tradition, has been dead for more than a hundred and forty years, and critics have abounded, from his own day to ours, to insist that his poetry died with him. Until recently, it was fashionable to apologize for Shelley’s poetry, if one liked it at all. Each reader of poetry, however vain, can speak only for himself, and there will be only description and praise in this introduction, for after many years of reading Shelley’s poems, I find nothing in them that needs apology. Shelley is a unique poet, one of the most original in the language, and he is in many ways the poet proper, as much so as any in the language. His poetry is autonomous, finely wrought, in the highest degree imaginative, and has the spiritual form of vision stripped of all veils and ideological coverings, the vision many readers justly seek in poetry, despite the admonitions of a multitude of churchwardenly critics.
The essential Shelley is so fine a poet that one can feel absurd in urg-ing his claims upon a reader:
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(1792–1822)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
POETS AND POEMS
I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself and knows itself divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse, All prophecy, all medicine is mine, All light of art or nature—to my song Victory and praise in its own right belong.
That is Apollo singing, in the “Hymn” that Shelley had the sublime audacity to write for him, with the realization that, like Keats, he was a rebirth of Apollo. When, in The Triumph of Life, Rousseau serves as Virgil to Shelley’s Dante, he is made to speak lines as brilliantly and bitterly con-densed as poetry in English affords:
And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit Had been with purer nutriment supplied,
Corruption would not now thus much inherit Of what was once Rousseau—nor this disguise Stain that which ought to have disdained to wear it.
The urbane lyricism of the “Hymn of Apollo,” and the harshly self-conscious, internalized dramatic quality of The Triumph of Life are both central to Shelley. Most central is the prophetic intensity; as much a result of displaced Protestantism as it is in Blake or in Wordsworth, but seeming more an Orphic than Hebraic phenomenon when it appears in Shelley.
Religious poet as he primarily was, what Shelley prophesied was one restored Man who transcended men, gods, the natural world, and even the poetic faculty. Shelley chants the apotheosis, not of the poet, but of desire itself.
Man, oh, not men! a chain of linked thought, Of love and might to be divided not,
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the sun rules, even with a tyrant’s gaze, The unquiet republic of the maze
Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven’s free wilderness.
Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, Whose nature is its own divine control, Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea ...
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The rhapsodic intensity, the cumulative drive and yet firm control of those last three lines in particular, as the high song of humanistic celebra-tion approaches its goal—that seems to me what is crucial in Shelley, and its presence throughout much of his work constitutes his special excellence as a poet.
Lyrical poetry at its most intense frequently moves toward direct address between one human consciousness and another, in which the “I”
of the poet directly invokes the personal “Thou” of the reader. Shelley is an intense lyricist as Alexander Pope is an intense satirist; even as Pope assimilates every literary form he touches to satire, so Shelley converts forms as diverse as drama, prose essay, romance, satire, epyllion, into lyric.
To an extent he himself scarcely realized, Shelley’s genius desired a trans-formation of all experience, natural and literary, into the condition of lyric.
More than all other poets, Shelley’s compulsion is to present life as a direct confrontation of equal realities. This compulsion seeks absolute intensity, and courts straining and breaking in consequence. When expressed as love, it must manifest itself as mutual destruction:
In one another’s substance finding food, Like flames too pure and light and unimbued To nourish their bright lives with baser prey, Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality, And one annihilation.
Shelley is the poet of these flames, and he is equally the poet of a par-ticular shadow, which falls perpetually between all such flames, a shadow of ruin that tracks every imaginative flight of fire:
O, Thou, who plumed with strong desire Wouldst float above the earth, beware!
A Shadow tracks thy flight of fire—
Night is coming!
