Evaluating Shelley 9781474465762

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Evaluating Shelley

Other titles published by Edinburgh University Press with the University of Durham: Huw Beynon, Ray Hudson and David Sadler A PLACE CALLED TEESSIDE

A Locality in a Global Economy Jennifer Britnell JEAN BOUCHET

Richard A. Chapman PUBLIC POLICY

The North East of England Frank Coffield and Richard Goodings (eds) SACRED COWS IN EDUCATION

Essays in Reassessment Roy Davies SERVICE IN THE ROMAN ARMY

Edited by D. Breeze and V. Maxwell Osman Durrani FICTIONS OF GERMANY

Images of the German Nation in the Modem Novel Gary Ferguson MIRRORING BELIEF

Marguerite de Navarre's Devotional Poetry Peter Lewis Fie l d in g ' s

bu rlesq u e dram a

Christopher Lloyd J.-K . HUYSMANS AND THE FIN-DE-SIECLE NOVEL

Ian Roberts CRAFT, CLASS AND CONTROL

The Sociology of a Shipbuilding Community I. G. Simmons THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF LATER MESOLITHIC CULTURES

The Creation of Moorland Landscape in England and Wales J. R. Watson AN INFINITE COMPLEXITY

Essays in Romanticism

EVALUATING SHELLEY

edited by TIMOTHY CLARK and JERROLD E. HOGLE

Published by Edinburgh University Press for THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM

For KELVIN EVEREST Swift as a Spirit hastening to his task

© Edinburgh University Press, 1996 Transferred to digital print 2012 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Linotron Palatino by Koinonia Ltd, Bury printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd Croydon, C R 0 4 Y Y A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN o 7486 0843 5

Contents

Preface

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

I.

Evaluating Shelley in his Wider Contexts j. r z e p k a , 'God, and King, and Law 7: Anarchic Anxiety and Shelley's Canonical Function

Ch a r l e s

stu a r t c u r r a n ,

Of Education

28

Shelley and the Question of Joint

m a r il y n b u t l e r ,

Authorship

42

je r r o l d e . h o g l e , w il l ia m r e a c h ,

11

Shelley and the Conditions of Meaning

Shelley and the Revolutionary Left

Shelley after Deconstruction: The Poet of Anachronism

48 75

t im o t h y c l a r k ,

II.

91

Evaluating Shelley's Works and the Evaluations in Them 'What's Aught But as 'Tis Valued?': A Reading of The Sensitive-Plant

111

'Lethean Joy': Memory and Recognition in Laon and Cythna

132

The Enigma of 'A Vision of the Sea', or 'Who Sees the Waterspouts?'

152

Shelley's Peter Bell the Third: Relationship and the Canon

164

c h a r l e s w o r t h g e l p i , Keeping Faith with Desire: A Reading of Epipsychidion

180

m ic h a e l o ' n e i l l ,

jo h n d o n o v a n ,

no ra crook,

jo h n w il l ia m s ,

Ba r b a r a

Ra l p h

p it e ,

Shelley, Dante and The Triumph of Life

197

Contents

VI

HI. Evaluating Shelley's Texts: The Past and Future Possibilities for Editors Close Your Eyes and Think of Shelley: Versioning M ary Shelley's Triumph of Life

2 15

'Poetry in a More Restricted Sense': The Canon of Shelley's Poems and the Canon of his Poetry

225

u s a vargo,

d o n a l d h . r e im a n ,

Works Cited

245

Notes on Contributors

259

Index

261

Preface

These essays were initially written to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Percy Bysshe Shelley's birth on 4 August 1792. Most of them, in their initial forms, were presented at the August 1992 international conference on Shelley organised and chaired by Kelvin Everest at the Gregynog Conference Centre near N ew ­ town, Powys, Wales. A few of these papers were first delivered at other bicentenary events in 1992, although the authors did attend the Gregynog conference. Those events included the November conference at the Keats-Shelley Memorial in Rome, organised by Lilia Crisafulli-Jones, and the special bicentenary session of the Keats-Shelley Association of America, chaired by Neil Fraistat, held at the Modem Languages Association Convention in N ew York near the end of December. Yet these essays on Shelley have all undergone considerable revision and reconsideration since his bicentenary. Indeed, whether they focus on his general ideas or individual texts, they all open out to a scope and importance far beyond the usual 'appreciations of the poet' common to birthday celebrations. Expanding and intensifying the general thrust of the pieces in the 1983 Shelley Revalued volume, edited by Kelvin Everest from the proceedings of Gregynog conferences in 1979 and 1981, the essays which we offer here carry the late twentieth-century reassessment— and transvaluation— of Shelley to what we regard as a very powerful (albeit a temporary) conclusion. They do so by looking, pointedly and comprehensively, both at how and w h y we 'evaluate', or should evaluate, Shelley as w e do today and at how Shelley himself was a person, thinker, activist and writer always in the process of evaluating his own and others' values at his own moment. We want to thank the many people who have helped to make this collection possible, most especially our excellent, understand­ ing and patient contributors. We are particularly beholden for helpful suggestions to Michael O'Neill, Donald Reiman and

viii

Preface

Marilyn Butler. We are also grateful for the fine proof-reading of Dr Carol Toma. Moreover, this entire project would not have come about without the efforts of Kelvin Everest, organiser of the 1992 Gregynog conference and first instigator of this collection, to whom we are pleased to dedicate this volume in recognition of his capacity for rapid hard work, his overall vision and his major contributions to the study of English Romanticism and Percy Bysshe Shelley. We are immensely grateful to the Publications Board of the University of Durham for its timely support (as well as its outside reader), to the editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press and to Oxford University Press for permission to include the essay by Michael O'Neill, a version of which also appears else­ where. W e and Donald Reiman send our special thanks to Michael J. Neth and the Bodleian Library at Oxford for permission to quote from The Hellas Notebook (Bodleian Shelley adds. e. 7). Finally, w e are pleased to say that each of us is very grateful to the other— especially for great cordiality and perseverance across great distances and several years— and that w e are indebted most of all to the life and work of the extraordinary poet and activist whom we celebrate, and re-evaluate, in what now follows.

Abbreviations

Letters The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols, ed. Frederick L. Jones, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Journal The Journals of M ary Shelley, 2 vols, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. o sa Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, revised G.M. Matthews, Oxford Standard Authors, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Prose The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 1, ed. E.B. Murray, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. sc Shelley and his Circle, 17 7 3-18 2 2 , ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devlin Fischer, 8 vols to date, Cambridge, m a : Harvard University Press, 196 1-. spp Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, Norton Critical Edition, N ew York and London: Ernest Benn, 1977. Works The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 10 vols, London: Ernest Benn, 1926-30. Throughout this collection, all citations from Shelley's poetry (with line numbers or act, scene and line numbers) or Shelley's prose (with page numbers), unless they are annotated otherwise, come from Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Reiman and Powers.

Introduction

Criticism, even when disguised as disinterested interpretation, has always been evaluative. Yet, as Barbara Hermstein Smith wrote in the early 1980s, 'the entire problematic of value and evaluation has been evaded and exiled by the literary academy'. Many of the major schools of criticism since 1945, from 'new criticism' through much of poststructuralism and most forms of 'reader response', have presented themselves primarily as theo­ ries and methods of interpretation alone. In the 1990s, however, as the academy has become increasingly the site for debate between different, even incompatible, intellectual and political move­ ments, questions about what constitutes value— and hence evalu­ ation— have come to be addressed more directly. The resurgence of the problem of 'culture' has even put in question the whole concept, provenance and value of the academy itself. In this context, as in others, Percy Bysshe Shelley's distinction is to be both ahead of and in tune with his time and ours. His value as poet or thinker was debated in his own day and remains as problematic as the nature of culture. Precisely because of his often uncertain placement in the established 'canon', the question of Shelley's worth has never been quite so settled as has the value, say, of Shakespeare or Wordsworth— even though the days are long past when attitudes towards Shelley served as a shibboleth for entry to, or exclusion from, critical respectability. Moreover, aside from supposed questions of quality, Shelley's own career has posed unique and unavoidable questions of value ever since he threw down the gauntlet of his atheism at Oxford in 18 11. His poetic practice nearly always resists the possibility of judgement on purely aesthetic terms, always posing the question of value in ways that refuse any dissociation of the literary from the ethical, the 'poetry' from the 'ideas', or the writing which we read now from the specific politics of his day. There are several good reasons, then, for reconnecting Shelley to writing that is explicitly evaluative at his time and ours. This

2

Introduction

collection of essays consequently offers a broad and representa­ tive survey of evaluations of Shelley in the 1990s, most of which also examine the poet as an evaluative thinker and determiner of values writing at a time of cultural conflicts at least as intense as our own. Given the current climate of intellectual debate, it is hardly a surprise that these new evaluations differ, sometimes greatly, in their approaches. A s well as instances of traditional historical scholarship, this collection includes studies that might be termed new historical, psychoanalytic and deconstructive, along with ones that address the theory and practices of editing. A s they employ or impinge on the terms 'evaluation' and 'value', however, the contributors and editors all strive to enable a dia­ logue of many voices between past and present debates on the nature of worth, including Shelley's worth and his senses of worth. The authors of the following essays therefore probe and assess the cultural values, stances and modes of reader-response that w e do or should bring to Shelley today— all that is most basic to our ways of drawing out Shelley's worth and value— while they also explore Shelley's own ethical and aesthetic premises, his cultural values, criteria, stances and modes of responding to what he saw and read at his own time. The result, we believe, is a revealing conversation across two centuries between different stances and practices of evaluation. In keeping with the aftermath of a bicentennial celebration, the contributors, combining senior and younger Shelley scholars, try to assess what is good (or not) in Shelley's writing and what gives his life and work lasting value. A t the same time, they are just as often concerned with evaluation in other senses: deciding on the most or least valuable ways to approach or read or edit Shelley today; assessing the values which we bring to reading him, in­ cluding the values that have made him 'canonical' or questionable for different evaluators; and even determining what values his work acquires, rightly or wrongly, in the contexts of interpreta­ tion that have arisen over the last two centuries. In these efforts, Shelley emerges as a figure who keeps countering many received w ays of framing him and his work. We are forced to reconsider his senses of the canon or of single authorship, his continuing place in left-wing debates outside the academy, his resistance to critical institutionalisation, and the challenges which his works have posed to the procedures of editors at his time and since. Our opening section begins this reassessment by looking at Shelley's writing and value-systems broadly, both in relation to their widest (though sometimes least-remembered) contemporary

Introduction

3

contexts and in connection with recent ways of reading Shelley that may be open to question. The first two essays consider if such an anti-canonical liberal as Shelley ever established his own sense of a literary 'canon' of great authors, a question bom in part from early Cold War conflicts over Shelley's own centrality to the 'great tradition' (a la F.R. Leavis) and in part from our current, post1960s controversies over the validity and criteria of any canon at all. Charles Rzepka avoids the worst tangles in this debate by looking directly at Shelley's evaluations of those whom he takes to be the most significant writers in history, especially in the Defence of Poetry. Rzepka shows how those judgements are actually scepti­ cal answers to the 'anarchy7 of what Shelley saw as establishment dogma and how these answers instigate an 'ongoing conversa­ tion' over quality and values that continues in today's vibrant discussions of canonicity. Stuart Curran, drawing on Shelley's and his own capacious learning, then sees the poet's everexpanding views of the most worthwhile kinds of reading as a magisterial, though still anti-establishment, proposal for a genu­ inely liberal education (another subject of current controversy). Shelley thus emerges as one of the founders of what we now call 'comparative literature' and even as a proponent of an increas­ ingly cross-cultural sense of 'comparative'. His great 'secret of morals' and values, Curran reminds us, is the degree to which we go 'out of our own nature' into 'an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own' (A Defence of Poetry, 487). Marilyn Butler then helps us see much more of that inter­ personal, collaborative Shelley by urging us, once and for all, to dismiss the inaccurate notion of the solitary Romantic con­ sciousness revealing its inwardness in poems. Our institutional construction of 'Shelley' is now pointedly at issue, especially in relation to questionable concepts of 'the author'. In Butler's view, we should see many of the authors in the Shelley circle working though a series of 'communitarian' interactions with each other and with many other liberal intellectuals. A supposedly 'personal' poem such as Shelley's Alastor, as much as Godwin's novel St. Leon or Peacock's Headlong Hall, should henceforth be evaluated as a 'patching together7 of multiple voices that itself engages in an interchange between different, yet adjacent, systems of value. The last three essays in the opening section are more directly concerned with evaluations of Shelley that arise from the diver­ gence between his time and ours. The first of the three considers the degree to which, and the reasons why, Shelley might be

4

Introduction

considered a contemporary within a poststructualist frame. Noting that 'signs' for Shelley include words, images, coins, paper notes, thoughts, gestures, ruins and other representations (often repre­ sentations with values attached), Jerrold Hogle argues for some correspondence between the poet's sceptically empirical sense of signs and recent post-Saussurean notions of signifiers primarily as references to other signifiers. That link is meaningful for Hogle, however, only if w e grasp how much the Shelleyan view of the sign grows out of the economic circumstances in England at his time and the assumptions about 'marks of value' connected to those conditions. We cannot legitimately evaluate Shelleyan signi­ fication using a poststructualist perspective, Hogle claims, unless w e base that assessment on how the conditions of meaning in Shelley's cultural situation affected the use of signs in social ex­ change as he knew it. The diversity of contexts in which Shelley has been, and should be, evaluated could not be better illustrated than by the contrast in tone and register between the next two essays, the one directed towards issues in left-wing debate largely outside the university, the other metacrihcal. Both, however, press the difference between Shelley's context and ours by focusing on his appropriation by the literary academy. William Keach looks at how the pro-revolutionary and (for many) proto-socialist Shelley is being, or ought to be, read by non-academic socialists and radicals today. Clearly hoping that Shelley's rousing of the oppressed, especially in 1819, can have genuine effect amid the inequities of the present, Keach's essay interrogates both our institutionalisations of 'literature' and the responsibilities of the professional critic. It also calls for an awareness, among non-academics and scholars, that Shelley is in a dialogue with himself, his contemporaries and his readers over how much revolutionary goals need to be tempered by misgivings about their potential consequences. Timothy Clark's essay, in turn, evaluates Shelley as 'the poet of anachronism' partly to suggest the dangers of identifying him too closely with any movements, especially critical movements, of the late twentieth century. Clark argues that some recent 'deconstructionist' readings of Shelley and other Romantic writing turn their subjects too completely into versions of their own assumptions. He then uses the notion of anachronism to propose an alternative approach to the poet, one more sensitive to the differences between past and present, but also more alive to the w ays in which Shelley's encounters with anachronism first challenged and then engaged him in his fascina­ tion with outmoded forms of writing. Clark even closes by

