Reading Shelley on the Bicentenary of his Death

ABSTRACT

This special issue marks the bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death by presenting ten new readings of his major poetry by some of the most innovative voices working in the field of Romanticism today. Contributors have been invited to offer a concise essay on a single poem, being free to determine the critical parameters of their interpretation. Throughout the special issue, Shelley’s own generic and formal range is matched by the diverse critical energies (comparatist, formalist, historicist, decolonial, ecological) that contributors have brought to bear on his poems. The result is a series of original and provocative readings grounded in radically different methodological intuitions.

In the decade between writing Queen Mab (1812) and leaving “The Triumph of Life” unfinished, Shelley wrote more than three hundred poems. His canon covers a dizzying range of forms, styles, and tones, and shows a poet who has as much delight in conceiving of a sonnet as a five-act drama. Despite being concentrated on only ten productive years, the readings collected in this issue show a Janus-faced Shelley who looks back to Homer, Dante, and Milton; is alive to the politics and literature of his own age; and whose poetry looks forward towards the concerns of our global present. The transhistorical conversation in Shelley’s verse reflects a poet who grew to be obsessed with the interplay of different historical epochs. “The Past, the Present, & the Future are the grand & comprehensive topics of this Poem,” he wrote of Queen Mab in a letter to his publisher of 18 August 1812 (Letters 1: 324), and these topics remained with him until the very end of his career. In the visionary world of “The Triumph of Life,” a chariot enters carrying the enigmatic “Life,” and we are told that its four-faced charioteer “could pierce the sphere / Of all that is, has been, or will be done,” were it not for its “banded eyes” (Poems lines 102–04). In a poem written in the wake of failed political uprisings, this visual impairment seems to be a comment that, for all their initial vigor, these revolutions were let down by those conducting them. The consequence of this banding of eyes is the denial of deeper vision, of the revolutions’ unfulfilled potential to see and alter “all that is, has been, or will be done.” Ahasuerus, the Jewish seer of Hellas (1822), is called by the Sultan Mahmud because he hopes him to be better sighted than Life’s charioteer: “from his eye looks forth / A life of unconsumed thought which pierces / The present, and the past, and the to-come” (146–48). And yet, Ahasuerus suffers the fate of many prophets who bring bad news, as his disbelieving employer claims, “thou art no interpreter of dreams; / Thou dost not own that art, device, or God, / Can make the Future present” (757–59).

Shelley's staging of a thwarted ambition to concertina time also appears in his less explicitly political poetry. In a description of a sunrise in “Ginevra,” which shakes the sleep “from every [trembling] heart” (129), Shelley conjures such a profound awakening for the Earth that it subverts time, as he describes a daybreak in which it seems “As if the future and the past were all / Treasured in the instant” (131–32). In what is arguably his last poem, a love lyric to Jane Williams commonly known as “Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici,” Shelley does, albeit momentarily, have time stand still:

Her presence had made weak and tame

All passions, and I lived alone

In the time which is our own;

The past and future were forgot,

As they had been, and would be, not.

But soon, the guardian angel gone,

The demon reassumed his throne

In my faint heart … 

In this unnervingly measured post-climactic reverie, the speaker achieves what neither ruler nor prophet, nor even daybreak could: a flattening of time into a moment. It is a state so remarkable that the speaker allows himself to try out the now defunct tenses (“As they had been, and would be”), before the demon reality conquers him, and puts him in a state in which the clandestine love described brings about regret for the past, guilt in the present, and worry for the future.

If the revolutionary, the ruler, the poet, and the lover, cannot escape time’s pressures, who or what might? Shelley suggests verse itself has such unifying properties when he talks of “that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world” (“Defence” 522). The readings which follow examine this co-operation between past and present, but they also show how Shelley’s co-operative sense of one “great poem” prioritizes the transhistorical power of words over whoever speaks or writes them. Recall the subtle clarification that comes just before the prophetic close of the “Ode to the West Wind”: “And, by the incantation of this verse, / Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!” (65–67, emphasis added). The imperative to scatter the prophecy is fulfilled not by the West Wind that Shelley apostrophizes, but by the incantation—the reading and reading aloud—of Shelley’s verse. Words crafted and ordered into form, the poem itself ensures that the prophecy it carries reaches its future audience. Shelley’s awareness of the potential of poetry to speak about and to different times in a way that a person and their historically contingent life cannot, is made clearer still in a moment just before the oft-quoted close to “The Mask of Anarchy.” Although the poem advertises itself as tethered to a specific moment—“Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester”—its ending breaks free of such temporal constraint:

 ‘ … these words shall then become

 Like oppression’s thundered doom

 Ringing through each heart and brain,

 Heard again—again—again—

 ‘Rise like lions after slumber

 In unvanquishable number—

 Shake your chains to earth like dew

 Which in sleep had fallen on you—

 Ye are many—they are few.’

