Shelley: Romantic and Proto-Modernist

Shelley is the least known of the great English Romantic Poets. Ordinary readers of poetry are usually aware of one sonnet Ozymandias, perhaps the complex but cumulatively powerful odes To a Skylark and To the West Wind, and sometimes the untypical Adonais. Nothing that Shelley wrote has permeated our general consciousness in the way Keats’ Odes have, or indeed the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, or a few short poems by Byron or Wordsworth (not to mention the Prelude and Don Juan). And to add to the problem there has been the obsessive pursuit of Shelley's private life. This began with Dowden's life and letters in 1886, and has produced some interesting books. Among these I personally like Richard Holmes' Shelley, The Pursuit and Edmund Blunden's Shelley, A Life Story, but there are numerous others. And there again there are the various editions of the letters and journals of Shelley and those round him. Read carefully, these books are a useful adjunct to the poetry, but with monotonous regularity they have deflected interest away from it.

Also, Shelley's complex politics affect the way that he is read. When left wing politics was on the up in the 1970's, Richard Holmes in Shelley, the Pursuit (and even more Paul Foot in Red Shelley) tried to reclaim Shelley for their own radicalism, by showing his position was a prelude to later Marxist positions. Thus Foot saw Prometheus Unbound as a statement in favour of violent revolution, despite Shelley's generally Gandhian position on political violence. At the other extreme, Kathleen Raine - in writing that remains admirable for showing the influence of Plato on Shelley (and in answering some of the sillier modern criticisms) - desperately tried to avoid her poet's politics. 'I have omitted Laon and Cythna (later revised and renamed The Revolt of Islam) and a great deal of occasional political verse by Shelley the student activist in which the inspirers [i.e. Plato and Plotinus] had no hand,' she tells us in the foreword to her influential Penguin selection, published in 1973. No doubt she made a false analogy between Shelley and both the left wing poets she had known personally in the Thirties and the younger radical generation of the Sixties and Seventies. To me both Foot and Raine are wrong because they do not understand the nature of Shelley's politics. Shelley was deeply affected by the violent outcome of the French Revolution. He wanted a gentler world, where ordinary people were treated well, oppression was done away with, and there was equality and some degree of sexual liberation. However, because of what had happened in the French Revolution, he also wanted all this to be achieved by non-violent means, so his revolution was as much about mental as political revolution.

However, Foot did have a point when he complained that Shelley's poetry was depoliticised in numerous popular selections published after 1880. Much easier of course to pretend this is a poetry of pleasant lyrical dream and occasional sadness, than to grapple with the often complex and elusive ideas that float about in almost all of Shelley's major work! And it was this elusiveness that led to the downgrading of Shelley in the twentieth century. Dr Leavis in the anti-Romantic atmosphere after the First World War notoriously and brutally attacked Shelley for vagueness and lack of realism, and this was deeply influential. Indeed it put me off reading Shelley when I was a teenager in the Sixties. And Eliot too had his problems with Shelley, even if his teenage self had to apologise to his mother for spending money meant for something else to buy his copy of Shelley. And of course where these men led lesser ones followed. It is all part of the relentless chorus that tells us that Modern Poetry begins with:

When the patient is spread out against the sky                      
Like a patient etherised upon a table

This has become such a mantra of correctness that one wonders if its perpetrators have read the whole of Prufrock. After all this is not a realistic poem at all, but full of dream and indirection, and lovely (if often ironic) music. And the conclusion (which is nearly always conveniently forgotten) is almost Shelleyan:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea                        
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

And anyway, where else in Prufrock are the post 1950's realisms that these two rather untypical lines about an etherised patient are now invariably supposed to typify? I doubt indeed if Eliot would have approved of the modern obsession with Realism, or the equal lack of attention to sensation. He wrote in The Music of Poetry in 1942 : 'If we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless. We can be deeply stirred hearing the recitation of a poem in a language of which we understand no word.' This is written in the context of a discussion of Mallarmé, and not Shelley. However, Keats and Shelley were published  in Paris in 1829 less than a decade after their deaths, and their musical and dreamlike work deeply influenced the development of French nineteenth century poetry, indeed far more than it did nineteenth century British poetry. Without Shelley would we have had Baudelaire? Without Baudelaire and those that came after him would we have had Eliot?