Introduction

5

demonstrating how the idea of anachronism can illuminate Shelley's too-little-discussed and unfinished story The Coliseum'. By moving from a general assessment to one work, Clark sets the stage for the second section, which comprises essays on parti­ cular Shelley poems and plays, some considered 'major7 and others viewed as 'minor' in current evaluations of Shelley's corpus. Here, those value-judgements are either reassessed or reaffirmed in new ways. In every case, these essays are explicitly concerned with critiquing or revising the frames of reference within which Shelley's texts have been read. This section begins, most appropriately, with an essay by Michael O'Neill that restates this volume's theme expansively and in terms of a specific poem. O'Neill analyses, and himself evaluates, several standards of evaluation applied to Shelley in the twentieth century, setting these alongside some of Shelley's explicit statements on measures of value. All of these are then juxtaposed to the internal selfevaluation worked out in Shelley's The Sensitive-Plant. There we see, particularly in the poem's Conclusion, the interdependence of interpretation and evaluation both for the sceptical Shelley and for his reader, who is made to confront his or her own values by the process of reading that the poem demands. The other essays in the second section also evaluate single texts by Shelley, now by offering very specific corrective lenses that counter our most standard views of the works being studied. John Donovan questions the extremes of modem criticism that have denigrated Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam) as either tendentiously revolutionary or riven by the poet's personal conflicts, and hence a 'lesser' work despite its grand scope. Donovan shows that this epic's moments of achieved revolution are always haunted by memories of the violent past that revolutions would like to forget. Such 'ghosts' mean that revolution cannot finally disguise the guilts and the destmctive longings, some of them quite personal, that are always bound up with drives for radical change. In a pointed extension of Keach's queries about Shelley's doubts, Donovan shows the poet confronting the complex psychology of transformative desire in order to judge history more fully. Donovan also gives us some of the clearest criteria that we now have for re-evaluating Shelley's achievement in Laon and Cythna. Nora Crook then leads us to reconsider both Shelley's sparselyexamined fragment 'A Vision of the Sea' (published with Prometheus Unbound in 18 20 ) and our understandable hesitation, despite pressing evidence, to read such poems biographically to the point of reducing them to reflections of the poet's personal

6

Introduction

tragedies. 'A Vision of the Sea' presents a Gordian knot of critical issues, since, in its allegorical obscurity and by its juxtaposition with other poems in its collection, it simultaneously expresses and disguises its origin in private emotion. Crook offers a balanced reassessment, following the biographical leads in 'A Vision' fur­ ther than anyone has before— thereby reasserting the value of biographical reading— while simultaneously showing the poem's own rarely-acknowledged artistry as arising from an unspeakable experience of loss. The remaining essays in the second section continue to chal­ lenge the most accepted current framings of certain works by placing those texts in contexts that now seem very natural, yet have never been used to evaluate such works before. John Williams shows how much modem readers need an historical recontextualisation of Shelley's Peter Bell the Third, which is still best known as a prickly 18 19 satire against the increasingly con­ servative Wordsworth— a satire based on dubious standards, especially given what Shelley later says in his own 'Satire on Satire'. Williams establishes the 'greatest value' that Peter Bell the Third actually assumes, a 'commitment to the idea of community and relationship', by showing the poem's forgotten connections to statements in Shakespeare, Wordsworth's own writings, and especially the contemporary satires of Thomas Moore, William Hone and John Hamilton Reynolds. A s Williams presents it, this rediscovered context even furthers Rzepka's argument from the perspective of satire: that the later Shelley was sketching out the features of an alternative, radical 'canon' of writings (some satires included) to break down the dogmas that prevented genuine community. A t the same time, Williams's sense of Peter Bell the Third reveals a Shelley doubtful of his own ability to transcend the oppressive values and conditions decried by his poetry, rendering his (and our) final attitude towards his satire even more ambivalent. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, in turn, offers a very different recontextualisation that challenges both extremes of the modem feminist evaluation of Shelley. One side (d la Nathaniel Brown) finds Shelley consistently proto-feminist, while the other (a la Anne Mellor) finds him belying his own statements on women's equality by making woman the 'other' created to fulfil the male imagination in his poems and his life. For Gelpi, Shelley's relation to the feminine is far more complex. Her reading of Epipsychidion shows that his multiple refigurations of woman in that poem are based on a preconscious quest, best described by Jacques Lacan, in which the poet pursues innumerable substitutes for Das Ding, an

Introduction

7

irrecoverable primal state located in the receding body of the Mother. This longing, which inculcates a preconscious standard by which Shelley evaluates women and projects the ideal Woman, apparently supports yet finally explodes both of the most extreme positions in the current feminist debate on Shelley. Ralph Pite then concludes this section by redefining the oft-noted relation­ ship between Dante's Commedia, especially the Purgatorio, and Shelley's The Triumph of Life. Writing against those critics who have found The Triumph sharply revising the meaning of many Dantean images and verse-forms, Pite shows that one precedent for the continually self-revising perceptions of Shelley's narrator is the Purgatorio itself, where vision also leads to multiple re­ visions. N ow our evaluation of Shelley's relation to Dante and other sources will have to consider Shelley as swerving towards, as much as aw ay from, the poetic processes of his precursors (pace Harold Bloom). The final section, containing two closely-related essays, focuses on the evaluative processes of editors by which Shelley's 'best' or 'final' texts have been or can be determined. Lisa Vargo uses Donald Reiman's modem concept of 'versioning'— where an editor must deal with compelling yet differing versions of a text— to assess the decisions behind M ary Shelley's rendering of the Triumph of Life manuscript, perhaps the most difficult task that faced her husband's first major editor. Several dialogues about evaluation inhabit this suggestive essay, ranging from those between Vargo and Reiman and Vargo and Mary Shelley to those between Mary and Shelley about a poem that not only evaluates many historical figures but also evokes conflicted memories and feel­ ings in the poet's lover, wife and collaborator. Donald Reiman himself then follows this look at the earliest editing of Shelley by outlining a new approach to the editing of Shelley's complete poetry today. Writing as the co-editor (with Neil Fraistat) of the Johns Hopkins University Press edition of Shelley's poetical works, Reiman proposes criteria for distinguishing between the 'canon' of Shelley's finished and released 'poems', which an edi­ tion should present in their 'intended' final shape, and the 'other canon' of unfinished and/or unreleased texts-in-process, which might be seen as 'poetry', be presented without polishing, and be given diminished 'authority' (depending on how that notion is defined). Whether others will agree with such distinctions re­ mains to be seen. Even so, Reiman's proposal ends this collection on a strong and provocative note by raising an issue basic to evaluating Shelley: how Shelley evaluated his own texts to the

8

Introduction

point of releasing only some of them. We are left with a question crucial to the future of Shelley studies. What shall be the govern­ ing criteria for our demarcations and assessments of "what Shelley really wrote7? Ultimately, we believe, these re-evaluations of Shelley's and his critics' evaluative schemes mediate between constructions that have either been kept too separate or been equated too uncritically: 'our7 Shelley and Shelley in his time, 'modem' and 'Romantic' criteria of evaluation, the well-known and the rarely-examined works of Shelley, and political and biographical as opposed to aesthetic and theoretical approaches to him. Indeed, the editors and contributors hope that no 'one Shelley7 emerges from these evaluative dialogues. For us, there was and is no single Shelley, particularly in his powerful but varied body of writing. There is rather the sceptical, hopeful, radical re-evaluator of himself and others who forces us to re-examine our own values in the process of evaluating him engaged in his process of assessing what values are most fruitful for the understanding and improvement of hu­ man life and art. A s Shelley writes in Adonais, T h e splendours of the firmament of time' survive, if they are great writers, not because they shine with a fixed, immobile light, now or at their own moment, but because they 'contend with time's decay7 in what they write, putting the supposed fixities of their own and future times to the test.

I. Evaluating Shelley in his Wider Contexts

'G o d , and K ing, and L a w ': A n arch ic A n x ie ty and Sh elley's C anonical Function C H A R LES J. RZEPK A

Last came Anarchy: he rode On a white horse, splashed with blood; He was pale even to the lips, Like Death in the Apocalypse. And he wore a kingly crown, And in his grasp a sceptre shone; On his brow this mark I saw— 'I am God, and King, and Law !' — The Mask of Anarchy M y fellow Romanticist, Marilyn Butler, tells me that she received a call from a British government official not long ago— a counter­ part to our Director of the National Endowment for the Humani­ ties, I suppose— asking if she would be good enough to name her choice of the 'top ten' British authors of all time. It seems the Tories were trying to create a standard national curriculum in English literature. Professor Butler politely declined to participate. With calls for tighter restrictions on the academic canon and for a unified national curriculum increasing on both sides of the Atlantic, one might argue that Shelleyans can ill afford to waste their ballots, and that we lost a golden opportunity when Profes­ sor Butler refused to fill hers in. Offhand, however, I can think of few less appropriate candidates for canonisation than Percy Bysshe Shelley. Implacable foe of hierarchies, inveterate sceptic of institutional claims on what Bourdieu has called 'cultural capital' (53-6), stubborn critic of reified values, atheist, revolutionary, self-exile— Shelley would seem a long shot for co-optation into the ranks of the anointed. In the current stormy climate of debate over standards of literary value and ideological bias in methods of evaluation, however, some conservative combatants might be tempted to rehabilitate the poet despite himself, discerning an approach to canon-formation

12

Charles J. Rzepka

in documents like the Defence of Poetry, which seems to appeal to standards of value assumed to be universally self-evident. Thus, when Shelley defines poetry as 'the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth', or as the 'unveilfingl' of the permanent analogy of things', or claims that poems create 'actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature' (485; emphasis added), stub­ born supporters of the traditional canon, and of Shelley's place in it, could maintain that, like them, he is basing his arguments for poetic excellence on a belief in absolute and unchanging values, and specifically on those universal 'truths' of an 'eternal' human condition that feminist, cultural materialist and ethnocentric crit­ ics decry as spurious reifications designed to perpetuate the inter­ ests of white Western males. Indeed, Shelley seems to have taken the legitimacy, self-evidence and universality of such a canon for granted. His select group of 'eternal poets' (488)— including Homer, of course, as well as the purported 'authors' of the Old Testament, along with Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton— would have no trouble earning the im­ primatur of the most enthusiastic present-day defenders of 'cul­ tural literacy,' or the hearty anathema of its opponents. And yet, were he questioned on the matter, I have little doubt that Shelley would have rejected any suggestion that the 'un­ changeable forms' or 'possible varieties of human nature' that he invokes in the Defence could possibly be exhausted by the litera­ ture of a single gender, race or tradition, or that the poets he most admires and cites as exemplary should become required— or even recommended— reading for the nation. Shelley's polemic is a defence neither of the canon, nor of the canonical imperative. It is a defence of poetry as an activity implicated in all human endeav­ ours, and the poets that he invokes are simply those most vital and familiar to him personally, as well as those whose poetic creden­ tials are least apt, presumably, to be questioned by his audience. It is important that we recognise the strategic impetus behind Shelley's choices and invocations, and, drawing on studies like Stephen Behrendt's Shelley and his Audiences, that we keep in mind the poet's always acute sense of just which audience he is address­ ing on any particular occasion, and why. Let us also keep in mind the poet's own early enthusiasm for 'popular' forms like the Gothic novel, their long-lasting influence on his work, his admira­ tion (even envy) of Byron's popularity, and his encouragement and help in Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein, a role she gratefully acknowledged in her 1831 preface to that book. If Mary, Monk Lewis and Byron are not mentioned in the Defence, this

'God, and King, and Law'

13

does not mean that they are to be excluded from the ranks of 'poets'. A s Marilyn Butler has pointed out, it was not until the 1830s or so, after a long process beginning with the antiquarian movement of the mid-eighteenth century, that critics managed to construct 'the single great line of English poets' that supposedly 'personified the national spirit' (Butler, 67-8), a personification contiguous with that of 'the West7 in the line of Homer, Vergil, et al. Only after his death did Shelley's exemplary writers become enshrined— by the powers he detested— in the Pantheon of West­ ern Civilisation. For that matter, the 'poetry7 Shelley says he admires in Homer, Dante and Milton does not consist in, but persists despite certain 'peculiar errors' endemic to their place and time (487), 'errors' that many of the canonisers who followed Shelley— white, Christian, male citizens of a Western imperialistic nation— consistently in­ cluded among the 'universal truths' of 'human nature': the masculinist glorification of 'revenge' in Homer (488), and the doctrinaire 'idealization]' of 'distorted notions of invisible things' in Dante and Milton (498). Poetry, meanwhile, can be found, Shelley insists, even in the cloyingly sensual— at times, semi-pomographic— 'bucolic' and 'erotic' poets of the Hellenistic period (492-3). A t least their 'sensibility to pleasure', says the poet, had not been utterly destroyed by the 'social corruption' of their time. Unlike most upholders of a restricted canon, who will not hesitate to spell out in detail the values and principles that their selection is meant to defend, Shelley evinces a refreshing reticence when it comes to enumerating or exemplifying.the 'eternal truths' and 'unchanging forms' of human nature by which he vindicates 'poetry7, or to telling us just which 'analogies' between just what 'things' are and are not 'permanent7. It is not that these phrases are meaningless to Shelley, but rather that they are vacant in the best, which is to say, the most productive, sense: they clear a discursive space for 'the human mind's imaginings'. Like the snows de­ scending on the summit of Mont Blanc, their meanings are as multiform as the minds that conceive them because 'none beholds them there"' in the place where reference, 'the secret strength of things/ Which governs thought7, is assumed to 'inhabit'. Thus, while it is true that the works Shelley happens to admire do coincide for the most part with what Wendell Harris would call the academic or 'pedagogical' canon of the poet7s own time (113), as well as what Alistair Fowler defines as the 'official' and 'critical' canons of a later day (98,99), and while the poet7s rhetoric often resembles that used by the upholders of such canons, his list,

14

Charles J. Rzepka

unlike theirs, is neither prescriptive nor proscriptive. It is, instead, broadly descriptive and, by implication at least, enormously inclusive— indeed, so inclusive as to make the activity of canonformation itself an almost pointless exercise. This is not to say that Shelley is not selective. In fact, he is just as selective as any of his pedagogical, official, or critical counter­ parts. What makes Shelley's canon different from products of a more institutionalised selection process, however, is that Shelley is not trying to separate 'poets' from poetic pretenders, or 'poems' from mere versifying, but rather selecting out of the vast range of all human works— including Greek philosophy, Christian reli­ gion, Roman law, and Celtic myth, as well as writing of every description— those poetic elements appearing, in one degree or another, in all of them. Shelley is not constructing a canon in the exclusive sense, as though it were a Hall of Fame. He is examining a handful of poets whose gifts he knows his audience takes for granted in order to isolate that often unremarked because all-toofamiliar element that, like the hypothetical phlogiston, can make any compound fashioned by the human mind combustible. What is that element? One w ay to answer this question is to observe that the very principles of selection Shelley elaborates and applies in the Defence arise from a radical— and for that matter, highly unconventional— view of poetry itself as an activity funda­ mentally opposed to any attempt at consensual prescription and proscription, canonical or otherwise. The most important thing uniting all these poets qua poets in Shelley's eyes is not their allegiance to one or another ill-defined Platonic universal, but the fact that they were all 'the authors of revolutions in opinion' (485)— re-fashioners of law, religion, and the arts— and this is true of even the least among them. Their specifically poetic value, in short, inheres in the fact that the work they did brought into question the inherited values of their day and age. The Defence demonstrates that the critical elaboration of principles of evalua­ tion and selection, even the appeal to so-called 'universal truths', need not result in a canon that is dogmatic. Indeed, the essential difference between Shelley's 'personal' canon, to draw again on Fowler's terminology (98), and an 'official' canon is that Shelley's list is offered in a spirit of scepticism, while most 'official' canons are proposed in a spirit of dogmatism. Sceptical and dogmatic canons can most easily be distin­ guished if w e employ the analogy between canon-formation and conversation recently proposed by Harris: 'Instead of stamping works with authority, literary canons propose entries into a