By the time Shelley had reached his final phase, of which the great monuments are Adonais and The Triumph of Life, he had become altogeth-er the poet of this shadow of ruin, and had ceased to celebrate the possi-bilities of imaginative relationship. In giving himself, at last, over to the dark side of his own vision, he resolved (or perhaps merely evaded, judg-ment being so difficult here) a conflict within his self and poetry that had been present from the start. Though it has become a commonplace of
recent criticism and scholarship to affirm otherwise, I do not think that Shelley changed very much, as a poet, during the last (and most important) six years of his life, from the summer of 1816 until the summer of 1822.
The two poems of self-discovery, of mature poetic incarnation, written in 1816, “Mont Blanc” and the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” reveal the two contrary aspects of Shelley’s vision that his entire sequence of major poems reveals. The head and the heart, each totally honest in encountering real-ity, yield rival reports as to the name and nature of reality. The head, in
“Mont Blanc,” learns, like Blake, that there is no natural religion. There is a Power, a secret strength of things, but it hides its true shape or its shape-lessness behind or beneath a dread mountain, and it shows itself only as an indifference, or even pragmatically a malevolence, towards the well-being of men. But the Power speaks forth, through a poet’s act of confrontation with it which is the very act of writing his poem, and the Power, rightly interpreted, can be used to repeal the large code of fraud, institutional and historical Christianity, and the equally massive code of woe, the laws of the nation-states of Europe in the age of Castlereagh and Metternich. In the
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” a very different Power is invoked, but with a deliberate and even austere tenuousness. A shadow, itself invisible, of an unseen Power, sweeps through our dull dense world, momentarily awak-ening both nature and man to a sense of love and beauty, a sense just beyond the normal range of apprehension. But the shadow departs, for all its benevolence, and despite the poet’s prayers for its more habitual sway.
The heart’s responses have not failed, but the shadow that is antithetically a radiance will not come to stay. The mind, searching for what would suf-fice, encountered an icy remoteness, but dared to affirm the triumph of its imaginings over the solitude and vacancy of an inadvertent nature. The emotions, visited by delight, felt the desolation of powerlessness, but dared to hope for a fuller visitation. Both odes suffer from the evident straining of their creator to reach a finality, but both survive in their creator’s tough honesty and gathering sense of form.
“Mont Blanc” is a poem of the age of Shelley’s father-in-law, William Godwin, while the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” belongs to the age of Wordsworth, Shelley’s lost leader in the realms of emotion. Godwin became a kind of lost leader for Shelley also, but less on the intellectual than on the personal level. The scholarly criticism of Shelley is full of sand traps, and one of the deepest is the prevalent notion that Shelley under-went an intellectual metamorphosis from being the disciple of Godwin and the French philosophical materialists to being a Platonist or Neoplatonist, an all but mystical idealist. The man Shelley may have undergone such a transformation, though the evidence for it is equivocal; the poet Shelley
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did not. He started as a split being, and ended as one, but his awareness of the division in his consciousness grew deeper, and produced finally the infernal vision of The Triumph of Life.
II
But even supposing that a man should raise a dead body to life before our eyes, and on this fact rest his claim to being considered the son of God; the Humane Society restores drowned persons, and because it makes no mystery of the method it employs, its members are not mis-taken for the sons of God. All that we have a right to infer from our ignorance of the cause of any event is that we do not know it ...
(Shelley, Notes On Queen Mab)
The deepest characteristic of Shelley’s poetic mind is its skepticism.
Shelley’s intellectual agnosticism was more fundamental than either his troubled materialism or his desperate idealism. Had the poet turned his doubt against all entities but his own poetry, while sparing that, he would have anticipated certain later developments in the history of literature, but his own work would have lost one of its most precious qualities, a unique sensitivity to its own limitations. This sensitivity can be traced from the very beginnings of Shelley’s mature style, and may indeed have made pos-sible the achievement of that style.
Shelley was anything but a born poet, as even a brief glance at his apprentice work will demonstrate. Blake at fourteen was a great lyric poet;
Shelley at twenty-two was still a bad one. He found himself, as a stylist, in the autumn of 1815, when he composed the astonishing Alastor, a blank verse rhapsodic narrative of a destructive and subjective quest. Alastor, though it has been out of fashion for a long time, is nevertheless a great and appalling work, at once a dead end and a prophecy that Shelley final-ly could not evade.