But what did Shelley actually do in his major work? The answer is that he let himself be the instrument for the creation of long poems that discover his ideas and imaginations as much as explain or exposit them. Surrealism was not a word that had come into use, but his method of letting the poem discover itself, while not identical with the Surrealists, has at least something in common with them. Hence one suspects (though this is largely uncharted waters) Shelley's appeal to such late twentieth century poets as J.H. Prynne or Barry MacSweeney. But the mind that discovered these poems was in contact with the latest philosophy and science and poetry of its own period, and was in constant debate with itself about history and poetry right back to the Greeks by way of the medieval and renaissance Italians, and the first century B.C. Romans. 

Equally it was a mind that cared deeply about the political situation in England. Poor people were starving, large numbers were badly treated, and yet the poor had little if any means of political redress. The boundaries of Parliamentary constituencies had not been revised for over a century, and shifts in population had left numerous seats with only a few voters. These rotten boroughs were effectively at the disposal of their landlords. The new cities that had grown up in the Industrial Revolution were barely represented in Parliament. And yet there was deep reluctance in Establishment circles to reform Parliament. This was not just a question of an oligarchy maintaining its power (though no doubt it played its part). There was a deep fear that moderate reform would end in another French Revolution, which in the context of large numbers of out-of-work soldiers roaming the country in the aftermath of the Napoloeonic Wars was not wholly unreasonable. Shelley devotes much of his introductory essay to The Revolt of Islam to his desire to see hope return to the world, and a passionate denunciation of this mood that nothing could be done.

But if England was bad, Europe was worse. In the aftermath of the defeat of Napoleon there was real oppression of anything approaching liberal ideas, and Shelley had all too many opportunities to witness this in his Italian travels. It is little realized by people who know it in anthologies that To the West Wind arises from the European and British political situation, and is not a purely personal poem. And the same is even more true of Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam.

All these themes are deeply important in Shelley's poetry. However, he treats them as themes to be interwoven into the texture of a poetry that originates in the subconscious. It is difficult to know how aware of contemporary classical music he was. All we know for sure is that he attended various Mozart operas, and it seems unlikely that he had much awareness of what was going on in Vienna in music. Neverthless there is a real analogy to be made between Shelley's thematic construction of his long poems and the sonata structures of Beethoven, Haydn or Mozart, or even more Schubert. There are great similarities between Schubert and Shelley when they create lyrical dreamlike structures that are anything but tight and to modern ears seem long, yet have their own very real effectiveness.

But this of course leads us to Eliot, Bunting, Pound and Zukofsky. Eliot wrote major thematically organised poems that he called quartets. Similarly Bunting used the term sonata to describe Briggflatts and his other longer poems, not least Villon. Zukofsky constructed A round the music of Bach. The Waste Land could be read as an attempt at a highly thematic late Romantic symphony by someone who used to play Beethoven sonatas on the piano for his own amusement. Did this Modernist obsession with musical form spring ultimately from Shelley?

However that may be, I want to end this essay by drawing the attention of readers to Shelley's longer poems. Like so many great Modernist works, they are are not easy to read on the page, and repay at least initial reading aloud, preferably with several people present. I sometimes wonder if their most ideal presentation might not be as modern experimental film. However, one must equally remember these are poems of their time, which is just after over twenty years of war with France, and when the eighteenth century was passing but had not passed away.

Shelley's long poems come at the end of a long series of almost entirely forgotten eighteenth century long poems, but also reflect the fact that Milton's Paradise Lost was as much the accepted Modern Classic as say Eliot's Waste Land is today. Equally, Spenser's Faery Queen had never gone completely out of favour (Charles James Fox used to read it to his mistress in the garden!) and Shelley and his generation were eagerly rediscovering what is still perhaps the greatest of English poets. And yet despite the very real movement toward the Romantic and dreamlike that this rediscovery of Spenser implied, it is impossible to read the heroic couplets of Shelley's Epipsychidion and not realize that Pope, Dryden and the other Augustans of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were still a very real presense to him. If nothing else, these were the poets he would have been pushed toward at school.

And yet, despite its long lineage, contemporaries found Shelley's poetry very hard. Not that they objected to contemporary long poems, for in the absence of television, radio, film, and the internet, they read them all the time, whether Byron's best selling Childe Harold, or Thomas Moore's Lalla Rooke (whose success Shelley hoped to emulate with his Revolt of Islam), or others now completetly forgotten. However, it took a long time before Shelley gradually came posthumously into favour with his public.