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culture's critical colloquy7 (112). Or at least, I would add, they do so if they are formulated sceptically rather than dogmatically. If making canons is like contributing to a conversation, we can tell sceptical canons from dogmatic canons not by attending to their criteria of selection, nor, for that matter, by noting one or the other's lack thereof, but by paying attention to their effects on a particular culture's or sub-culture's critical conversations. Sceptical canons help to establish, to maintain, or to extend a colloquy or conversation on the question, What is worth attending to? and Why? They are 'sceptical' not in the commonly misunder­ stood sense that they cast doubt on the canonical enterprise as a whole, but insofar as they resist the temptation to advance a claim to objective truth. The list of works and the principles of selection that shape a sceptical canon are thus, in the best sceptical tradi­ tion, bracketed within an epistemological circle, which Terence Allen Hoagwood has described most succinctly in Scepticism and Ideology as 'a mentalistic or phenomenal limit to the truth content of knowledge claims' (33). To draw on Shelley's own language in the Defence— to wit, 'A ll things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient' (505)— what sceptical canons offer, simply, is an account of the existence of certain literary works as perceived 'in relation to' one particular 'percipient' who considers them worthy of attention, along with an explanation of the how and w hy of that judgement of worthiness. For this reason, scepti­ cal canons make up part of an open-ended evaluative discourse that is more extensive and inclusive than any single canonical description can possibly be. Sceptical canons are no more (but no less) than what Shelley would call 'episodes of the cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men' (494). Dogmatic canons, by contrast, tend to impede the ongoing critical conversations of a culture or sub-culture, or even to bring them to a halt, by advancing implicit or explicit claims to objective truth, Dogmatic canon-makers presume to offer final or, like Anarchy in The Mask of Anarchy, 'apocalyptic', answers to ques­ tions of What? and W hy? Drawing on the ecclesiastical meaning of 'canon' as a restricted list of books considered dogmatically correct, such critics would write Finis to Time's great cyclic poem, which is nothing less, in canonical terms, than writing an end to the history of evaluative criticism itself. If I were asked to compile a Shelleyan checklist of specific elements that distinguish sceptical from dogmatic canons, I would say, first of all, that sceptical canons evince love and res­ pect for one's interlocutors, dogmatic canons fear and suspicion.

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Secondly, sceptical canons are based on belief, dogmatic canons on faith. Third, sceptical canons promote individual free­ dom of choice b y opening up new possibilities and perspec­ tives for evaluation; dogm atic canons promote institutional or autocratic control b y limiting such possibilities and narrow­ ing such perspectives. One could summarise this checklist by saying that the sceptical canon is, in a very special Shelleyan sense, poetically motivated, the dogmatic, in a very special Shelleyan sense, anarchically motivated . We may argue interminably about the fine points of what Shelley meant by the poetic, but I think we can agree on a few fundamentals. Poets, as opposed to anarchs, are constantly calling into question the status quo ante. They know that, precisely be­ cause 'A ll things exist as'— that is, insofar as and in the manner in which— 'they are perceived' (476, emphasis mine), the words and works of individual 'percipients' that see things differently from our own should be studied, if not admired, but in any case, never wholly rejected. Accordingly, the language of sceptical canonisers should, like that of poets, 'mark[] the before unapprehended rela­ tions of things'— in this case, poets themselves to each other—and perpetuate!]' this 'apprehension'. Like great poetry, a great canon should 'lift!] the veil from the hidden beauty of the world' of letters, 'and make!] familiar objects'— that is, literary works— 'be as if they were not familiar' (487). It should also, I think, by implication, make unfamiliar literary objects— like those conde­ scendingly referred to as 'effeminate' or 'vulgar'— strangely familiar.1 Whenever once-fresh apprehensions begin to harden into fetishistic 'truths', then, writes Shelley, 'language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse' (482). True con­ versation, in other words, will be at an end. In shaping canons, as in writing poetry, the 'great secret'— again I refer to Shelley's own words— is 'Love; or a going out of our own nature' (488). The critic who would offer a vision of the canon must put himself or herself 'in the place of another and of many others' (488), not in a position from which these others appear as a threat. We should keep in mind the reflections of Julian, the eponymous narrator of Shelley's 'Julian and Maddalo', on the vexed camaraderie of his contrarian friend, Count Maddalo: 'his wit and subtle talk would ... make me know myself' (560-61). In short, what Shelley meant by the poetic was that which rearranges our settled and parochial views, and thus enables us to increase our degree and range of freedom, not only from the tyranny of others' percep­ tions, but from the tyranny of our own unexamined preconceptions.

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What Shelley meant by anarchic is also fundamentally clear: the anarch appeals to the supposed incontestability of certain 'values', 'laws' or 'principles' in order to intimidate or shame others into making corresponding evaluative decisions, with the aim, ulti­ mately, of controlling their behaviour. In the matter of canonicity, this means dictating what they should or must read. Most often, as Frank Kermode has pointed out, the 'medium' of such 'pres­ sures and interventions', of these 'forces which limit, or try to limit, what [one] may say, and the ways in which [one] may say it7, 'is the institution' (Kermode, Institutional', 72), but there is no particular reason for tracing such edicts exclusively to the citadels of academia. They can be imposed just as readily by the guerilla camps of 'interest groups' or 'marginalised classes'. The desire for control over others is always anarchic because it leads, paradoxically, to social disorganisation, as Shelley implies when he says that, at the point where the 'before unapprehended relations of things' begin to lose their freshness and harden into a dubious objectivity, they become 'disorganised'. Anarchy, for Shelley, is any imbalance in the social distribution of pleasure that is imposed by a self-appointed agent wearing the face of authority or righteousness— Anarchy's 'mask'— so as to advance or protect parochial interests. The arbitrary, anarchic valorisation of indivi­ dual or group power always proceeds under the banner of values and principles taken to be universal and self-evident, that is, taken to be articles of dogma, the denial or questioning of which is construed as a form of heresy, delinquency, irresponsibility, dis­ respect or just plain 'bad citizenship'. I should add that anarchic anxieties leading to the formation of dogmatic canons are just as likely to motivate those attacking the traditional canon of 'great books' as those defending it. The final effect of these anarchic anxieties is to stifle, or at the very least to restrict and attenuate, ongoing canonical conversa­ tions— and there are always many such conversations, never just one, taking place at the same time at diverse sites in every commu­ nity.2 The causes of anarchic anxiety are many, and by no means reducible to ideology, but all anarchs, in Shelley's view, seem to have one thing in common: fear. The fear of losing one's job or institutional power or standing in the profession, or of one's profes­ sion losing its standing in the culture at large, or more commonly, the fear of appearing foolish or wrong or out of step— a bad person, a bad teacher, a bad scholar, an incompetent steward of the 'best that has been thought and said', a disloyal member of a particular ethnic or racial group, 'unwomanly' or 'unsisterly', 'unmanly7 or

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'unliberated', 'unpatriotic' or 'unsophisticated'. Many other, nobler feelings— love of literature, admiration for certain writers, concern for one's cultural heritage—motivate the formation of canons in general, but only the admixture of fear seems to incite canonical dogmatism. Motivated by fear, defenders of dogmatic canons tend to make certain truth claims about the values that their particular canons are supposed to embody and uphold— let's say, in line with current professional polarizations, 'universality', 'accessibility7, 'sublimity', 'complexity' on the one hand, and on the other, 'human dignity', 'fairness', 'inclusion', and 'representation'. Dogmatists take these values to be both universally self-evident (so that whoever fails to recognise them must be considered a fool) and absolute (so that whoever presumes to question them must be considered a knave). Thus, in a recent Partisan Review discussion moderated by Edith Kurzweil on the subject of 're-making the canon', the eminent historian of the nineteenth century, Gertrude Himmelfarb, voiced her 'conviction of the universality and accessibility' of the tradi­ tional, Western academic canon, and of its power to 'transcend the limitations of race, class, and gender7 (361,362). But a truth claim of that magnitude can only be confirmed by the testimony of all readers from every race, class and gender who have had a chance to read the authors Himmelfarb admires. Should even one minority, working-class or female reader not find this canon 'transcendent' to, yet still 'accessible' from, the vantage of his or her own historical situation, Himmelfarb's claims of 'transcendence', 'universality and accessibility' would have to be abandoned, or at least qualified to the point of making them applicable to a great many works lying outside the canon as well. A t the other end of the spectrum of canonical dogmatists, efforts like those of Jane Tompkins to 'reconstitute the notion of value in literary works' by trying to determine whether the aims and achievements of an author 'were good or bad' (Sensational Designs, xviii), necessarily reduce literary value to a putatively universal standard of morality that is in fact, as John Guillory has recently pointed out, naively contemporary ('Canonical', 490).3 Canonical dogmatists generally align the idea of the literary canon with that of its etymological and ecclesiastical antecedent, the Biblical canon, which was originally used to designate those sacred books taken to be 'the Word of God'.4 For this reason, they often verge on hagiography, and hagiographers tend to bristle at any hint of irreverence directed at their patron saints. Professor Himmelfarb, for instance, suggests that the process of canonisa­

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tion is important for the purpose of inculcating 'respect' for 'great' authors, so that their works will receive the attention and study they deserve from those initially unfamiliar with them: The student who came to a book prepared to respect it, to try to understand it, simply out of [a canonically inspired] respect for the author was, I think, on his w ay to a better understanding of it. A t the very least he knew that a wiser man than he had written i t ... and that he ought, therefore, to make a serious effort to understand it— to understand it before presuming to pass judgment on it. (in Kurzweil, 362) Anarchic anxieties often incite dogmatic canonisers to restrict to their own household gods the care, attention and respect that is the due of every artist— indeed, of every human being. I would hope that no one coming for the first time upon a literary work wholly unknown to him or her would make anything less than a 'serious effort to understand it' before putting it aside, regardless of what we of the priestly class may or may not have to say about the author's wisdom. Hagiographic fetishism is not a vice with which Shelley can be charged. All of the poets he admires, he readily admits, have faults peculiar to their historical moment. Some even display vices of a more personal nature. But what makes them all great poets is not that they upheld and maintained a particular set of national, cultural, moral or even aesthetic values, but that they gave, and continue to give, pleasure. It is the pleasure a reader derives from a writer, after all, not the 'value' of a writer weighed on another reader's scales, and certainly not the 'moral values' informing an­ other reader's scheme of life, that is for Shelley, as for Wordsworth, the fundamental criterion of poetic excellence.5 Indeed1, says Shelley, 'the last triumph of evil' and the 'end of social corruption' is not the erosion of law or morality, nor blindness to beauty, truth and goodness, but the extinction of 'the sensibility to pleasure', even in its most appetitive form (493). If a new reader's initial respect for a writer yielded no commensurate pleasure, I doubt that Shelley would have seen the point of continuing to read that writer simply because Gertrude Himmelfarb— or Jane Tompkins, or anyone else, for that matter— insisted that he or she was, or should be, 'canonical', which is to say, 'worthy of attention'. It is, of course, our responsibility as professionals to make known, both to our students and to our colleagues, and even to our neighbours and friends, the pleasures we take in one writer or another, and the reasons w hy we value some forms of pleasure

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over others. Perhaps the features that we appreciate in a particular poet, and the reasons w h y w e appreciate him or her, wifi resonate in some hitherto undiscovered recess of our interlocutor's soul. Perhaps not. So be it. A s Wordsworth indicates in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it would be foolish to attempt to reason someone into enjoying a poem. (I wish he had acted more in accord with this insight.) Nothing useful is to be gained by seeking agreement on a monolithic canon and then arguing over who 'belongs' to it, and in what niche. That's all well and good', I hear my colleagues say, meaning of course that it's not. 'But there are still syllabi to be drawn up, and programmes of study to be decided on, and national agendas to be set. Meanwhile, the language of the profession is breaking up into idiolects, and our cultural landscape is undergoing 'Balkanisation' or, alternatively, both language and landscape are 'becoming ever more "hegemonic"'. 'H ow can we act responsibly in the current educational crisis if canons make no truth claims, if all we have to work with are lists of personal favourites?' Or as Harris puts it, adhering to the analogy of conversation, 'Critics, however relativist, must choose what texts they wish to talk about, just as readers must choose what ones to read' (118). First of all, a sceptical canon is not just a list of personal 'favour­ ites', nor does proposing one imply a 'relativist' position in which any work can claim to be as worthy of sustained attention as any other. A sceptical canon is a list of works that someone finds worthy of such attention for specific reasons. We can discuss the relative merits of these reasons, weighing, for example, a purepleasure standard based on what Charles Altieri calls 'prefer­ ences' against what he terms those 'strong evaluations' that 'allow[] a [reader] to represent herself as being an agent of a certain kind' (46). We can exchange views on the desirability, or even the possibility, of adhering to what Hazard Adam s calls 'antithetical values' in the face of the mutual negations of literary and power criteria (751-5). However the conversation proceeds, and whatever decisions result from it, we must submit the reasons for our personal canons to critical interrogation, or forgo partici­ pation in the canonical conversation. If everyone does nothing more than submit 'lists of favourites', then the conversation will soon move on to another topic. The sceptical canon is never 'relativist'— that is to say, 'merely' personal— because, like Shelley's argument in the Defence, which was written in immediate response to Thomas Love Peacock's 1820 attack on contemporary poetry in 'The Four Ages of Poetry',

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it is always framed in the context of an ongoing, conversational dialectic.6 Sceptical canonisers neither shrug their shoulders with indifference, nor make a show of hiding their fists. They speak, then listen. Even dogmatic canons are, after all, no more than lists with reasons attached. The only real difference between sceptical and dogmatic canons is that the one tends to keep the cultural colloquy going, while the other tends to cut it off, attempting to impose 'one law for the lion and the ox', which, as any student of Blake knows, is 'oppression'. I'm not sure w hy some people believe that making curricular or editing or compositional decisions requires that we put a stop to the canonical conversation. We do not need to be dogmatic about the canon in order to agree on what function we wish a particular canon to serve in a particular context. 'A t the practical level', says Harris, there will always be competing canons: it is impossible to avoid the question of which texts one wishes to share or discuss in one's anthology, or critical article, or syllabus, or polemic .... This is all good to the extent that it makes us recognize the clarification of the literary text's functions as the necessary prolegomenon to the process of selection. (118) Among the many functions that selective canons perform, Harris lists seven, in no particular order of importance: 1) provid­ ing models, ideals and inspiration, 2) transmitting the heritage of thought, 3) creating common frames of reference, 4) logrolling (that is, promoting the work of friends), 5) legitimating theory, 6) historicising (that is, casting light on a particular period), and 7) pluralising. In the canonical debate as it has evolved to this point, antagonisms have emerged between the proponents of one or another of these functions, as though the entire canonical enter­ prise could be reduced to a single rationale, or group of related rationales. Thus, the 'heritage of thought' and 'common frames of reference' people often find themselves peering over the ramparts of 'literary value' at decadent 'theory legitimizers' and restive peasant 'pluralisers'. To dogmatists on both sides, Harris would point out that none of these canonical functions is 'nefarious or trivial'. All of them deserve some attention in the curriculum. But none of them can possibly receive the attention due them given the time constraints on the typical undergraduate degree pro­ gramme, (119). For this reason, he adds, 'We need more than ever to be honest with ourselves and with our students about the limited purposes [of canons]— to be honest about what our selec­ tion of texts and our approach to them does not accomplish' (119).

