A Poetics of Ether

ABSTRACT

This essay is about atmosphere in Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813). Engaged with debates in natural philosophy, particularly concerning ether, Queen Mab develops an ethereal poetics that suspends the division of spirit from matter. I trace, throughout Shelley’s poetry, complex metaphors that draw spirit towards matter, and vice versa. This upending of metaphorical and metaphysical hierarchies has political consequences. Shelley’s poem seeks to subvert all forms of anthropocentric sovereign power. Projecting a utopian future, in which humans reconcile themselves to nature, Shelley identifies an obstacle to its realization: “commerce,” and the world-destroying labor that makes it possible. To be freed from the laws of commerce is to inhabit a new relation to need and to activity altogether. For Shelley, utopia realized must be “a paradise of peace,” achievable only by relinquishing the desire to remake the world. Shelley again invokes ether as the spirit of nature and the sign of paradise’s imminent arrival. The vehicle of a utopian natural history, ether reconciles passivity and liberation, nature and humanity, as much as matter and spirit.

Notes

1 For more on ether and early modern science, see Robert Schofield’s Mechanism and Materialism. Carl Grabo, in A Newton Among Poets, exhaustively catalogues Shelley’s allusions to these ideas.

2 I first learned about Prynne’s letter from Ross Wilson’s Shelley and the Apprehension of Life. I share Wilson’s skepticism about any reading of Shelley in which “the process of ‘lyricising’ science has no significant effect on the thinking that science is always already taken to have set forth” (27).

3 Cf. The Making of the English Working Class. More recently, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, in Slow Print, has explored the significance of Shelley’s poem for later nineteenth-century socialist organizations (149–58).

4 The Engels anecdotes are frequently repeated; for one source, see Engels’s letters of 1839–40 in Volume 2 of the Collected Works.

5 For related views of the politics of inactivity and the abolition of work, around 1800 and today, see Anne-Lise François’s Open Secrets and the articles collected in Endnotes 1: Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the Twentieth Century.