Towards an “Aesthetics of Weather”: Gustaf Fröding and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

ABSTRACT

In spring 1892 the Stockholm literary magazine Ord och bild commissioned Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding (1860–1911) with a translation of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816). At the time, Fröding was an accomplished poet and an experienced translator of Romantic poetry from English, German, and French. However, Fröding lamented in a letter to his editor that in “Hymn” he had encountered an unexpected problem with rendering Shelley’s poetry of meteorological form into Swedish. This is peculiar as Fröding’s own poetic compositions, original and translations alike, are deeply preoccupied with meteorology. Taking its outset in Fröding’s struggle with the translation, this essay investigates weather in “Hymn,” arguing that what had puzzled Fröding was a mode of meteorological representation idiosyncratic to Shelley. The essay suggests that it is precisely through these idiosyncratic meteorological representations that Shelley develops discourses of French materialist and British skeptical and empirical philosophy. This development culminates in an “aesthetics of weather,” expressive of Shelley’s radical conceptions of the social and physical world. The essay concludes that Fröding’s pronounced struggle and the variation in semantic content of his version of the poem reveal what is really the meteorologically precise poetic form of an aesthetics of weather in “Hymn.”

Notes

1 All translations from Swedish are mine, unless otherwise indicated. This letter correspondence is also discussed in Sven Rinman’s 1942 article on the history of Ord och bild.

2 For example, such Chamissonian storm tropes appear in Fröding’s later poem, “Frågande svar och obesvarade frågor om ondt och godt” ‘Inquiring answers and unanswered questions about evil and good’ (1898), as well as in his more contemporary, “Uppror” ‘Rebellion’ (1892).

3 For further discussion of Fröding’s financial reasons for publishing his work, see Nordmark, Förvandlingar (ch. 1).

4 Fröding also found it particularly difficult to render Shelley’s title in Swedish, asking if his editor or Lindgren might aid him in his endeavor (see Brev 2 200). For a discussion of the title of “Hymn,” see Rosenthal.

5 The manuscript of Fröding’s “Hymn” is in the Mörner-Fröding Collection at Örebro University Library. The manuscript is a fair copy with very few emendations. For an account of the emendations concerning the published versions, see Fröding, Samlade Skrifter 224–25.

6 The OED cites Baumgarten’s definition of “aesthetics” as directly derived from the Greek origin, but Latinized as a noun designating a philosophy of the senses, extended to the meaning of “criticism of good taste.” This meaning was adopted into German and other European languages. In early-nineteenth-century British discourse, it was especially novel in its adjectival uses. Coleridge, as one of the first to employ the term as an adjective in English, felt compelled to explain in a footnote to one of his 1821 Blackwood’s articles that it could be adopted like “no other usable adjective, to express that coincidence of form, feeling, and the intellect” (234; original italics).

7 As testament to Fröding’s skill in composing verse, we find in his letters the less common story that he had in fact been sought out by one of Sweden’s most well-reputed publishers at the time, Albert Bonnier, and asked if he wanted to publish his poetry with them (see Brev 1 158).

8 For an introduction to the textual history of “Hymn,” see the commentary that Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy provide in Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley 716–18. See also Whickman’s and Westwood’s respective essays for critical readings of the two versions of “Hymn.”

9 William Keach too has argued that Shelley, in fact, “sometimes writes about language in ways that seem to anticipate ideas familiar in modern linguistic and critical theory” (xvi), finding also that Shelley’s “linguistic skepticism . . . runs throughout the Defence like a counterplot” (22).

10 In his classic study, M. H. Abrams explains that Shelley sought to combine his poetry with an intellectual commitment to natural philosophy, as he “held no commerce with the opinion that what he called ‘Science and her sister Poesy,’ need be at odds” (310). The poetics which resulted from that commitment has been, in turn, the focus of a rich body of work by critics such as Angela Leighton, Paul Hamilton, and Cian Duffy, as well as shorter studies by Evan Gottlieb, Alan Weinberg, and Paul Whickman, to only name a few. All agree on philosophy’s central role in Shelley’s writing. For Weinberg, Shelley “was among the most philosophical of English poets” (501). Whickman notes that poems like “Hymn” are now recognized as framed by “the difficult relation of Shelley’s reading of and admiration for such works [of eighteenth century philosophers], and the philosophical scepticism they offer, to his aesthetic or creative work as a poet” (145).

11 I refer here particularly to the following sections from Shelley’s early and later writings: in his “Notes” (1813) to Queen Mab, for example, Shelley paraphrases Holbach’s empirical rejection of the theistic understanding of the physical world, stating that material discoveries in astronomy are testament to the “falsehoods of religious systems” (83–84). In “On Life” (1819), he similarly praises the “most clear and vigorous” philosophy of Drummond, which leads him to conclude that even the material instrument of poetry, language itself, should be regarded with great skepticism on account of its subjective and metaphorical foundation (621–22). Likewise, in A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley states that “Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity are entitled to the gratitude of mankind” (672).

12 Hamilton, for instance, has argued that despite his evidently extensive “philosophical affiliations,” “Shelley’s advocacy of Holbach is still unusual and surprising” (“Literature and Philosophy” 171–73). For detailed explorations and critical readings of Shelley’s engagement with Holbach, see Duffy, Shelley, especially chapter 1, “From Religion to Revolution.”

13 My definition of the sublime here correlates to Burke’s rather than Kant’s notion of the sublime. For an extensive discussion of the “widely unexamined Kantian appropriation” (293) of readings of the sublime in eighteenth-century British discourse, see de Bolla.

14 For a cultural-historical exploration of aesthetic representations and engagements with weather in English literature and arts, see Harris.

15 For an example of readings in historical meteorology in the works of other Romantics, see McGann; and Bate. The unusual climate of the years that preceded Keats’s composition of “To Autumn” (1820) has provided material for contrary interpretations by these critics. For McGann “To Autumn” is about idealizing the true social hardships associated with poor harvests and starvation, whereas for Bate, Keats’s poem is about climate change if read accurately against historical records on meteorological conditions. For a study which extends Bate’s eco-critical theories in a reading of Shelley’s poetry, see Gidal. For an introduction to eco-critical readings of Shelley’s poetic work, see Morton, who argues, in line with his eco-critical theories, that “In the reformed worlds of Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound, it is not just ‘as if’ nature is transformed along with political and cultural change; it really is transformed” (189).

16 See also Janković’s two monographs, Reading the Skies and Confronting the Climate.

17 Weather in Coleridge’s writings has received more critical attention than in Shelley’s. For key contributions on the topic see Reed; and McKusick.

18 For a discussion on Shelley’s atheism and the Alps, see Duffy, Introduction.

19 For a thorough study on Shelley’s work as a translator, see Webb.

20 In fact, not many years after Fröding had translated Shelley’s “Hymn” and declared his preference for measured meter, as Eva Jonsson has argued, he would adopt the Modernist conventions of free verse. For a thorough investigation of this shift in Fröding’s composition, see Jonsson.