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It must be conceded, however, that Harris has only shifted the focus of the canonical dispute from the relative value of compet­ ing canons to the relative value of competing canonical functions. Given that we haven't enough time to devote to all, or even most, of these functions, which ones ought we to favour in the appor­ tionment of staff, classroom space, class time and preparation? On the most basic, day-to-day level, the question of apportion­ ment will be determined by the syllabus, what Harris would call the 'pedagogical' canon, as drawn up by a particular teacher. That 'pedagogical' canon is nothing less than the agenda of topics that the teacher compiles in preparation for conducting a particular cultural sub-colloquy, usually in the form of a semester-long classroom discussion, or a lecture with discussion section or ques­ tion-period. Pedagogical canons are imposed canons, of course, but they are imposed much in the manner of a diplomatic proto­ col, for the purpose of facilitating a particular discussion. Few teachers would suggest that only the works on their syllabi are worth reading. Pedagogical canons become dogmatic only when used for the purpose of altogether shutting down the discussion— either in class or outside of class— that they are supposed to frame and promote. Of course, it is not at the level of formulating specific course syllabi that anarchic anxieties typically bear their bitter fruit, but in formulating course rubrics and degree programmes. A t this level, I believe we must all bend to the will of the majority of those— usually the departmental faculty— who are entrusted with institutional responsibility for deciding such issues. For this rea­ son I share Kermode's reluctance to conclude that 'the power of the institution to validate texts and control interpretations' is necessarily a bad thing, with the proviso that such power is wielded democratically. And I would agree, with the same pro­ viso, that 'it is by recognizing the tacit authority of the institution that we achieve the measure of liberty we have in interpreting [texts]' (Kermode, 'Institutional', 86) M y proviso will seem rea­ sonable only to those who believe, as Shelley did, in the funda­ mental fairness of the democratic process. It will not sit well with those who fear the tyranny of majorities, and especially not with those who are convinced that such tyrannies lend themselves all too easily to manipulation by so-called 'special-interests', or by 'hegemonic' forces. However that may be, I doubt that adherence to canonical dogma would prove any more helpful in protesting or seeking to overturn curricular decisions than in arriving at them by means of the democratic process in the first place.

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The only effective answer to tyrannies of the majority is not tyrannies of the minority, but sceptical engagement, just as the proper reply to dogmatic canons of the right is not dogmatic canons of the left, but ampler, and more sceptical, conversation. Where such conversations cannot flourish, dogma reigns, and the curriculum becomes moribund. M y advice to those of m y col­ leagues who feel they can no longer tolerate the dogmatic intransi­ gence'— right-wing or left-wing— of the institutions of higher learning to which they are attached is, 'Keep talking ... and look for more pleasurable conversations elsewhere'. Some of the most pleasureable and exciting of those conversa­ tions are taking place outside the academy, in dialects that are not standard English, or in languages that are not English at all, as well as in sub-cultures primarily oral or visual rather than literary. Those who fear cultural 'Balkanisation', those who see in the spread of non-European ethnic literatures or the vigour of popu­ lar culture or the new curricular prominence accorded female writers, the decline of our 'common intellectual heritage' should be reminded that there never was anything very 'common' about it to begin with. For that matter, most truly important cultural and intellectual conversations have historically taken place between the adherents of 'high culture' and the so-called 'barbarians', and those conversations have inevitably ushered the 'barbarians'— marginalised national literatures, class-based discourses and genres— straight through the front gates of the canonical fortress. To engage in discussion with the advocates of the 'noncanonical' is already to begin to include them in the ongoing conversation that comprises a sceptical canon. Thus, as Guillory observes, the term 'noncanonical' has come to designate 'not what fails to appear in the classroom, but what, in the context of liberal peda­ gogy, signifies exclusion,' making the 'noncanonical' a 'newly constituted category of text production and reception, permitting certain authors and texts to be taught as noncanonical' (Cultural Capital, 9)7 Is this conversational contamination a process to be feared, or embraced? Here again, we can learn from the example of Shelley, who argued precisely this point in the Defence when he came to examine the influence of Christian and Germanic mythologies on the declining Roman Empire: 'It is an error', he writes, 'to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic'— that is, the barbarian— 'nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprung from the extinction of the poetical principle' in the Empire they had

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overrun, 'connected with the progress of despotism and superstition' (495-6)— that is, the progress of Anarchy— therein. Considering how many interests among the English-speaking nations remain unaddressed by the limited range of functions appropriate to the white, Western, male canon, the aims of most canonical critics and reformers seem rather moderate, if not downright modest. Generally, I hear pleas to expand, not to re­ place the canon, and to add to, not to subtract from, the repertoire of critical approaches and methods by which we can derive pleas­ ure from the reading of texts. Very few pluralisers wish to exclude the most important traditional figures from the modem curricu­ lum, if only because so many of the non-canonical figures they admire were themselves shaped and influenced— positively or negatively— by the work of these white, Western males. Where would Emily or Charlotte Bronte be without Byron? Derek Walcott without Homer? Raymond Chandler without Mallory? or, for that matter, M ary Shelley without Percy? Many feminist and ethnocentric critics are simply asking that we acknowledge, in the work of uncanonised authors that they consider worthy of attention, the same merits long taken for granted in the work of 'official' canonical writers. The effect of such an acknowledgment would be not only to enhance the repu­ tation of the former, but to expand the audience, and influence, of the latter. Thus, m y former colleague and Director of AfroAmerican Studies at Boston University, Wilson Moses, has stated the aim of Afrocentrists to be, not scrapping the traditional Western canon, but 'easing black students into a study of the general and transcendental truth' embodied by that canon, 'through the gateway of the specific. They are seeking a concrete universal or an objective correlative, on which to anchor a more abstract and generalized perception' (in Kurzweil, 373). This is language unexceptionable to the most fervent defender of the 'great books'. Whatever the 'pedagogical' canon decided upon at a given university or college, it is important to keep the conversation going. To that end, decisions must be made with reference to the specific functions and limitations of particular canons, and these decisions must remain open to revision in the light of further discussion and the adumbration of new canonical rationales. In short, all such canons must be proposed, and implemented, in the Shelleyan spirit of scepticism, the advantages of which Hoagwood has eloquently summarised on Shelley's behalf: 'The effect of a transcendental or dogmatic!] account of power is to enslave its

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believers; the effect of a sceptical dialectic is to relocate the construction of ideology within human activity' (63). If canons are constructed to fulfil certain functions, then in what sort of canon should we place Shelley's poetry as it enters its third century? It is important that we who think Shelley worthy of attention find answers to this question, because his place in the 'official' canon has traditionally been rather precarious. Only in recent decades has that position been strengthened by his higher standing in the 'critical' canon, and this rise in stature, in turn, seems to have resulted most recently, in large part, from the 'legitimising' function attached to his work by deconstructionists, whose influence is already in decline. Even if his position in the 'critical' and 'official' canons were to remain steady, however, Shelley's position in the pedagogical canon may well continue to suffer, to the point that his most important works are no longer taught in most undergraduate courses on English Romanticism. According to a recent study by Kim Blank, Shelley is already the next-to-least-often taught of the traditional six major Romantic poets in period survey-courses. In fact, I would wager that at the moment, Frankenstein's position in the pedagogical canon is more secure than that of Prometheus Unbound. Whether or not Shelley will fall to last place among the Roman­ tic poets, or even be overtaken by someone as yet excluded— say, Charlotte Smith or Felicia Hemans— depends ultimately not only on the pedagogical decisions that each of us makes, but on our willingness to stand up and explain w hy we consider Percy Shelley's writings worthy of attention. Our reasons will no doubt be varied, even idiosyncratic. With any luck, we shall contradict each other! But I think we can all agree that if there is one canonical function for which Shelley's writings are perfectly suited, it is that which encompasses the writings of the great prophets, questioners and gadflies— Jesus and Socrates, Swift and Voltaire, Blake and Whitman, Wollstonecraft and Emily Bronte. These are the writers who have taught us to remain vigilantly sceptical, in the construction of canons as in every other interpretive and evaluative endeavour. Should the reasons we advance in our defence of that vital function reach, at some future date, ears that can no longer hear, it will be the result, not of our collective failure of allegiance to some canonical dogma, but of our collective failure to envision Shelley's 'before unapprehended relations' to the writers that our contemporaries, and readers to come, find worthy of attention.

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Charles J. Rzepka NOTES

1. Hazard Adams's insistence on the importance of 'antithetical crit­ eria' of literary evaluation which focus on a text's ability to 'continu­ ally challenge!] one to think further in a new light or to think again through the whole' (758) resembles Shelley's emphasis on making the familiar unfamiliar, as does Viktor Shklovsky's related, and per­ haps more famous, concept of 'defamiliarization', or ostrannenie. See, for example, Shklovsky's attack on the 'automatism of perception' in 'Art as Device' (12). 2. Susan Aiken advocates a similar, conversational model of 'canonicity', a 'canonical multiplicity in terms of ongoing dialogue, or more accurately, polylogue' (298). 3. Brook Thomas criticises Tompkins from the opposite end of the historical continuum, noting that she 'mistakes the values of a cul­ tural elite for those of a culture's economic and political elite' (29). Tompkins's 1981 article on the same subject, 'Sentimental Power', seems much less moralistically absolute than her later book. 4. Moreover, the current dogmatic notion of a literary canon seems to be indebted more to the modem Christian, rather than ancient Hebrew, model. A s Kermode's summary history of the Biblical 'canon' demonstrates, the notion requires the counterconcept of 'heresy7 (Institutional', 76-7) in order to make sense. Such a notion seems alien to the consanguineous and consensual faith of preChristian Judaism. As Bruns points out, however, the first Jewish 'canon', properly speaking—that is, the Torah—was originally devised and defined for political purposes, 'to strengthen the monarchy and the priest­ hood' of the Hebrew nation 'b y centralizing the court and the Temple cult in Jerusalem' (70). In this sense, the Jewish 'canon' seems to have arisen as a sectarian reaction against the parochialism of local sacred practices and legal punishments that prevailed during the era of Judges. In short, whatever its current status, the canonising of the Hebrew Torah was motivated, in the first instance, by fear. Even so, Bruns admits that the modem 'notion of canonization... is a patristic idea ... not easy to map onto earlier periods' (66). 3. With Bentham and the Utilitarians in mind, Shelley defines 'utility' as that which gives us pleasure, and goes on to distinguish 'poetic7 pleasure, which is 'permanent7, from other kinds, which are 'transi­ tory7, or in larger terms, 'whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense7, from the mere 'banishing [of] the importunity of the wants of our animal nature7 (500). Shelley, like Wordsworth and De Quincey, would thus discount all 'utility7 derived from "books of knowledge' as being unpoetic. 6. By stressing the permutations, wide distribution, and unpredicta­ bility of poetic genius and 'the spirit of the age', and by refusing to fill in, as it were, the metaphysical blanks in his own argument, Shelley keeps his canonical perspectives wide open. The Four Ages of Poetry7presumes, by contrast, a dogmatic notion of the canon, which for Peacock is necessarily confined to a handful of poets from the 'iron', 'gold' and 'silver' ages of poetic history, ancient and modem. Peacock applies to the historical record an absolute standard for including or excluding individual poets from that group which, he believes, has proven itself to be 'worthy of attention'.

'God, and King, and Law' 7. Guillory wishes to distinguish a spurious notion of the "noncanonicar as referring to a group excluded from representation in a certain body of works, rather than the more worrisome reality of exclusion from "access to the means of cultural production" through the academic definition and control of "literacy", "the systematic regulation of reading and writing", which has, over the past two hundred years or so, been used to mark a particular form of aca­ demic cultural ascendency (Cultural Capital, 8). From this point of view, the academic advocates of both "canonical" and "noncanonical" literary works, and their students, male and female, majority and minority, have much more to fear from the growing class of whitecollar managerial professionals and their children, for whom the notion of "critical" or "aesthetic" value, or skill in discoursing upon and interpreting the "fine arts" in general, no longer function as "cultural capital' with the power to mark and valorise class distinc­ tions. As "cultural capital' accumulates less and less in field of liter­ ary study and more and more in the fields of computer and machine languages, the control of access to "literacy" in the culture will shift accordingly, imperiling the study, appreciation, and transmission of both "canonical" and "noncanonical" works in the academy. The terms of the canonical debate as Guillory sets them forth are very similar to those set forth by Shelley in the Defence as he sought to re-define, for an increasingly utilitarian professional and techno­ logical society whose material standards of value Peacock had defended, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, in The Four Ages of Poetry", the notion of "true utility" (502) as "pleasure in its highest sense' (501), that is "durable" and 'permanent' pleasure (500) as opposed to the ’transitory and particular’ pleasure of material consumption (500): "We have eaten more than we can digest" (502).

