Radical Elegy: Adonais, Am/Trak

ABSTRACT

This essay builds toward a comparative reading of Shelley’s Adonais and Amiri Baraka’s Am/trak, both examples of radical elegy at the crossroads of poetic experimentation and political dissidence. It was Esther Jackson who first suggested that Baraka’s own Romanticism is rooted in a Hegelian understanding of form as the concretion of consciousness. As a genre with an outstandingly intimate relationship to crisis, elegy is a special case of the concretion of consciousness through form. How does the mind apprehend the presence of a person who no longer exists? How does its collision with the disfigured referent of the dead shape the look of the poem on the page? Most pertinently for these two writers, how does elegiac form gather political steam? By considering both the Spenserian form of Adonais and what I take to be Shelley’s rewriting of his sonnet “England in 1819” in its thirty-ninth stanza, I propose a model of elegy grounded in the impulse to turn private consciousness into public, insurrectionary exhortation.

Notes

1 The etymology is, as Halpern notes, disputed but it suits his purpose. Insofar as I am building off Halpern here it suits mine as well.

2 Shelley’s poetry and prefaces are quoted from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose.

3 I am referring in this instance to the murder of John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, by Jonathan Henry Christie, who met Scott in a duel on behalf of Tory journalist John Gibson Lockhart, author of the famous series of articles (in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) on what he called the Cockney School of Poetry. For a detailed historical account of the Scott affair, see Patmore.

4 This was, in fact, how the poem was interpreted by Shelley’s more hostile readers. As a reviewer in the Literary Gazette puts it, “it is hardly possible to help laughing at the mock solemnity with which Shelley charges the Quarterly Review with having murdered his friend—with a critique! If criticism killed the disciples of [the Cockney School,] Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on another” (Rev. of Adonais 297–301; 300).

5 Another good example would be “The Triumph of Life,” in which, as Ross Wilson notes, the substance of Dante’s terza rima undergoes a subtle but striking change of phase, for “whereas Dante’s tercets congeal fluidity into solid units … Shelley’s instead flow into one another, rendering a solid form fluid” (149).

6 For what it is worth, Glaucus also appears in the House of Proteus episode in book 4 of The Faerie Queene (11.13.3).

7 The reading is available on the YouTube page of the late English poet Sean Bonney, who wrote his PhD thesis on Baraka. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71i6tCHGUYo. Accessed 27 Sept. 2021.