   THE END (368–76)

Tense is in flux: the superfluous “then” (that Janus-faced adverb) in the first line, looks forward, but it also hints at movements of time gone by. Although the introductory line is in the future tense, the concluding five-line stanza switches between a present it aims to empower and an enchained past it wishes to cast off, before concluding in the apocalyptic “THE END.” Like the sunrise in “Ginevra” the effect of this blending of times is total: it works “through each heart and brain,” and it breaks the temporal constraint of a moment by being spoken “again—again—again.” The structure mirrors that of the ode, whereby poetry and not its speaker (“these words,” “this verse”) are what empower actions (“Rise,” “Shake,” “Scatter”). Proof of Shelley’s success in creating a consciously impersonal and timeless voice to be revived “again—again—again,” is given by the many repurposings of these lines in the two hundred years since his death. We might think of these lines being put on banners by Chartist reformers after the poem’s first publication in 1832 (see Morgan 129–31); their quotation in the anti-colonial disobedience of Mahatma Ghandi in 1930s and 40s India (see Fischer 153); the printing of these lines on the back cover of The Jam’s Sound Affects (1980) as an appeal to disaffected youth; and most recently in Jeremy Corbyn’s speech at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival and in the title of the 2017 British Labour Party manifesto (“For the many, Not the few”), to encourage voters in a mass democratic system.

Shelley’s critical reception has not always kept up with his popular appeal. Much as bicentenaries invite us to reflect on and celebrate the achievement of an author, they also offer an opportunity to consider the achievements of their critics. Since Shelley’s two-hundredth birthday in 1992, a steady stream of colloquia, conferences, and publications have provided opportunities to assess different aspects of the poet’s life and career. As a result, in the last thirty years Shelley has been well served by collections of essays: Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays (1992), edited by Kelvin Everest, and Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (1995), edited by Betty T. Bennet and Stuart Curran, were both conceived in celebration of the bicentenary and helped set the parameters for studies of Shelley for over a decade. Subsequent collections, such as The Unfamiliar Shelley (2009) and The Neglected Shelley (2015), both edited by Timothy Webb and Alan Weinberg, have attempted to broaden the canon of the poet’s works, and move study into areas such as Shelley’s early Gothic novels, paratexts, and manuscript notebooks. The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2017), edited by Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan, comprises forty-two entries that amount to a comprehensive overview of the state of Shelley scholarship in the run up to the bicentenary of Shelley’s death. Two further collections, Percy Shelley in Context, edited by Ross Wilson, and Percy Shelley for Our Times, edited by Omar F. Miranda and Kate Singer, are currently in preparation. These critical surveys are complemented by advances in editorial scholarship, manifested in the appearance of new volumes in the two critical editions currently underway, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Johns Hopkins) and The Poems of Shelley (Longman/Routledge), as well as a new edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford). The date itself will provide further opportunities for celebration of Shelley’s career combined with critical reflection on its significance for Romantic scholarship today: a series of online roundtables under the #Shelley200 umbrella that culminated in a conference at Keats House in London on 8–9 July 2022 as well as a commemoration hosted by the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.

Taken together, these various publications and initiatives offer the context in which we present ten new readings of Shelley’s major poems. The collection represents a departure from much recent work in this area, which has been defined by a quest for new discoveries (prompted by the uncovering of the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things and the publication of manuscript facsimiles in print and digital form), whereby much attention has been paid to neglected works, drafts, and fragments. The present collection’s significance rests on it taking a different tack. We return to the major poems. The ten readings offered in this special issue reject the biographical and completist tendencies of recent criticism to offer something less comprehensive and more nimble: concise and stimulating essays by some of the most innovative voices in the field. Our aim is not only to convey a sense of Shelley’s plasticity—his ability to conceive of poems as different as the “The Witch of Atlas,” Adonais, and Hellas in the space of just over a year—but also of the rich variety of Shelley scholarship. In this special issue, the poet’s generic and formal range is matched by the diverse critical energies (comparatist, formalist, historicist, decolonial, ecological) that contributors have brought to bear on his poems. The result is a series of original and provocative readings grounded in radically different methodological intuitions. The issue as a whole does not add up to a coherent critical program as much as an attempt to assess Shelley’s poetic canon in all its variety, to try and get at both his “workmanship of style,” which Wordsworth thought made him “one of the best artists of us all,” as well as his ethical commitments and their present utility. We hope to show how and why reading Shelley’s poetry still matters, two hundred years on.