27

Of Education STUART CURRAN

Those who profess a scholarly concern for elucidating (even perhaps for proselytising) the thought and art of Shelley share something more than a mere interest in one writer. All of us, however diverse our cultural or professional situations, have found ourselves at some point or another having to assimilate a more or less exten­ sive curriculum of works outside our normal course of education, works that it is unlikely we were ever taught and that we our­ selves will in turn never expect to teach our students. So habitu­ ated are w e by the natural desire to comprehend the mind and vision of a writer whom we are convinced stands tall among the creative geniuses of our heritage that we plunge forward into this specialised education, scarcely pausing to ask who is behind it, w hy it exists, what it constitutes, or how we should construe its independent significance. The correlative question, one that might well prompt such self-reflexiveness on our part, is just what it was that drove Shelley himself, one of the most compulsive autodidacts whom modem history records. To remind us sharply of what is peculiar about the enterprise called Shelley we need only consult the index to Newman Ivey White's biography. There, under the poet's name, we find first a rough chronological index, which is followed by certain useful categories for a biographical taxonomy, such as 'Descriptions and Portraits', 'Health', 'Finances' and 'Miscellaneous Tastes, Traits, and Peculiarities'— these run alphabetically from 'aristocratic prejudice' and 'aversion to bores' down to the predictable 'veg­ etarianism'— and they are succeeded in turn by the presumably less idiosyncratic 'Ideas, Attitudes, and Opinions' held by Shelley. That would seem a sufficient breakdown, one might think, before allowing us access to a list of his works in poetry and prose. But it appears to be not at all sufficient: before the works Shelley wrote there must intervene an entirely different set of terms, those he read. Even 'Reading, and Influences from Reading' seems inad­ equate to the urgency of White's stress on formative influences on

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the poet, for it is followed by a further section of 'Shelley's Read­ ing Alphabetically Arranged'. It is true, we may concede, that Richard Holmes has a rather different sense of what matters in Shelley's life, emphasising five attributes of 'character', 'fantasy and horror', 'general ideas and attitudes', 'political and moral ideology7 and 'imagery and themes'. But in the Shelley literature Holmes's biography is notorious for its anomalous investment in the quotidian. White's concentration on the textuality of Shelley's existence is supported by Jones's edition of the Letters, where as Appendix VIE he supplies us with 'Shelley's Reading'— 'his Read­ ing' (thus capitalised) also furnishes the initial entry under the poet's name in the index— and, once more with even greater refinement, it is reiterated in the Feldman and Scott-Kilvert edition of the Journals, whose apparatus includes as its longest section T h e Shelleys' Reading List'. In contrast, for all of Raymond Dexter Havens's endeavour in The M ind of a Poet to secure Wordsworth's serious claim to intellectual weight rather than mere sensibility, there are only five entries under 'education' and none at all for Wordsworth's 'reading'. The very different perspective in which we hold Wordsworth is, perhaps, best epitomised by Mary Moorman's offhand approach to his education: 'We come to the question of what Wordsworth actually read during his Cam­ bridge years' (99), she says, after having exhausted his lodgings, friends, preparation in geometry and dislike of compulsory chapel. The question is answered within two pages, with the greatest attention being given to Wordsworth's esteem for John Langhome, a poet who is— as one would doubtless expect— con­ spicuously absent from any Shelley list. Although it is true that all the early notices of Shelley's life and character were written by friends with pretension to authorship, the universal emphasis on his prodigious reading habits cannot be simply reduced to a habitual privileging of the literary. Hogg reports: No student ever read more assiduously. He was to be found, book in hand, at all hours, reading in season and out of season, at table, in bed, and especially during a walk not only in the quiet country and in retired paths; not only at Oxford in the public walks and High Street, but in the most crowded thoroughfares of London.... I am convinced that two-thirds of the period of day and night were often em­ ployed in reading. (White, 1, 96). Hogg adds that 'A large share of [Shelley's] scanty income ... was always expended upon books' (White, I, 243), and speculates

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about the size and excellence of the library that he would have owned if all the books he had bought and left behind at his various residences could have once been assembled together (White, I, 244). Hunt paints a similarly devoted existence: He rose early in the morning, walked and read before break­ fast, took that meal sparingly, wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, walked and read again, dined on veg­ etables (for he took neither meat nor wine,) conversed with his friends, (to whom his house was ever open,) again walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily exist­ ence. (Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 1, 323) The numbing catalogue of books under daily assimilation re­ corded in the Journals makes us aware that this was a shared family regimen. Often Shelley and Mary read according to a dis­ tinctively different programme, whether from taste and literary inclination (Mary had a remarkable command of contemporary fiction that Shelley did not) or as they accrued background for their various writing projects. Even so, we can be sure that when the books were put down, their contents were shared in the small talk of these two professional writers. And not only by them, for Claire Clairmont when in their company seems invariably to have had a book in hand, and wherever the Shelleys visited in Italy (the Gisbomes, Lady Mountcashell) books were pulled from the shelves, talked over or borrowed. What the Journals also richly document is the variety within the daily regimen of the Shelley household. There are generally two or three different books tapped by each of them during the day, with the result that modem students leafing through the daily records cannot help feeling as if they were by means of these surrogates attending a set of university classes, a curriculum that, for instance, in the appro­ priate atmosphere of the university town of Pisa would regularly feature Latin or Greek in the morning, history and philosophy in the afternoon, Renaissance drama after supper, with heavy doses of creative writing and not a little Italian interspersed. It is relatively easy to see where these habits came from, or at least to recognise how an early bookishness in both Shelley and Mary could become so systematised. Here is the description of another such programme of study by a professional writer, that of William Godwin, a generation earlier. He rose early and would read from the work of a Greek or Latin author before breakfast, not for its direct relevance to his

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studies, but to refresh himself, as he saw it, with the best literature__ The remaining morning hours until noon were devfited to writing and to reading.... Reading was a vital process in the search for truth, and his first duty in the autumn of 179 1 was to reread all his most important predecessors beginning with Plato and including Rousseau, Hume, Voltaire, Helvetius, d'Holbach's Systtme de la Nature, Locke, Price, Burke, Paine, Mackintosh, Bentham, Condillac, Condorcet, Montesquieu and others. He also read an immense quan­ tity of history, poetry, novels, and drama. A s a boy he had been worried about what he would do when he had read all the books in the world and it is easy to understand why. In the course of a long life he was one of the last men to have read all the great European authors of ancient and modem times. (St Clair, 59-60) However strained the relations between father and daughter, or between Godwin and his erstwhile disciple Shelley, the pro­ gramme of study imbibed by the one at home and explicitly sought through correspondence by the other became the major determinant of their daily routine. Even St Clair's quotation of Lamb's smart remark (reported, appropriately enough in Hogg's Life) that Godwin 'had read more books not worth reading than any man in history7 (60) seems acutely applicable to the nature of the education that Shelley scholars have largely shared to prepare ourselves properly for our tasks. In this enterprise w e all reveal idiosyncratic 'values', which is perhaps a charitable term for the quirks of Shelley's multifarious interests that have perforce in­ spired our own educational eccentricities. The collective educa­ tion afforded Shelley's students through this imitation would allow us if we so wished to adduce a catalogue of such works that would surpass the putative library Hogg thought Shelley had left dispersed among his various ports of call. To cast our common enterprise in so unflattering a light, however, is to misconstrue our purposes, and those of Shelley too. Scenes of instruction abound in his writing, from Queen Mab to The Triumph of Life. Their nature and contents alter in the course of time, but no Romantic poet so foregrounds the educative process as Shelley does. A t first, if we rely on Queen Mab as our focus, the aim is distinctly Godwinian. A s Shelley justly remarked his ambitions, T h e Past, the Present, & the Future are the grand & comprehen­ sive topics of this Poem' (Letters, 1, 324). Ianthe, in preparation for her encyclopaedic education, is the very embodiment of Godwinian virtue: 'sincere and good; of resolute mind, / Free from heart­

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withering custom's cold control, / Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued' ( o s a , ix.200-2). Mab instructs her, and through her the largest audience Shelley ever attracted, in what the poem every­ where honours as truths that are as ascertainable and demon­ strable as the scientific facticity in which Shelley couches his first two notes, those on the speed of light and the multitude of stars. His epigraphs in Voltaire's French, Lucretius' Latin, and Archimedes' Greek prepare us for the virtuoso intellectual and linguistic fanfare of the notes, which, employing four languages (and pretending to German as well) in their attack on the inter­ locked and mutually supportive tyrannies of capitalism, monarchy and state religion, attain a quality reminiscent of the Olympian sweep of Godwin's indictment in Political Justice. For all the poem's metaphoric privileging of the imaginative act, however, its true allegiance is with an Enlightenment rationalism that, in freeing the mind from 'the icy chains of custom' ( o s a , 1.127), initi­ ates social regeneration. If Shelley never loses that faith in reason's liberating power, it becomes a less sanguine expectation, one increasingly tested in the recast models of his ensuing poems. Equally tested is the balance of mental faculties that Queen M ab manifests in its juxta­ position of visionary poetry and analytical prose, a much more tenuous alliance than Shelley, at least at first, wishes to acknow­ ledge. Indeed, for the next few years it is so uneasily held in place as to make one wonder whether it expresses the true strength of Shelley's convictions. Offering Godwin a sketch of his adoles­ cence at nineteen, Shelley wrote off his juvenile period before he encountered Political Justice in terms that, however coerced he might feel himself as an adult to embrace pure reason, seems calculated at the same time to take as little as possible aw ay from the child's world of fantasy: I ... read romances & those the most marvelous ones unremit­ tingly, & pored over the reveries of Albertus Magnus, & Paracelsus, the former of which I read in Latin & probably gained more knowledge of that language from that source, than from all the discipline of Eton. M y fondness for natural magic, & ghosts abated as my age increased; I read Locke, Hume, Reid & whatever metaphysics came in my way, with­ out however renouncing poetry, an attachment to which has characterised all my wanderings and changes. (Letters, 1,303). When Shelley is not on his good behaviour, no such metaphysicians as Locke, Hume and Reid obtrude: they are conspicuously absent

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from the poetic representations of his education Shelley offered over the next five years, that is, before his departure for Italy. In Alastor both the putative autobiographical voice and the Poet who never writes verse share the same passion for a mystified, fantastic lore. It dictates the surprising tenor of the opening, dis­ tinctly unscientific invocation to Nature: I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee. Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost, Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Like an inspired and desperate alchymist Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmed night To render up thy charge. (23-37) Even if the speaker admits that he has never penetrated to the 'inmost sanctuary' (38) of this Nature, he certainly makes a claim to a highly specialised knowledge his readers would not share. But his Poet would understand; they communicate ably in the same dead languages. Forsaking the conventional grand tour that polishes modem gentlemen, the Poet sets his goals among T h e awful mins of the days of old' (108), from Athens, to Jerusalem, Babylon, Egypt, and at last to the originary Abyssinia. He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world's youth, through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like a strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. (121-8) Although it is possible to read the endeavours of both poet figures to recover secret lore as undercut by the w ay in which the poem continually resolves its hermetic elements into a narcissistic culde-sac, such a conclusion requires that w e read back from our

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later discoveries into a process that by reiteration in both histories, as well as by the heightened rhetoric in which they are invested, originally seems intended to gain our approval. And yet he who 'drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate', in the words of the Preface (69), bears a fraternal likeness to that hectic obsessive at once denounced and empowered in Queen Mab, the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus. In the 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' of the succeeding year, Shelley explicitly renounces such claims to a specialised knowl­ edge as a 'vain endeavour' dependent on 'frail spells' (28-9), and in the fifth stanza of that poem he marks his conversion from the 'poisonous names with which our youth is fed' (53) to the pure 'intellectual beauty7 they distortedly shadow forth. Yet the con­ version to aesthetics is forced and premature, ungrounded in Shelley's deepest concerns. Once more, in The Revolt of Islam, a succession of educational models even more pronounced than those in Alastor evinces the same troubled insecurity about the kind of knowledge requisite to lead a revolution or write a poem. Recounting once again in the dedicatory stanzas a conversion experience, Shelley reverts to claiming access to the arcane: 'And from that hour did I with earnest thought / Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore' (37-8). Predictably, the rhyme demands its complement in 'secret store' (40). In the Preface to the poem, however, we are told in a boldly inflated autobiographical sketch that There is an education peculiarly fitted for a Poet', and, sur­ prisingly, it is one that is conducted almost wholly in public, in the varied scenes of nature, in 'populous cities' and 'amongst multi­ tudes of men'. Even when Shelley adds to this experience the 'poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modem Italy, and our own country7, as an afterthought he appends the rider that he means 'Poetry in its most comprehensive sense', among whose writers, as later in his Defence, he includes 'Historians' and 'Meta­ physicians' ( o s a , 34-5). Of that inclusion, one can say without question, Godwin, celebrated in the Dedicatory stanzas as speak­ ing in a 'voice ... Which was the echo of three thousand years' (109-10), would have approved. In the body of the poem Shelley does shift his terms to accord with this sense of a public mission. The 'magic store' is reproc­ essed as simile in Laon's account of his own education: With deathless minds which leave where they have passed A path of light, my soul communion knew; Till from that glorious intercourse, at last,

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As from a mine of magic store, I drew Words which were weapons. (838-42; italics added) The Hermit who rescues Laon in Canto III is even more richly educated than the youth, but his books, all 'the lore of bards and sages old' (1514), allow him only the limited value of promulgat­ ing universal truth. A true education demands the capacity in turn to energise the people: in this aim the Hermit is only Laon's 'passive instrument' (1549). During the hero's long convalescence occurs the even more striking education of the imprisoned Cythna, as she is forced back first on memory and then on creative intuition: 'M y mind became the book through which I grew / Wise in all human wisdom' (3100-1), she recalls. But the end of wisdom is not knowledge per se, not even the ascertainment of the 'subtler language' (3112) of finely graduated distinctions within the mind; rather it is to become Familiar with the shock and the surprise And war of earthly minds, from which I drew The power which has been mine to frame their thoughts anew. (3133- 5) Doubtless, Shelley's aim 'of kindling within [his] readers a virtu­ ous enthusiasm for ... liberty and justice' ( o s a , 32) dictates his accentuation of the power of oratory, linking the purpose of his poem with the impact of the fictions within it, both the framing recitals within the Temple of the Spirit and the instances of inspir­ ing rhetoric by which Laon and Cythna, particularly the latter, in the words of the preface 'excite ... a generous impulse, an ardent thirst for excellence, an interest profound and strong such as belongs to no meaner desires' ( o s a , 32-3). The enthusiasm the adolescent Shelley associated with magical lore has been trans­ posed into reconstituting knowledge as an active agent of social liberation. No longer is it adequate, as he twice counselled his Irish auditors, simply to 'think, read, and talk' (Prose, I, 49). Indeed, that Godwinian formula, as Godwin himself well recog­ nised, seemed inadequate to Shelley even in 18 12, since w hy else be off in Dublin agitating? Yet, for all the actual political good realised by his Irish venture, it might also be said that Shelley would have done as well at home. If his pretence to arcane knowl­ edge was the stuff of fantasy, the shift of agency to a conspiracy of Illuminati articulating universal revolutionary truths and leading the masses to their embodiment was no less so. Whether from circumstances or temperament or simple

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maturing, then, we might anticipate that Shelley would retreat from his faith in propaganda, as he had from his fantasies of the accession of hermetic lore, and reconceive the purpose of the educational programme to which he had so obsessively commit­ ted himself virtually since childhood. With Prometheus Unbound the 'education peculiarly fitted to a Poet' has reverted to the library: 'one great poet is a masterpiece of nature, which another not only ought to study but must study7 (134). In the Preface to his lyrical drama Shelley underscores intertextuality as the goal of educator and student alike: A Poet, is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others, and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both.... Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are in one sense the creators and in another the creations of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape. (135) If this austere constraining of individual talent to the sustenance of intellectual networks and thus to a dependency on what might later appear as 'tradition' seems a far cry from the staged heroics of The Revolt of Islam, yet, as in that earlier poem, the model of education explicitly supported by the preface is internalised within the text. Prometheus and Asia, the spiritual incarnation of a regenerate earth, foresee themselves being visited in their cave by lovely apparitions ... Of Painting, Sculpture, and rapt Poesy And arts, though unimagined, yet to be, The wandering voices and the shadows these Of all that man becomes, the mediators Of that best worship, love, by him and us Given and returned, (m.iii.49,55-60) What Shelley here defines as the core of all educational experience is a process of shared intertextuality that minimises the effects of individual genius within a mighty, collective enterprise. Such a process must by its nature honour what six years before he called 'a study that is hateful & disgusting to my very s o u l... that record of crimes & miseries— History' (Letters, 1, 340). And if it has not yet been elaborated into its full dimensions in Prometheus Unbound, by 1821, as it is conceived in the Defence of Poetry, the intertextual process of education assumes the character of an ethical act of identification with and recreation through the other.