Shelley’s starting point as a serious poet was Wordsworth, and Alastor is a stepchild of The Excursion, a poem frigid in itself, but pro-foundly influential, if only antithetically, on Shelley, Byron, Keats, and many later poets. The figure of the Solitary, in The Excursion, is the central instance of the most fundamental of Romantic archetypes, the man alienated from others and himself by excessive self-consciousness.
Whatever its poetic lapses, The Excursion is our most extensive state-ment of the Romantic mythology of the Self, and the young Shelley quarried in it for imaginatively inescapable reasons, as Byron and Keats did also. Though the poet-hero of Alastor is not precisely an
innocent sufferer, he shares the torment of Wordsworth’s Solitary, and like him:
sees
Too clearly; feels too vividly; and longs To realize the vision, with intense
And over-constant yearning—there—there lies The excess, by which the balance is destroyed.
Alastor, whatever Shelley’s intentions, is primarily a poem about the destructive power of the imagination. For Shelley, every increase in imag-ination ought to have been an increase in hope, but generally the strength of imagination in Shelley fosters an answering strength of despair. In the spring of 1815 Shelley, on mistaken medical advice, confidently expected a rapid death of consumption. By autumn this expectation was put by, but the recent imagining of his own death lingers on in Alastor, which on one level is the poet’s elegy for himself.
Most critical accounts of Alastor concern themselves with the appar-ent problem of disparities between the poem’s eloquappar-ent Preface and the poem itself, but I cannot see that such disparities exist. The poem is an extremely subtle internalization of the quest-theme of romance, and the price demanded for the internalization is first, the death-in-life of what Yeats called “enforced self-realization,” and at last, death itself. The Alastor or avenging daemon of the title is the dark double of the poet-hero, the spirit of solitude that shadows him even as he quests after his emanative portion, the soul out of his soul that Shelley later called the epipsyche.
Shelley’s poet longs to realize a vision, and this intense and overconstant yearning destroys natural existence, for nature cannot contain the infinite energy demanded by the vision. Wordsworthian nature, and not the poet-hero, is the equivocal element in Alastor, the problem the reader needs to, but cannot, resolve. For this nature is a mirror-world, like that in Blake’s
“The Crystal Cabinet,” or in much of Keats’s Endymion. Its pyramids and domes are sepulchers for the imagination, and all its appearances are illu-sive, phantasmagoric, and serve only to thwart the poet’s vision, and drive him on more fearfully upon his doomed and self-destructive quest. Alastor prophesies The Triumph of Life, and in the mocking light of the later poem the earlier work appears also to have been a dance of death.
The summer of 1816, with its wonderful products, “Mont Blanc” and the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” was for Shelley, as I have indicated, a rediscovery of the poetic self, a way out of the impasse of Alastor. The rev-olutionary epic, first called Laon and Cyntha, and then The Revolt of Islam,
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was Shelley’s first major attempt to give his newly directed energies ade-quate scope, but the attempt proved abortive, and the poem’s main dis-tinction is that it is Shelley’s longest. Shelley’s gifts were neither for narra-tive nor for straightforward allegory, and the terza rima fragment, Prince Athanase, written late in 1817, a few months after The Revolt of Islam was finished, shows the poet back upon his true way, the study of the isolated imagination. Whatever the dangers of the subjective mode of Alastor, it remained always Shelley’s genuine center, and his finest poems were to emerge from it. Prince Athanase is only a fragment, or fragments, but its first part at least retains something of the power for us that it held for the young Browning and the young Yeats. Athanase, from a Peacockian per-spective, is quite like the delightfully absurd Scythrop of Nightmare Abbey, but if we will grant him his mask’s validity we do find in him one of the archetypes of the imagination, the introspective, prematurely old poet, turning his vision outward to the world from his lonely tower of medita-tion:
His soul had wedded Wisdom, and her dower Is love and justice, clothed in which he sate Apart from men, as in a lonely tower, Pitying the tumult of their dark estate.
