its responsiveness to theoretical approaches now in favour. But contemporary literary theory problematises even as it explains or vindicates Shelley’s poetry. The editing referred to above has adhered to traditional scholarly norms, yet it has been put to unconventional use by some critics. For instance, in The Supplement of Reading (1990) Tilottama Rajan claims that the editorial production of a reading text of The Triumph of Life has only ever been achieved by choosing between alternatives left uncancelled in the manuscript, and contends that ‘The manuscript… encourages us to read the poem as a palimpsest of traces, as the site of its own constant displacement.’¹ Again, attacks on the very notion of a ‘canon’ call into question the assumption that the poetry’s ‘greatness’ has been established once and for all. It is probable that Shelley’s work will continue to be the site of battles over value.

Such is a reasonable surmise, given the history of the poetry’s reception. It is a striking fact that the most famous literary critics writing in English during and since Shelley’s lifetime – William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and F.R. Leavis – have expressed strong reservations about the success and significance of his poetry. Hazlitt’s review of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems tilts at the poet’s utopianism and his style, the latter said to be ‘a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging in love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature’. Hazlitt allows for the poet’s right to a certain imaginative autonomy, but seeks, ultimately, to tether the imagination’s creations to ‘existing materials’: ‘Poetry, we grant, creates a world of its own; but it creates it out of existing materials.’ Shelley transgresses this referential obligation since, for Hazlitt, ‘Mr Shelley is the maker of his own poetry – out of nothing.’ A staunch liberal, Hazlitt would seem to be a natural ally of the politically radical Shelley, but, in fact, Hazlitt bore the poet a special grudge for bringing radical ideas into disrepute through the extremeness with which he espoused them. Hazlitt blames Shelley for giving ‘great encouragement to those who believe in all received absurdities, and are wedded to all existing abuses’, and he detects in the poetry a perversely heterodox rejection of ‘the probable or the true’: ‘Epithets are applied, because they do not fit: subjects are chosen, because they are repulsive: the colours of his style, for their gaudy, changeful, startling effect, resemble the display of fire-works in the dark, and, like them, have neither durability, nor keeping, nor discriminate form.’

Subsequent accounts of the poetry can often be seen as taking Hazlitt’s remarks as their point of departure, even if they come to different conclusions about the poetry’s value. For example, post-structuralist criticism, with its view that meaning and the truth-claims of any thought-system are unstable, relishes the elusiveness which stings Hazlitt into asserting, ‘Instead of giving a language to thought, or lending the heart a tongue, he utters dark sayings, and deals in allegories and riddles.’² For the critic influenced by Jacques Derrida, Hazlitt’s approval of ‘giving a language to thought’ is an example of ‘logocentrism’, that tendency discerned by Derrida in Western thinking to seek a centre or ground on which to base meaning. Indeed, much contemporary criticism of Shelley has brought out the degree to which the poet is beforehand with his critics. Rajan argues that A Defence of Poetry ‘contains the seeds of a deconstructive theory of language’ as well as encouraging a reading which ‘renews the originality of the text by liberating it from the tyranny of the original intention behind it’.³ Questions which absorb the modern critic intrigued and often vexed the Romantic poet. What is the relationship between language and thought, author and text, text and reader, poet and society? What is the nature of personal identity? What is the relationship between the aesthetic and the political? What are the ideological implications of the pursuit of desire so frequently narrated by the poems? Moreover, it is wrong to think of ‘contemporary literary theory’ as springing into being out of nothing; much of the finest contemporary criticism of Shelley still engages in fruitful dialogue with criticism written before the ‘theoretical revolution’ which has overtaken literary studies in the last few decades. In what follows, therefore, I map briefly the critical response to Shelley in the ‘pre-theory’ part of the century, before going on to discuss more recent theoretical accounts of the poetry.

New Criticism, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis

First of all, however, a brief digression on the phrase, ‘pre-theory’, which I have just used. In one sense, ‘pre-theory’ is a myth; as theorists never tire of asserting, all critical responses betray or are enabled by theoretical assumptions, unacknowledged or proclaimed. But in another sense, it suggests that the relation between general notions about literature and analysis of specific works has altered over the course of the century. Empsonian ‘ambiguity’, for example, seems less a theory than a device, a means of shedding light on the workings of particular poems. Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) is the work of a critic committed to the view that there is such a thing as good poetry and that verbal analysis involves the attempt to reason about effects created by poets using language in subtle and complex ways. By contrast, the user of contemporary theory is often dangerously tempted to regard the particular text as illustrating an all-embracing idea (such as the concept that meanings are ultimately indeterminate). One criterion I have employed in selecting pieces for the present volume is that they should apply theory to Shelley’s poems in a flexible and discriminating spirit, and leave the reader with a sense of the poetry’s distinctiveness and richness.