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It may be that this highly socialised conception of the reading act is a natural evolution from the political straining of The Revolt of Islam, but it may depend, much more than we tend to countenance or that Shelley ever directly acknowledged himself, on a radical shift, as it were, in the location of his library. The move to Italy, at least initially, threw the small family circle wholly on its own resources. Their systematic programme of study offered at once continuity with the past, a ritual of signification, and a refuge from the cultural and linguistic alienation one can sense through­ out the letters of the first year. The very privacy of the reading act in such circumstances must paradoxically have underscored its traditional public, cultural functions. Shelley's turn to translation in the spring and summer of 1818, to which Timothy Webb has so markedly called our attention (The Violet and the Crucible, 35-50) manifests not only the threat to his creativity involved in this wholesale dislocation, but a reflexive impulse to connectedness. The more we find ourselves persuaded by the importance Webb attaches to Shelley's undertaking translation as a singularly private act, that is, without regard for eventual publication, the more curiously evident are its social implications. Especially is this the case with the complex associated with his translation of the Symposium, the major work to which he initially turned his attention in Italy. First of all, it is noteworthy that the Symposium is itself Plato's most socialised work, not a quiet dialogue but rather a polyphony of voice and attitude within the convivial ambience of a dinner party. But the effort to translate it draws Shelley himself into colloquy, as his interaction with the Symposium propels his mind simultaneously in opposite directions, into the private meditation of 'On Love' and into the cultural history of his 'Discourse on the manners of the Ancient Greeks relative to the subject of Love' (Works vn, 223-39). One can certainly argue that at this point Shelley actually had publication in mind and that his two prefatory discourses were prompted, as it were from opposite directions, by a felt need to allay the scandalous import of the first faithful translation of the Symposium in the English language. But the large pattern is the issue, however we construe its develop­ ment, that for Shelley the interaction with such a 'monument of unaging intellect' is itself both personally creative and charged with social significance, drawing him into a community tran­ scending the barriers of epoch, culture and language, drawing him into history. Given the particular emphases of the present inquiry, the some­ what vexed question of Shelley's relations to and views on history

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may be passed without particularised elaboration here. Yet, it is crucial to observe that, whatever objections Shelley may have posed to the subject or however contradictory might appear the various models that over time he abstracted from the past, after Godwin's admonition he read a great amount of history. Once he and M ary moved to Italy, in fact, historical patterning noticeably increases in his writing, from the 'Discourse on the manners of the Ancient Greeks', the Thilosophical View of Reform' and its revision A Defence of Poetry, on the one hand, to the cyclical abstractions of 'Lines Written among the Euganean Hills', Prometheus Unbound and Hellas, to such reconstructions of the Italian past as The Cenci, down to the reductive collapse of history under the weight of its redundancies in The Triumph of Life. One could, of course, argue that by the time he got to Italy Shelley had simply outgrown his boyhood and that it was high time that so systematic a pro­ gramme of reading gelled into a coherent construct of the past. But what appears to indicate a fundamental shift in values is what happens when his inescapable thirst for the arcane momen­ tarily intrudes itself on his mature commitments. In The Witch of Atlas w e find ourselves in old territory, immediately enclosed within the witch's cave, where flows a 'secret fountain' (56) with magical properties, where T h e magic circle of her voice and eyes / A ll savage natures did imparadise' (103-4), where are stored spells for all the senses, 'scrolls of strange device, / The works of some Saturnian Archimage' (185-6) and 'wondrous works of sub­ stances unknown' (201). A more total retreat from the actual conditions of the world could not be imagined; even when the Witch desires company, she must transcend the principles of nature, dismissing the 'Ocean-Nymphs and Hamadryades, / Oreads and Naiads' (2 17 -18 ) from her presence and creating a living oxymoron, her hermaphrodite, out of 'fire and snow' (321). And yet, this 'Eternity', as Blake would have it, 'is in love with the productions of Time.' Even if the Witch and Hermaphrodite seem amoral in their prankishness, their arena is human and their effect is liberating: 'she would write strange dreams upon the brain' (617) begins stanza 72, and it ends by reinforcing the crucial roles of writing and reading in changing society: 'the lying scribe / Would his own lies betray7 (623-4). Similarly, in Adonais the enclosed artifice of the funeral chamber, although arguably more intense and certainly less mutable than the actual world, gives w ay in both the politicised prose introduction and the anathema of its centre to the social responsibilities of true poets and in the dazzling ascent in which it breaks off reinforces, rather than denies,

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the assured social effect of poetry to draw us out of ourselves— ex ducere, to educate us.1 What we may reasonably derive from these two late reinterrogations of the arcane in which Shelley had found the bookish retreat of his adolescence is his mature belief that, however refined through allusion or artifice becomes the act of reading, both its context and its effects are irreducibly social. Such a conclusion allows us to see within an arching and unified perspective the two late works of prose and poetry that strive for a totalising vision and in conventional readings appear so radically discordant, if not simply contradictory, in how they construe it: A Defence of Poetry and The Triumph of Life. One ele­ ment they share is their grasp of history. To say that is not to exonerate Shelley's mollification of the savage chronicles of re­ publican Italy (a wilful distortion he took from Sismondi), nor will it explain how it is that Immanuel Kant comes to be chained next to Catherine the Great in the procession of Life's victims (236). Whatever odd particularities we worry over in either work, we should observe that the ambition of them both is similarly ency­ clopaedic. A lifetime of concentrated reading is brought to bear on, respectively, the contemplative and active constructions of existence. Both are universalised (if we are willing to allow for a Eurocentric perspective to stand in 18 2 1-2 for the universe), delib­ erately crossing all artificial borders of nation, era, language, faith. The extraordinary ease with which Shelley sets Dante (whose masterwork had only just been fully translated into English) at the pinnacle of modem literature, quickly casts Milton as his rival, then forces both to step outside the mere trappings of the Christi­ anity they mythologised is audacious. No less so is the decision to use Rousseau as the pivot on which the modem world hinges, here recognising his mentor in Voltaire, there his intellectual heir in Kant, but all the time acknowledging that he speaks familiarly, across languages and cultures, to an English poet resident in Italy who cannot escape being written upon by, even as he writes to, his age. Above all, what both works testify to— the one in enthusiastic celebration, the other with shifting levels of sceptical magnifica­ tion— is the imperative of finding one's place in the stream of time. In one sense nothing has changed from Queen Mab: Shelley cannot escape his compulsion for 'grand & comprehensive topics' nor his totalising ambition. He could have retrieved his old epi­ graph from Archimedes and applied it to either work: 'Give me a place to stand and I will change the world'. Not only is Shelley so wholly self-assured that he can justly estimate the place of Dante and Milton in the development of European literature, but he

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knows with amazing confidence his own as well. He is in the vanguard— cannot but be in the vanguard— if he is to add his inscription 'to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operat­ ing thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world' (493). Perhaps the stakes against him are over­ whelming in The Triumph of Life, and no critic can wholly relieve this poem of its deeply felt pessimism. Yet none can deny either that it is the poet's very universalising education (he is, after all, the one doing the dreaming) that has taken him outside the trium­ phal course to observe the procession in all its onrushing fatality. Especially here, Shelley, figuring himself on his back on a moun­ tainside, is still looking for a place to stand. I recall this epigraph in the hope of fixing m y subject within a single, unified perspective. It is important to remember that Shelley began and ended with an ambition of towering propor­ tions. If at first he seems attached to a programme of simple Godwinian rationalism— truth serves virtue by breaking custom's chain— even so, it requires a mammoth commitment to assimilate all that truth. A t the same time that he sets himself to this regimen, there is a part of the youthful Shelley that wants to have the keys to the secret passageway or the magic incantation that will allow him to bypass all that personal struggle with intractable experi­ ence. And this seems linked, in his several representations of his own development, to the formation of a conversion experience that would adopt him one of the elect and similarly would obviate the need for any gradual transformation through education. But the gradual transformation does takes place, whether he wills it or not, freeing him from a sense of isolated purpose into a remark­ ably socialised conception of the educative process. Perhaps the appropriate w ay to understand that is to empha­ sise the freedom offered Shelley by this view of education from the various parochialisms he had inherited or had earlier imbibed. Although it may be true that Shelley scholars are collectively forced to put together a formidable mine of secret lore to which the study of Shelley has led us, there is a second and a far more significant list to which we have likewise been led, the altogether remarkable bibliography of the Defence of Poetry. After 170 years it stands, unequalled by any contemporary document of European Romanticism, as the defining statement about the nature and contents of European comparative literature before the eighteenth century. To compare Warton's History of English Poetry (1774-81) for that particular literature, or to set Thomas Dibdin's Library Companion (1824) against Shelley's, is to be forced to acknowledge

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a signal difference: different as they are, both Warton and Dibdin in comparison with Shelley are curiously antique, eccentric, beset with the problems of establishing standards of taste and impor­ tance against special interests of education and audience expecta­ tion. But A Defence of Poetry offers us, by and large, the canon as we conceive it today. It was taught in no university, written up in no history, anthologised in no set of matched volumes. It is, most remarkable of all, conceived not as the catalogue of a museum, but as the record of a collective effort of the human spirit throughout history to effect its liberation from the the bonds of ideology and the inevitable dislocations of time. It may be the case that today we would ourselves profit from being liberated from the dead metaphors that have congealed upon the notion of a secure canon of European literature. It is surely part of the genius of Shelley's achievement in the Defence that he coined the term 'high poetry': 'All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially' (500). But our culture tends to retain the aristocratic overtones of that idea of canonical importance and sacrifice the democratic impulse Shelley saw so surely at its base. For Shelley, 'high poetry' is linked, in a determinedly secular way, to the justification Milton offered for his programme of study in 'Of Education': T h e end of learning ... is to repair the ruins of our first parents....' In his Second Defence of the English People Milton listed this tract as one of several he had published in the cause of liberty. That, too, is the essential goal of education for Shelley, and, in turn, it is this 'high poetry', the united programme of study and ever-progressing intellectual ambition, that he leaves to us. NOTE

1. I argue the case for this social and political interpretation of the frame of the poem in 'Adonais in Context'.

Shelley and the Question of Joint Authorship M A RILYN BU TLER

It has become fashionable to consider Romantic authors as col­ laborators. During 1992, Susan Eilenberg's Strange Power of Speech addresses Wordsworth, Coleridge and literary property-rights or possessiveness; Jack Stillinger's M ultiple Authorship and the M yth of the Solitary Genius tackles different examples in discrete essays, half in the Romantic period. Canonical Romantic poets make the obvious ground for this enquiry, having long been approached as solitary geniuses, while their circles provide a good supply of collaborators. Perhaps the familiarity of the material explains why no Romantic author-despot has yet been toppled using this method, and w h y the literary hierarchy seems to be much where it was. In Eilenberg's accomplished study of (mainly) the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth emerges from his internecine struggle with Coleridge for posses­ sion of the collection with his own ascendancy confirmed— and Coleridge's relative mediocrity secure too. Yet, rather oddly, Nor­ man Fruman's case that Coleridge was a plagiarist of virtually criminal dimensions has not so much been disproved in the 1980s, as circumvented. He has been let off because, as Stillinger observes, what for Fruman was theft has turned into a contest for property rights, which everyone else engages in too. So that7s all right, then: in fact it leaves critics with a clear run into a freshened close reading; or psychobiography; or source-hunting, remodelled as inter-textuality. Shelley may, however, be a more difficult case than Coleridge. One reason is that he is now de facto challenged, though it's not altogether tactful to mention it, by the greater classroom popular­ ity of M ary Shelley's Frankenstein; it's not clear which writer's interests will be served, if either's, by teaming them. Another reason is that Shelley had a conscious investment in joint author­ ship. Most of the best work in this field in the 1980s has seen the issues as essentially unconscious, in an inarticulate psychic strug­ gle for mastery over the text, probably against the claims of a rival.

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Without giving up this aspect, which in the hands of, say, Jerome Christensen and Eilenberg has been subtle and profitable, we ought also to acknowledge the ideological visibility, indeed the central­ ity, of questions of proprietorship, sole ownership and property in the period. Of the three revolutionary keywords, Liberty, Equal­ ity, Fraternity, w e sometimes neglect the active political meaning of the second and the third. Equality gets more early 19th-century edge when we gloss it as levelling, the attack on property. Frater­ nity scatters into sociability, communitarianism, co-operatives, combinations. Since all Shelleyans acknowledge Shelley's radical­ ism, we should have been looking harder at specific literary w ays in which it might have expressed itself. M y concern here is with a brief 'spot of time' (18 15-16 ) when he is one of the most thorough­ going, self-conscious and intriguing of Romantic property-sharers. There is certainly an extensive context, even at the time of Shelley's birth, in which Romantic writers are moved to become collaborators. The pantisocracy of the 1790s, a scheme precisely for property-sharing, was only ever put into operation as an agreement to pool literary earnings. In 1794 and 1795, all the poetry and prose of Coleridge and Southey, along with that of a third Fricker husband, Robert Lovell, went into the pantisocracy fund. The Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle came into the scheme, as something like its business manager. Even when the group dis­ solved in late 1795, both Coleridge and Southey for a decade usually published with a co-author, each using a style and themes which maintained the group's identity. Not only Lamb, Lloyd, William Taylor of Norwich and Humphry Davy, among their many new recruits, but Wordsworth too, adopted the Bristol house-manner. Preferred forms were ballads (historical and popular), longer metrical romances, sonnets, inscriptions, verse dialogues or eclogues and monodramas; among their leading themes were community, popular superstitions, death and social practices relating to death and burial. It looks as if Shelley, who was deeply versed in the culture and ideology of the 1790s, was fully aware of this communitarian tendency operating as a writing practice and stemming from pantisocracy. A sympathy with that culture seems to account for his strange procedure in Alastor, of writing what professed to be a 1790s poem— and, moreover, writing himself into it as a belated 1790s poet. He also addresses the whole question of joint author­ ship directly in Alastor by re-writing his three seniors to make them a single collective author. While Shelley wrote Alastor between September and December