I have never wearied of these poems in over thirty years, and I hope I may persuade others to look at them for their inherent interest and pleasure. I would mention six poems especially.

In Alastor (written in 1815 after a boat trip up the Thames, but also extraordinary events in his private life) Shelley's imagination takes off into a strange dream narrative. A young man communes with a vision of Nature, as he wanders the Middle East. He falls in love with a girl but runs from the consummation. His vision of  Nature is lost. He goes on a strange wild journey in a boat, first across a wild sea, then up a river through a wild gorge, then through wonderfully described trees and finally up a mountain where he dies. The journey in the boat is quite extraordinary, and quite probably leads on to Rimbaud's Bateau Ivre.

The Revolt of Islam (written two years later in 1817 at Marlow) has a very simple story at the core of it. The prophetess Laone leads a non-violent revolution against a tyrant. This is suppressed by the forces of reaction, and Laone and her lover Laon are executed by burning in a strangely christological way. They seem then to escape into another dimension or possibly an after-death experience. The story however is overlaid by extraordinary convolutions over twelve cantos, and we seem to be presented with a tense inner experience that is arguably more important than the ostensibly political text.

The remaining poems were all written in Italy after Shelley's move there in 1818.

Prometheus Unbound and Julian and Maddalo were begun at much the same time in 1818-9, which is extraordinary given that Prometheus Unbound is an exercise in the grand and operatic and Julian and Maddalo makes an almost prosaic use of the heroic couplet (in a way that anticipates Browning's My Last Duchess). Prometheus Unbound's first Act has Prometheus fastened by Zeus to the hillside (as at the end of the Aeschylus play) undergoing great tortures. This act often uses wild harsh Pindaric choruses.In the second Act, liberation comes in sight through Prometheus' wife Asia, and the poetry is very gentle and lyrical. As in The Revolt of Islam the revolt is led by a woman, but this time it is successful. In the third act Zeus is overthrown, and the world is liberated as much from fear of death and mental terrors  as political tyranny. The fourth act is a rather dubious later addition, which I personally could have done without. Julian and Maddalo is the story of two noblemen in Venice who after the fashion of young men debate the wisdom of the latest ideas. Maddalo takes Julian to visit a Man who these ideas have seemingly sent mad. The Madman raves, but one can more or less discern his story. Strangely the poem is dominated by the same strange tolling of a bell that floats spectrally through the movements of The Waste Land a century later. Did the Shelley poem haunt Eliot?

The Mask of Anarchy was written after the famous massacre at Peterloo Fields in Manchester, when a meeting about Parliamentary reform was broken up violently. It starts with a savage satire of current government ministers that recalls contemporary political cartoons. However then it depicts a Right Wing coup being overthrown by non-violent resistance, and proceeds prophetically to list most of the reforms which took place in this country during the century and a quarter from Shelley to the Labour Government of 1945, and the National Health Service. Not exactly of course, but it is surprisingly close! This remains a remarkably direct and powerful political poem. Much of its power comes from its essentially imaginative structure. It is as much a poem of the imagination as Prometheus Unbound, even if it is a more direct piece of writing.

Finally I mention Epipsychidion (though it is scarcely Shelley's only remaining long poem). This is a complex but beautiful piece of writing. Shelley (and his wife and her sister) had visited a nineteen year old girl, Emilia Viviani, who had been put in her convent by her family. He seems to have fallen platonically in love with her in real life. However the poem is not  about a real love affair. The first part is a discussion of Platonic love in the modern world, which is heavily influenced by Dante and other Italian writers. The poem proceeds by way of an intense surreal autobiography of the inner mind, to imagining an escape with Emilia to some magical isle. This vision of their escape is one of the most beautiful things Shelley wrote. It breaks down at the end, however, overwhelmed by its own impossibility.

The poem is in heroic couplets, and it is curious to note how the breakdown of the vision of this escape to the island echoes the end of Pope's Dunciad. One of the most interesting things about Shelley is his constant dialogue with his English predecessors, whether Pope or Spenser. And yet Shelley and the other Romantics are always supposed to mark a great divide in English Poetry. The same can be said  of Eliot and his Modernist contemporaries a century later. They also are always regarded as marking a great divide, and yet their best things often arise out of a dialogue with the very predecessors they are supposed to have rejected. Is it not time – both with the Modernists and the Romantics – that we started to look at the whole story? It might well provide a way out of our own increasingly oppressive narrowness.