Underpinning much current Shelleyan criticism is the view that the poet suffered unfairly at the hands of ideologically conservative opinion-formers in the period between the Great War and circa 1950; any narrative of contemporary criticism of Shelley must address the slighting treatment he received then, especially at the hands of T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, and the so-called New Critics. The New Critics developed a series of implicit and explicit criteria for reading and evaluating poetry, including the following: the proper matter for a critic of poetry is ‘the words on the page’, somehow isolated from their historical context, their emotional impact on the reader, and their author’s intention; the language and structure of achieved poems fuse opposing meanings into unified wholes; coherence and complexity are equally hallmarks of a successful poem; the meaning and form of a poem are inextricable; and, therefore, although (or because) a poem orders its language to mean uniquely what it means, this meaning cannot be paraphrased. Two things about the criticism of Shelley produced by the New Critics and their fellow-travellers strike the reader. The first is its disregard for the range of Shelley’s achievement. T.S. Eliot, admittedly, was one of the early admirers of The Triumph of Life, praised for ‘a precision of image and an economy … that is new to Shelley’. Yet a note dismisses The Witch of Atlas as ‘a trifle’, albeit one with ‘charm’, a judgement that ignores the poem’s sophistication and power. The second is the fact that Shelley’s language, though bearing the brunt of adverse comment, is never read with the attention to nuance which characterises the best work of the New Critics (and of Eliot and Leavis); rather, the reader is aware of a nitpicking hostility which does nothing for Shelley and little for the critics themselves. A sense of wasted opportunity hangs about the affair; Shelley’s verbal art could have lent itself to the methods of these critics more easily than they allowed themselves to see.

But critics of the order of Eliot, Allen Tate, and Leavis inevitably raised significant points in writing about Shelley, even if their evaluative conclusions were narrow-minded. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot addresses an issue which remains of great importance: that is, is it possible to separate a poet’s poetry from his beliefs? Eliot feels that it is not possible. Since he dislikes Shelley’s ideas (which he does not trouble to define) he concludes that it is impossible for him to enjoy the poetry; the bad ideas infect the language, as is shown by ‘the catchwords of creeds outworn, tyrants and priests, which Shelley employed with such reiteration’.⁴ It is self-evident to Eliot that the use of such catchwords made for indifferent writing. Even though there have been excellent studies of the effects achieved by the use of recurrent words and images, Shelley’s later champions have tended to bypass such criticism; the tendency has been less to pause over local effects in an evaluative spirit than to focus on larger contexts informing and led on to by particular textual moments.

Two demolition-jobs on Shelley’s poetry were supplied by Allen Tate (in Reason in Madness, 1941) and F.R. Leavis (in Revaluation, 1936). Tate focused on the late lyric, ‘When the lamp is shattered’; the nature of his criticisms can be gauged by looking at his account of the final stanza. Here Tate objects to the way the opening line supplies us with ‘an abstraction that will relieve us of the trouble of examining the particular instances’.⁵ Tate does not read the poem with care, but his muddling attempts to define muddle bear witness to a sense, shared by Shelley’s admirers and detractors alike, that the poet’s use of figurative language is idiosyncratically mobile. Frederick A. Pottle, whose essay ‘The Case of Shelley’ (1960) seeks to defend Shelley against the New Critical attack, points out that Tate’s sense that there is ‘confusion’ in the final stanza of ‘When the lamp was shattered’ derives from an implicit rule ‘that there shall never be any crossing-over of tenor into vehicle’; he goes on to concede that ‘Shelley constantly flashes back and forth between tenor and vehicle’, but says that ‘such practice is not carelessness but a brilliant extension of poetic possibilities’.⁶ (Pottle is making use of the distinction proposed by I. A. Richards between the ‘tenor’ of a metaphor, that is, the subject to which the metaphor is applied, and the ‘vehicle’ of a metaphor, that is, the figurative expression being applied.) Foreshadowed here is the post-structuralist’s obsession with instability, though for Pottle Shelley’s methods make possible a more intense poetic experience of meaning.