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18 15 , his friend Peacock was writing his first satirical prose dia­ logue, Headlong H a ll In Alastor Shelley uses Peacock's technique, now familiar again two centuries later as fashionable postmodern bricolage. Peacock is not imitating but patching together real-life written statements by current personalities, whose words make them identifiable, though their characters and disputes are fic­ tional. All his works from here to Gryll Grange are conceived and set out as multi-vocal and jointly authored. N o w the effect of Alastor is not obviously comic in the same w ay, but it is surely meant to be satirical and intriguing, a puzzle-poem. The puzzle isn't what it may be about, but who is writing it. And, as everyone knows who has taken a trip on the Orient Express, the answer to 'Whodunnit?' is not always an individual. Apart from the highly coded Preface, the first test of readers' wits occurs in the poem's frame, which takes up just under a hundred lines of the seven hundred and twenty. These are re­ markably mannered, echoic lines, with the most saliently placed— the first eighteen and the last twenty-five— often directly pointing to Coleridge or Wordsworth, such as the poem's conclusion: Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. Admittedly the rest of the frame, the poem's second verse para­ graph and its penultimate one, introduces Gothic details we don't trace to an individual, though w e might connect it with 1794-9. If Shelley has authors in mind here, they will be Godwin (St. Leon), Southey and Coleridge again. I shall call this fictional Poet estab­ lished in the frame, who is the 1790s collectivism and idealism, 'Wordcoley7. The story Shelley gives Wordcoley to narrate opens at line fifty with the satisfying Wordsworthian echo, 'There was a Poet'. It goes on to recall the wording of Book 1 of The Excursion (1814), where the Wanderer describes his self-education in youth. But what we should really be looking for here in an allegorical story is an already-known allegorical story belonging to the years when the Wanderer, the Recluse and Wordcoley were all young and communitarian. Wordcoley's plot is a Bildungsroman, featuring as so often an early crisis or great error, determining all the rest: the Visionary hero neglects and leaves a domestic Arab maiden who loves him. A lw ays thereafter looking for love, he sees only a phantom, a projection of his own ideas and fantasies. His wanderings take him through time as well as space; most literally, across the

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Arabian desert, through mountains to Kashmir, then west again to the Caspian sea and Georgia. Each personage so far mentioned, the time-travelling back to the ancient world, the two women (the second a phantom) and the mountain journey, partly by boat, occur in the same order in Southey's Thalaba (1801). But other texts parallel the action, by introducing the theme of the mourning or abandoned woman, and by describing a journey, allegorical of life itself, into high arid places. These are Lady Morgan's The M ission­ ary (1811), with its encounter between a European missionary and a veiled priestess, Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), and a book that analytically uses Wollstonecraft-Godwin's St. Leon again (1799). For reasons that may have to do with date, genre, and above all with the after-career of Godwin and Southey, Shelley makes most use of St. Leon and Thalaba. Godwin's novel, set in different Euro­ pean countries in the early sixteenth century, syncretises the Faust-myth with the story of the Wandering Jew to make an allegory of modern individualism, the thirst for power through knowledge.1 St Leon, a French aristocrat, has become poor, but has been reconciled by his familial, feminist wife Marguerite— a theorised or intellectual portrait of Wollstonecraft— to life on a Swiss small-holding. Then in the woods St Leon meets an old scholar who wants to die, but cannot till he passes on his secret, the alchemist's elixir of life. This unnamed figure I take to be the Renaissance experimentalist Paracelsus, who did die in mysteri­ ous circumstances in the early 1540s. If St Leon will take the elixir he need never grow old; he will be able to transmute base metal into gold; he will have power, fame, distinction— Paracelsus tempts him with all the right buzz-words, and ridicules the domestic idyll he has established with Marguerite on the grounds that it is ignoble or, in later terminology, bourgeois. He can have the earth, provided— there's always a proviso— he keeps the secret to him­ self, not even telling his wife, till the moment he gives it away. Betraying the values he shares with his wife, St Leon accepts. His son leaves, Marguerite dies, and St Leon becomes a wanderer, shunned because of the mystery that surrounds him. Godwin's paradigmatic novel explores the clash between two idealisms, the masculine success-ethic that drives the individual to fame and ascendancy at a terrible personal price, and the more social, familial group-ethic, collaborative rather than competitive, which Woll­ stonecraft in the letters of her last two years begins to develop as an alternative system— notionally female, and also fully human. The acknowledged presence of Wollstonecraft in the first volume

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of St. Leon adds greatly to its power for the right reader. Shelley is the right reader. But the career of the Visionary in the inset story of Alastor shows features special to Godwin's hero, who is, like all Godwin's heroes, an obsessive, neurotic, exceptionally assertive first-person narrator. While the reader is induced by the strong plot, with its allegorical overtones, to read St Leon's life critically, he writes a confession as self-lacerating and self-betraying as one of Rousseau's, which displays him trapped in his masculinist dream of self­ aggrandisement and 'self-seclusion'. Not only is the 'crime' of the desertion of the woman repeated in Alastor, but the increasingly sick, guilty hero, driven to pursue his purposeless journey, grows old in a w a y that echoes the uncanniness of the Wandering Jew. The fact Godwin had authored the severe, chilling St. Leon had, of course, great resonance for Shelley. To the man who had eloped with his daughter, the ageing Godwin had done what St Leon prophetically does— denied his own better insights, as feminised by his first wife. He was even now rejecting them in his and Wollstonecraft's daughter and also in Shelley, his adoptive son, disciple, and reincarnation. Not in mere pastiche, then, Shelley re­ tells the inset story in something approaching his own voice. His own literary journey has been Godwinian. The Visionary isn't just another St Leon but another Shelley and another Godwin: about as full-hearted a partnership as Romanticism affords. The same complexity and the same tone of intimacy recur once w e recognise the action as also a reading of Thalaba. To my mind the finest lines in Shelley's poem are H .81-128, an impressionistic description of the world of Thalaba in verse far more resplendent than Southey's: Nature's most secret steps He like her shadow has pursued, where'er The red volcano overcanopies Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ic e ,... Then to the ancient world, 'the fallen towers / Of Babylon', and 'Dark Ethiopa ... where the moon / Filled the mysterious hall with floating shades', and where 'he saw / The thrilling secrets of the birth of time'. Shelley notices what hardly any critic has given Southey credit for, his access to deep time as well as desert space. He also picks up the emotional cost of Thalaba's quest, for Southey does give his hero naturalistic personal relations: he's always in mourning for his parents and his siblings, then his sister-bride Oneiza, and finally the magician's child Laila, a series of deaths all

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partly on his account. Costliest of all, his bride is taken back in the form of a vampire— an episode Shelley ingeniously divides among two women, the Arab maiden and the spectral false image of the ideal. Southey's hero is made sad and vulnerable because he stands for fraternity, a feeling of kinship and correspondence with a lost human family and with animals, birds and insects. This seems tacitly acknowledged in the fidelity of detail Shelley picks up, and in his pantisocratic lines in the introductory part of the frame, where Wordcoley is allowed to boast, ... no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred. (II.13-15) So much the worse now that Southey is Poet Laureate, and that the form on which he puts his stamp, quest-romance, stands for the forked tongue of modem poetry. For, whatever its professed ideology— and Southey was still an egalitarian and a sharer of literary property when he wrote Thalaba— the long poem's epic form and ambitiousness, its pursuit of the sublime and valorising of the hero must all contribute to the aggrandising, the bad emi­ nence, of the individual author. Under the influence of this very individualism, we are inclined to think that as readers of Alastor we must choose between making the Visionary a self-projection by the author on the title-page— Shelley— or some kind of lampoon on the style, views and careers of other writers. M y own solution— that we should identify the poem as a well-signalled experiment in multiple authorship— allows for elements both of self-expression and satire. Yet the poem— oddly, given the tone of the prose preface— does seem to yearn for collaboration. Shelley captures Wordcoley's many voices and attitudes not in their fallen state (Peacock's specialism), but in their youth. By re-reading their best, most hopeful texts, he elicits other writers' internal contradictions. These signal later defections, and yet they also enable Shelley to work in a genre which is gentler and more positive than mere satire. NOTE

1. For a discussion of Godwin's powerful plots, at once symbolic of modem culture and laceratingly critical of modem intellectuals, see my general introduction to Godwin's Collected Novels.

Shelley and the Conditions of M eaning JERROLD E. HOGLE

I Like many who have evaluated Percy Bysshe Shelley at the end of the twentieth century, I do not read his work exactly the w ay I did even a decade ago. I would still argue, however, as a point of departure, that Shelley anticipated some postmodernist assump­ tions, especially in his mature writing. By that time he found all signs and symbols (including but not limited to words) to be so incomplete, so unable to represent any objects or thoughts on their own, that their potential meanings had to be seen in terms of the possible meanings of other signs. That was so much the case for him that all figures in his mature writing ultimately gain their significance from— or are given their value (are 'evaluated') by— the w ay their elements can be transferred into re-presentations of them by other terms, which are themselves already being inter­ preted by figurations in different positions. Meaning, as Shelley came to understand it, is ultimately relational, highly contingent, and, as Tilottama Rajan would put it, primarily 'heuristic' (31): always open to evaluation and revision by different perspectives of interpretation across time and even in the same cultural space (including the same text, which is never really self-contained anyway). A n y construct that uses elements of this signifying movement to restrict its openness and anchor it to some all­ controlling origin or end-point is an act of oppression and repres­ sion that the true poet, for Shelley, is bound to resist by using the potentials in language for disruptive transference and thus for the transformation of closed symbolic orders towards 'unappre­ hended relations' among signs. In that complex little essay 'On Life', for example— written late in 18 19 as a kind of endnote to a portion of A Philosophical View of Reform (474-5, n. 1)— Shelley puts the possibilities of signification this way: a healthy, sceptical 'intellectual system' rightly used, he says,

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reduces the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments of its own creation.— By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including what is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter sense all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others, in their capacity of suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts.-—Our whole life is thus an education of error. (477) On the one hand, there is no perceived 'object' here that is not already a 'sign', something that has been observed, interpreted, and thereby turned into a signifier by a perceiver in another position. For Shelley, after all, 'nothing exists but as it is per­ ceived', to quote 'On Life' again (476). Each perceived sign, more­ over, which is also a thought interpretable by different thoughts, is always other than itself, 'standing not for itself but for others', that is, for other signs and thoughts, not for referents or objects that are somehow entirely separate. A sign will therefore refer to a particular thought only as that thought becomes a sign inter­ preted by others that are themselves open to interpretation. Each sign has the potential, then, of directing thoughts about it towards an extensive 'train' of related signs and thoughts, a kind of intertextuality. Such a movement is celebrated in Shelley's Defence of Poetry as the 'manner' of the poetic process that 'awakens and enlarges the mind ... by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought' (487). A t the same time, a 'misuse' of what signs might be and do can turn their potentials into limitations. If any sign in the sense of an 'object of thought, that is, any thought upon which any other thought is employed', is viewed too much 'with an apprehension of distinction', again in the words of 'On Life' (478), the sign as object can seem so divorced from sign as word or thought that it can appear to be a singular, 'objective' entity already defined outside of perception. Once that assumption is accepted, res­ ponses to such 'objects' can be viewed as predetermined and automatic, with the object pointing only to one thought that in turn leads to just one train of other thoughts. It is when that perversion becomes a constant assumption that the word 'sign' takes on a 'peculiarly' limited definition (signifier pointing to singu­ lar signified) and 'our whole life' thereupon becomes 'an educa­ tion of error' for Shelley. A t that point we have submitted to 'a mist of familiarity' (an habitual view of the supposedly objective

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world) that both 'obscures from us the wonder of our being' (4745) and makes us the slaves of an assumed 'reality' that is actually no more than a construction of signs, something momentary instead of eternal, particular instead of universal, and almost always ideological and political instead of objectively and meta­ physically 'true'. But if that is Shelley's view of how meaning is possible and in danger of confinement (a question to which we will return shortly), we now have to ask what I have failed to ask sufficiently in m y previous work on this poet: what led Shelley to this sense of representation? What prompted his approach to signs and mean­ ing, partly in the philosophies of language and significance he knew, but also in the many other factors that informed the poet's conscious and pre-conscious awareness: the ideological debates, the cultural quandaries, and the social, economic and political circumstances affecting philosophies of meaning at the time of Shelley's life and in the places he lived? What, in other words, were the conditions within and behind the conditions of meaning that Shelley specifies in such pieces as 'On Life' and carries out, to varying degrees, in poems, verse dramas and essays? I propose some answers to these questions in what now follows. After con­ sidering whether m y sense of the Shelleyan sign should be more inclusive than some feel it to be, I go on to pursue those answers by returning to 'On Life' and assessing the most plausible expla­ nations for its view of signification. Then I proceed to evaluate, refine and even revise the best explanations by looking at key moments in the Philosophical View of Reform to which 'On Life' is so closely attached and pointing to the specific historical conflicts being acted out in those moments. Finally, I close by showing how much these conflicts make up the conditions which underlie the definitions of signs in 'On Life' and how those conditions place Shelley in the position of having to evaluate, and then to choose between, different attitudes regarding the relationship of signifiers and signifieds. II First I must deal, however, with what may be the most powerful objections to the sense of representation and reference in Shelley with which I have started this essay. Perhaps the two strongest recent counters to m y apparent position are the proposals offered by Tilottama Rajan in The Supplement of Reading and William Ulmer in Shelleyan Eros. Like some others before them, these critics see the mature Shelley's poetics as divided against itself. For them

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m y sense of a continuous deferral of meanings across different signs and the intervals between them is but one side, the 'perfor­ mative' side id la Paul de Man1), of a poetic drive that, on its other side, projects, desires and even tries to recover transcendental signifieds inside or outside thought. These signifieds, supposedly, are the ultimate 'antitypes' to which Shelley's signifying 'types', be they thoughts or words, try to make reference in their move­ ment between different signifiers, even though they can never reach complete fusions of signifier with signified. The several readings of Shelley that have emphasised a Platonic transcenden­ talism, or a proleptic idealism never really silenced by a Humean scepticism, should gain comfort from these accounts and may take satisfaction in m y view apparently being overturned. But actually I have no doubt that Shelley and the speakers of his works were and are often obsessed by the desire to project and attain transcendental antitypes. Such a desire is one inevitable consequence of the sense of signification in 'On Life'. Signs that seek their meaning in other signs— and thus in positions clearly different from their own— are always looking back or ahead to­ wards a point, beyond the train of past and future signifiers, where reference may resolve the conflict between the differences and similarities among signs (which are at least similar in all being thoughts) by leaping to a formation or position entirely different from the level of differentiation. Shelley exemplifies that inclina­ tion in 'On Life', first when he writes that 'man is a being of high aspirations ... existing but in the future and the past, being, not what he is, but what he has been, and shall be' (476) and then when he follows a 'train' of thinking from the emerging similarity of ideas and objects (both being signs or thoughts) to the ultimate non-difference of 'individual minds' and finally vaults to seeing 7 , you, they' as 'merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind' (477—8). Yet I would still part company from such highly perceptive colleagues as Rajan and Ulmer if they are claiming, as they seem to, that Shelley, until The Triumph of Life, is usually taken by surprise when the deconstructive drives of differentiation and alienation rise up in his texts to counteract his constructive projects of unification and self-transcendence. Such eruptions for him, in my view, are moments of relief, even deliberate forms of salvation. A t least by the time of 'On Life'— and I think well before that— Shelley is as sceptically fearful of the drive towards tran­ scendental reference as he is highly attracted to it, particularly since both drives emerge from his sense of meaning as generated