There is a touch of Byron’s Manfred, and of Byron himself, in Athanase, and Byron is the dominant element in Shelley’s next enduring poem, the conversational Julian and Maddalo, composed in Italy in the autumn of 1818, after the poets had been reunited. The middle portion of Julian and Maddalo, probably based upon legends of Tasso’s madness, is an excrescence, but the earlier part of the poem, and its closing lines, intro-duce another Shelley, a master of the urbane, middle style, the poet of the
“Letter to Maria Gisborne,” the “Hymn to Mercury,” of parts of The Witch of Atlas and The Sensitive Plant, and of such beautifully controlled love lyrics as “To Jane: The Invitation” and “Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici.” Donald Davie, who as a critic is essentially an anti-Shelleyan of the school of Dr. Leavis, and is himself a poet in a mode antithetical to Shelley’s, has written an impressive tribute to Shelley’s achievement as a master of the urbane style. What I find most remarkable in this mastery is that Shelley carried it over into his major achievement, the great lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound, a work written almost entirely in the high style, on the precarious level of the sublime, where urbanity traditionally has no place. The astonishingly original tone of Prometheus Unbound is not
always successfully maintained, but for the most part it is, and one aspect of its triumph is that critics should find it so difficult a tone to character-ize. The urbane conversationalist, the relentlessly direct and emotionally uninhibited lyricist, and the elevated prophet of a great age to come join together in the poet of Prometheus Unbound, a climactic work which is at once celebratory and ironic, profoundly idealistic and as profoundly skep-tical, passionately knowing its truths and as passionately agnostic towards all truth. More than any other of Shelley’s poems, Prometheus Unbound has been viewed as self-contradictory or at least as containing unresolved men-tal conflicts, so that a consideration of Shelley’s ideology may be appropri-ate prior to a discussion of the poem.
The clue to the apparent contradictions in Shelley’s thought is his profound skepticism, which has been ably expounded by C.E. Pulos in his study, The Deep Truth. There the poet’s eclecticism is seen as centering on the point “where his empiricism terminates and his idealism begins.” This point is the skeptic’s position, and is where Shelley judged Montaigne, Hume, and his own older contemporary, the metaphysician Sir William Drummond, to have stood. From this position, Shelley was able to reject both the French materialistic philosophy he had embraced in his youth and the Christianity that he had never ceased to call a despotism. Yet the skep-tic’s position, though it powerfully organized Shelley’s revolutionary polemicism, gave no personal comfort, but took the poet to what he him-self called “the verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know.” That abyss is Demogorgon’s, in Prometheus Unbound, and its secrets are not revealed by him, for “a voice is wanting, the deep truth is imageless,” and Demogorgon is a shapeless darkness. Yeats, sensing the imminence of his apocalypse, sees a vast image, a beast advancing before the gathering dark-ness. Shelley senses the great change that the Revolution has heralded, but confronts as apocalyptic harbinger only a fabulous and formless darkness, the only honest vision available to even the most apocalyptic of skeptics.
Shelley is the most Humean poet in the language, oddly as his tempera-ment accords with Hume’s, and it is Hume, not Berkeley or Plato, whose view of reality informs Prometheus Unbound and the poems that came after it. Even Necessity, the dread and supposedly Godwinian governing demon of Shelley’s early Queen Mab, is more of a Humean than a Holbachian
Shelley is the most Humean poet in the language, oddly as his tempera-ment accords with Hume’s, and it is Hume, not Berkeley or Plato, whose view of reality informs Prometheus Unbound and the poems that came after it. Even Necessity, the dread and supposedly Godwinian governing demon of Shelley’s early Queen Mab, is more of a Humean than a Holbachian