F.R. Leavis consigned Shelley to the B-team of literary history, arguing that the poetry’s intensity was a cheap thrill, the product of the poet’s ‘surrendering to a kind of hypnotic rote of favourite images, associations, and words’. Leavis’s case against Shelley grows out of his dislike of the affective workings of the poetry. This should not be confused with a priori anti-Romanticism. Wordsworth, on Leavis’s account, ‘seems always to be presenting an object (wherever this may belong) and the emotion seems to derive from what is being presented’. By contrast, ‘Shelley … offers the emotion in itself, unattached, in the void.’ He does this ‘at his best and worst’, but the hint of concession in ‘best’ is rhetorical. Shelley’s procedures, for Leavis, are, for the most part, reprehensible. One uses the word advisedly since Leavis’s assault on Shelley prides itself on involving ‘moral judgements’; so the poet’s fondness for certain words, such as ‘corpse’ and ‘phantom’, is illustrative of ‘viciousness and corruption’. The whole performance still has power to provoke thought and simply to provoke. Undoubtedly Leavis is made queasy by the Utopian aspirations of Shelley’s poetry; the author of Prometheus Unbound may be ‘unmistakably a distinguished poet’, yet ‘the elusive imagery, the high-pitched emotions, the tone and movement, the ardours, ecstasies, and despairs, are too much the same all through’. This has the unjust brilliance of a brutal caricature. For Leavis, Shelley’s language delivers less than it seems to offer and fails to repay the attention its elusiveness demands, even as the rhythmic movement of the writing seeks to take our minds off ‘any inconvenient degree of realization’. Leavis’s account of Shelley’s language is one which, as description, many of Shelley’s post-structuralist admirers might, with some modification, be happy to share; where they differ is in not seeing Shelley’s ‘confused generations and perspectives’⁷ as blameworthy.

After New Criticism: Bloom, Wasserman, and others

Prior to discussing post-structuralist and other recent theoretical approaches to the poetry, I shall explore the work of a number of critics who sought to defend and clarify the nature and value of Shelley’s writing. Drawing on Martin Buber’s distinction between two primary words, ‘I–Thou’ and ‘I–It’, the former establishing an imaginative world of relation between human beings and reality, the latter evoking a world of experience and separation, and ‘looting the work of the Frankforts [on mythic imagery] for [his] own purposes’, Harold Bloom in Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959) treats Shelley as a ‘mythopoeic [mythmaking] poet’.⁸ Bloom valuably insists on the visionary drama enacted in Shelley’s poetry, and though he has been criticised for an over-dogmatic application of Buber’s ideas,⁹ he answers New Critical objections to Shelley with vigour and force. Bloom has no time for the New Critical shibboleth that images should always be apprehensible by the senses; hence his analysis of the ‘Life of Life’ lyric in Prometheus Unbound demonstrates that the lines are not intent on ‘sending [the reader] to the sketching board’. In his fine chapter on The Witch of Atlas, which he describes as ‘the supreme example of mythmaking poetry in English’, Bloom tackles the crucial issue of ‘reality’. Whereas Leavis and others had alleged that Shelley evades the ‘real’, Bloom retorts that in Shelley’s poetry the ‘quest toward confrontation seeks a relationship at the cost of commonplace observation’, and that the crucial question is ‘“whose reality?” and the answer is forever disputable’. At the same time, Bloom cannily points out that, even judged by central New Critical premises, Shelley comes off well; his poetry is often ‘built on ironic foundations that can withstand contemporary criticism’. Moreover, Bloom appeals to the quintessentially New Critical notion of the ‘achieved’ poem. The presence invoked by Shelley in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ has a ‘reality’ which is ‘in the poem’ and ‘achieved there’; therefore ‘no faith need be asked of the most sceptical reader, if he will but read and not preconceive’. Shelley’s Mythmaking goes some way towards fulfilling hints dropped in essays by Yeats as to how Shelley might be read; so Bloom declar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Shelley
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Timothy Clark Destructive Creativity: Alastor (1815)
• 3 Frances Ferguson Shelley's Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said
• 4 Kelvin Everest Shelley's Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo
• 5 Jerrold E. Hogle Unchaining Mythography: Prometheus Unbound
• 6 Isobel Armstrong Shelley's Perplexity [Prometheus Unbound]
• 7 William A. Ulmer The Politics of Reception [The Cenci]
• 8 Stephen C. Behrendt The Exoteric Political Poems
• 9 Ronald Tetreault The Dramatic Lyric ['Ode to the West Wind']
• 10 Stuart M. Sperry Love's Universe: Epipsychidion
• 11 Peter Sacks Last Clouds: A Reading of 'Adonais'
• 12 William Keach Shelley's Last Lyrics
• 13 J. Hillis Miller Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life'
• 14 Tilottama Rajan Idealism and Skepticism in Shelley's Poetry [The Triumph of Life and Alastor]
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index