Ever since Harold Bloom suggested “The Triumph of Life” as the centerpiece for Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), Shelley’s poetry has driven innovation in literary theory. It has inspired the contributors to our special issue to chart future directions for Romantic criticism as the discipline responds to contemporary challenges. These challenges include ethical imperatives to diversify and decolonize literary study and face up to impending environmental and climate catastrophe, but also to defend the work of reading as a form of resistance against the banal populism that has captured contemporary public discourse. The special issue amply demonstrates how a return to Shelley’s poetry—far from being an escape from present-day problems—offers the imaginative and intellectual tools to meet some of these challenges. To do so more effectively, we seek to disrupt two common critical tendencies. First, we do not approach Shelley’s poetic oeuvre chronologically. Chronology often suggests development, a linear movement at odds with many of Shelley’s own philosophical and poetic principles—from his practice of reusing poetic imagery to his experiments with cyclical historiography. Therefore, although the special issue contains readings of Shelley's mature poetry from Queen Mab to “The Triumph of Life,” we have arranged the contents alphabetically to reconfigure the relations between the major poems and to encourage readers to approach each of them in separation from the established narrative about Shelley's poetic development. Second, the essays are conceived as readings of individual poems rather than research articles about contexts, influences, or themes that reappear across multiple works. In the last fifty years, many brilliant scholars have published articles considering and comparing fine points of distinction in Shelley’s poetry, while essays that approach a single poem in its entirety are comparatively rare. Each of our readings offers an original interpretation of a whole poem, and while they differ in how they go about this, these differences are a product of diverse critical temperaments and diverse personal encounters with Shelley’s oeuvre. Choosing ten poems for our commemorative readings meant some major works were ignored. Any exercise in canon formation reveals something about the tastes of its selectors, and our general preference for Shelley’s later poetry is reflected in our choices. While some will be irked by the absence of Alastor and Laon and Cythna, we more keenly feel the absence of a reading of the “Ode to the West Wind” and of Shelley’s last lyrics to Jane Williams. The selection emphasizes a poet who lived and travelled in Europe, and whose relentless (and at times eccentric) reading of European literature enacts a cosmopolitan poetics.

Many of the contributions concern themselves with the relation between poet and history, looking both backwards and forwards. Looking back the furthest, Andrew Burkett examines Shelley’s interest in geological debates and how he adopted Huttonian notions of “deep time” in the cosmological vision of Queen Mab. This transition from geological to poetical imagination can also be witnessed in “Mont Blanc,” which is the subject of Andrew Hodgson’s attentive reading. Hodgson explores the complex layers of the poem’s imagery and how they perform the shifting relations between the human mind and the external universe. On a more human historiographical scale, Erica McAlpine finds in “Ozymandias” a highly self-conscious reflection on how writing persists over time. It is the inscribed—rather than the spoken—word that remains. Tom Phillips gives a different account of textual transmission in an essay that unveils Shelley’s debts to his Greek and Latin predecessors in “The Witch of Atlas,” showing how these inflect the relation between the poem’s fictionality and the real world. The relation between fictional and real is also at the core of Julia Tejblum’s engagement with “The Triumph of Life,” which shows how Shelley separates the various forms that autobiography might take from the writing self. This separation also informs Valentina Varinelli’s reading of Epipsychidion: rejecting conventional biographical interpretations of the poem, she shows how it adapts the sociable poetics of Dante and his contemporaries. Will Bowers’s reading of “Julian and Maddalo” likewise places sociability at its center as he explores how Shelley’s poem interrogates the value of conversation. The friendly talk of “Julian and Maddalo” is in contrast to the ideal register of Prometheus Unbound, the subject of Alexander Freer’s essay. Meditating on the different types of bonds at stake in the lyrical drama, Freer offers forgiveness as a model for critical readings that seek to bear witness to past violence in the present. Another attempt to address this question, more directly focused on transatlantic slavery, can be found in Mathelinda Nabugodi’s presentist reading of Hellas in light of current debates around decolonization. A comparably anti-chronological ethos informs Anahid Nersessian’s yoking together of Shelley’s Adonais and Amiri Baraka’s Am/Trak, two elegies that encode a revolutionary break with the past in their very form. The collection closes with an afterword by Ross Wilson that surveys the new directions for Shelley’s poetry and its criticism opened up by the contributors to this special issue.