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by transfers between and across signifiers. For him or one of his speakers or characters really to believe in and consistently defer to some ultimate Referent, be it inside or outside thought, a physical object or a metaphysical essence, is for that projective thinker to become the slave of an object of thought, this one distended into an 'upthrown' Other (as in Canto vm, 11. 3226-306, of Laon and Cythna, in Works, n, 211-20 ), an Absolute that, again, seems to mandate one particular train of thought and destroys the freedom of the mind to pursue 'unapprehended relations'. Consequently, Shelley backs away from the 'one mind' concept the moment he has projected it in 'On Life'. First, he refuses incorpor­ ation into it by denying what he calls 'the monstrous presumption, that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind' (478). He has already shown in Alastor, Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci and other works that projected mental abso­ lutes are usually anamorphoses of the projecting ego itself, under which the projector comes to feel subjected and abjected and therefore inclined to subject others (see Wasserman, 8 4 -12 6 ,2 5 7 61; Woldoff; Bandy, 96 -125; Hogle, 45-57,9 7-16 6 ). Moreover, the desire in the 'one mind' projection for the blending-together of thought and object or self and other is prompted, nevertheless, by movements between different signifier-thoughts. It therefore runs up very consciously, and with quite deliberate scepticism, against the capacity in differentiated figures only to defer to an always distant elision of differences: 'It is difficult to find terms ad­ equately to express so subtle a conception' as the disappearance of separate terms suggested by a 'one mind', Shelley now writes; 'W e are on the verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if w e grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of—how little we know' ('On Life', 478). For him to write otherwise would be for him to deny what he has been saying throughout the essay. The restoration of the mind's freedom in 'On Life' lies in people seeing that it is 'vain'— both in the sense of hopeless and in the sense of presumptuous and egotistical— for us 'to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and that is much' (475-6). Otherwise we will turn our admirable desire for unities and har­ monies among different thoughts or signs into what 'Mont Blanc' regards as 'Large codes of fraud and woe' (1. 81), fixed systems with single dominant reference-points that appear to control and deny the very expansive movements between different thoughts and minds which make projections of unity possible. We will let ourselves be dominated by beliefs in some knowable final 'Cause',

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instead of realising that, as 'On Life' concludes, 'cause is only a word expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard to the manner [here quite clearly the Humean manner] in which two thoughts are apprehended to be related to each other' (478). Ideal­ istic references, for Shelley at his best, must remain consciously sceptical of their referentiality— and thus aware of their basis in signs referring to signs— in order to remain idealistic and hopeful of changes in hegemonic systems of thought and value. In any case, if we include (as I think we should) a longing for deep or distant transcendental reference, albeit an ironic and suspicious longing, in a basic sense of how Shelley viewed the signification of meanings, our questions about the conditions underlying and driving his view are more pressing and more complicated than they seemed a few pages ago. We now have to ask, not just w hy Shelley sees signs and thoughts as referring other signs and thoughts, but w hy he is so anxious both to posit and to distance ultimate antitypes to which thoughts and signs might refer? W hy does he offer both a quest for possible 'truths' outside the limits of interactions among signs and a claim that signs are most liberat­ ing when they prompt the desire but not the act of really transcend­ ing their negotiations among different signifiers? W hy does he keep leaving his speakers and readers undecided on whether there is ultimately more difference or more similarity between particular signs and thoughts or between thought and object, signifier and signified, self and other, siblings and lovers (as in Laon and Cythna), and even male and female, to name a few of the binary oppositions that he seems at once to affirm and to question? What, again, are the conditions of such conditions of meaning? Ill There are, of course, some intriguing existing answers to these questions, or at least partial answers, for which we can find sup­ port in 'On Life' and texts by Shelley that it recalls or anticipates. One answer, as several scholars have revealed,2 is that Shelley was caught between, and strove to reconcile, at least two different philosophies of language and representation current at his time— although I would add that both philosophies also differed from themselves within themselves. On the one hand, when 'On Life' straightforwardly says that 'Thoughts and feelings arise ... and we employ words to express them' (475), Shelley is mainly follow­ ing the Lockean empirical line, best explained to students of the poet by William Keach in Shelley's Style (especially 1-4 1). In this view traces of sense experience (including emotions) become

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'ideas' that are recollections of former perceptions; these then become signifieds that employ words to be their signifiers to other minds— so much so that, in one part of the Defence of Poetry, language is 'a direct representation .... of our internal being!,]... has relations to thoughts alone!, and is therefore] plastic and obedient to the controul of that faculty of which it is the creation' (483). The mind's control is limited, though, insofar as words refer to signifier-thoughts ('ideas') that are recollective of memorytraces which cannot recover the supposed referents of the original perceptions. Hence Shelley follows his 'thoughts and feelings' sentence in 'On Life' with 'W e live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life' (475), and that is one reason w hy it is 'vain' in the very next sentence 'to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being', the most primal signifieds of words being no more than signifiers themselves. On the other hand, there can be no sense of 'cause' in 'On Life', as w e have seen, unless there is first 'a word expressing a certain state of the human mind' when thoughts are 'apprehended' as being related to each other. For Shelley, then, thought may be able to arrive at no clear ideas or foundations for them, and certainly at no projection of their causes, unless there have already been non­ mental signifiers used to give form to the interactions among mental ones (as in Saussure, 1 1 1 - 1 2 ) . In words from the Defence of Poetry, 'neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles' (491). It may be that, as Asia sug­ gests in Act Two of Prometheus Unbound, 'speech createls] thought', rather than the opposite, and only then does thought become 'the measure of the Universe' (pu n.iv.72-3). This view (best explained by Aarslef, 1 3 - 1 1 4 , and Cronin, 1-25) extends the other empirical tradition of such 'Enlightenment' or post-Enlightenment theorists known to Shelley as Condillac, Rousseau, Lord Monboddo, Home Tooke, Godwin, Coleridge and Jeremy Bentham.3 In this scheme the abstraction of words from primal cries into terms related by a syntax, as Condillac puts it, 'im proves] the operation of the human mind' to a point where it can 'give names to things' as they are perceived (Essay on the Origin, 173-4). Relations among verbal signs, in other words, precede and enable the capacity of mind to organise and specify its recollective ideas. Yet in this second concept, too, among most of its proponents— including Shelley— there is an ironic reversal of some its tenden­ cies, often in the name of a potential but lost equality of human­ kind. For these thinkers, as Robert Essick has shown (28-103), the

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later developments and arrangements of what started as primitive cries are always in danger of perverting the 'primal poetry' of natural human understanding into being controlled by hierarchical verbal abstractions too forgetful of 'the language of Adam'. Modem conceptual language, best known to the highly educated, is too distant from the indistinct and inherently metaphoric representa­ tion of basic sense experiences still available, at least in theory, to people of all social classes. To some extent, poetry for Shelley should be, in the words of his Defence, a return to the wondrous instant where 'the savage ... expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in ... language and gesture [that] become the image of the combined effects of those objects, and of his apprehension of them' (481). While the Lockean scheme of language as the effect of ideas cannot escape the presence of incomplete signifiers at the basis of thought, the scheme of language creating thought, which could move ahead towards the continual self­ revision of thought in language (as Shelley sometimes does), harkens back, even in Shelley, towards remote original acts of natural reference in which there is equal importance given to objective perception, the subjective transformation of it, and the need for words to relate both of these to each other, even though language can or has become either creatively or repressively dis­ tant from the initial interplay among all these elements. I do not think Shelley ever entirely resolved the conflict be­ tween, or the conflicts within, these notions of linguistic reference; indeed, I think those contradictions energise his poetry and many of the ideological and figural struggles within it. One reason for this irresolution may be found in a second general answer to the questions raised by Shelley's view of the sign, the answer offered by Tilottama Rajan when she sees the point of departure behind most English Romantic poetry as 'the disappearance of actuali­ zation' in late eighteenth-century 'concepts of the nature and location of meaning' and 'the status of discourse' (15-17). By the 1790s, Rajan writes, a 'disjunction between signifier and signified' is simply becoming so 'endemic to writing' in the West— even as most contemporary concepts of language try to heal this breach in their definitions of signs— that 'a self-present meaning can no longer be located in [a] text, but must be sought in a conception that exists' outside of its verbal formulation and must somehow be recreated in the mind of a reader without direct access to the author's or speaker's consciousness (Rajan, 20). Here again there is a tug-of-war between the control of a sequestered subjectivity, or at least the desire for its control over language, and the

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movement of differing and deferring in and among verbal signs that carries them aw ay from or towards subjectivities that are themselves directed elsewhere as signifier-thoughts keep point­ ing to or interpreting other types of signifiers. Rajan's explanation, in turn, is quite close to a third answer offered by Jean Baudrillard in his brief history of Western con­ cepts of the sign.4 He posits a medieval time that, when later eras harken back to it, seems to be controlled by the notion of the 'bound sign', which claimed to unite the individual's signifiers with a social, and thereby personal, status inherently attached to each person and to that person's ways of symbolising the self (Baudrillard, 'Structural Law ', 61). Since the effulgence of a far more mercantile and less strictly land-based economy in the Renaissance— a more fluid situation where people can shift more readily between economic statuses not attached to set persons— the sign has come to be seen, sometimes overtly and sometimes tacitly, as first assuming the qualities of 'the counterfeit' ('Struc­ tural Law 7, 61-2). The sign now longs for the old, but fading tie between sign and determined status while allowing persons to attach themselves, unbound, to floating signifiers of statuses not originally their own that can be appropriated by a variety of people, whatever their classes at birth. By the dawn of the Indus­ trial Revolution, the time of Shelley, the sign as counterfeit is slipping towards a sense of the sign as 'industrial simulacrum', the 'very possibility of production' as mechanical reproduction ('Structural Law7, 63). A t this stage the signifier as perhaps a singular reference to a non-signifier is being more thoroughly displaced by 'a relationship of equivalence' in views of the sign whereby 'objects [can be] transformed indefinitely [by the manu­ facture of duplicates] into simulacra of one another' (63) to the point where old distinctions between signifiers, objects and thoughts start to disappear. N o w a Shelley, by this account, is virtually driven in an 'On Life' to see signification as a deferral of simulacrum to simulacrum, with each one leading to or produc­ ing a 'train of thoughts' that may be more equivalent to than different from each other, even as he strives to hold on to the sign as a partially nostalgic counterfeit, as able to half-represent an individual status defined at least by a subjectivity and extensions of it. Meanwhile, a fourth answer to the question of what determines the Shelleyan sign may be more similar to Rajan's and Baudrillard's than it seems to be at first, especially when we consider one of the most recent uses of this answer as an approach to

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Romantic poetics. I refer to Michel Foucault's sense, back in Les Mots et les choses in 1966, that the turn towards the nineteenth century brought a radical change in the Western episteme. Language, having long voiced confidence in its capacity for the representa­ tional 'ordering of things by signs' (Foucault, Order, 57), now confronted itself and what it claimed to represent as 'an enigmatic multiplicity' (305), as fragmentary manifestations of a hidden depth that supposedly cried out through its signs for being recov­ ered, plumbed, unfolded, and even projected as deeply hidden by readers of the signs, while remaining always other and mostly out of sight. A person now came to be represented as such a depth, the locus of an obscured and nearly forgotten origin, out of which he or she developed mysteriously but organically. That depth then became the object, indeed the creation, of a will-to-knowledge among people that always attempted and always failed to un­ cover it fully in symbolic manifestations. More recently, Clifford Siskin has adopted this and other concepts from Foucault in order to expose Romantic poetry as reacting to the loss of former sym­ bolic links between the individual and the community by crafting a vision of the self as a depth of organic growth that can and cannot be fully represented and can be mastered only by being thus unfolded in a discourse that will always leave more to be probed (Siskin, 67-124). It is this process in Romantic poems of signifying developing selves while never getting to a primal signified that, ironically, seems to give individuals self-determination and yet serves to open them in discourse to the surveillance of others as never before. A t the same time, this discourse can maintain its power by never fully grasping the psychological depth that it takes to be its object of knowledge. Discourse, conceived of this way, after all, is in the position, by its own rules, of having to attempt its mastery of the 'deep truth' again and again and again. The Shelleyan signifier, as the place where the mind comes to know its own activity by finding it reflected in that which it resembles, appears to be dependent on, and to take account of, all these Foucauldian dimensions of the post-Enlightenment sign. In 'On Life' it is 'vain' for us 'to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being' both because the words that reflect mind are fragmentary references to other signifiers distant from their refer­ ents and because the self and the roots or ends of its 'being' are always receding, as the other of their signifiers, into a profound mystery that can and should never be fully penetrated, though such a 'dark abyss' should be posited as the reference-point that we seek and cannot know. Such a concept of signification really

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includes the other three that I have cited as good approximations of what Shelley assumes about signs in his mature work. The struggle in this notion between the pull of a supposedly original depth, on the one hand, and the creation of that depth by a dis­ course that then tries to control it by claiming that hill control is impossible, on the other, is similar to the conflicts between— and within— the idea of thought as causing signs and the idea of signs as bringing thought into form as the 'other' of language. Signifiers thought of as references to an ever-receding ground, so much so as to be references to trains of signifiers that may seek but can never attain the ground, also suggest the disappearance of Rajan's 'actualization' and Baudrillard's 'bound sign' behind a nearly mechanical reproduction of symbols, especially when Shelley's view of signification is seen in time as partly an extension and partly a revision of previous ones. Yet still w e are left with ques­ tions. There are conceptual and even vaguely historical explana­ tions in these four accounts of the basis of Shelleyan signs, but we still must wonder what economic, ideological and political conditions most necessitated the assertions by Shelley that such accounts help to explain. If those conditions are more clearly understood, do these accounts turn out to be as accurate as they seem to be at the moment? Can a fuller sense of the social dynam­ ics of Shelley's time, as re-enacted in his notions of signification, tell us even more about w h y he both posits and distances subjec­ tive 'antitypes' in successions of signifiers that simultaneously claim to approach their referents and announce their inability to do so without more signifiers? We now need to move from the abstractions in 'On Life' to what might be called the 'natural grounds'— or perhaps the unnatural conditions— from which those statements arose. IV Such grounds, or losses of grounds, for the evaluation of signs are described extensively in the larger text of A Philosophical View of Reform. To be sure, the piece 'On Life', including its excursus on signs, appears to be an expansion on that one segment of the View which describes the post-Lockean philosophies that 'established the certainty of our ignorance with respect to those obscure ques­ tions which under the name of religious truths have been the watch-words of contention] and the symbols of unjust power' (sc vi, 971, m y emphases).5 But the entire View, as in the passage I have just quoted, is replete with references to the nature, use and abuse of signs as they extend or even cause social, political and

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ideological conflict. The distortion in the reigning system of par­ liamentary representation, for example, stems here from the de­ tachable nature of signifiers, their survival after their social foun­ dations are dead, and the resulting distance between the 'existing [indeed, antiquatedl forms according to which [hulmankind are found divided' and 'those rules of freedom & of equality which [have been] discovered [through interpretations of perceptions] as being the elementary principles [by] which the happiness result­ ing from the social union ought to be produced & distributed' (sc vi, 973, bracketed sections mine). Much of the View, it turns out, is obsessed with the problem of drawing the line, between 'true representation' and 'false representation' (Shelley's own phrases), not just in the case of 'the assemblies of legislation' (975), but in the often unrepresentative relationships of supposed signified to sup­ posed signifier that have occurred between labour and wages, property and money, class and style of expression, the national will and literature, individuals and institutions, church and state, and the old 'Constitution' and modem laws. In general, reform for Shelley will begin to be achieved when recastings of 'existing forms' reach 'accommodations' with just 'principles' of free and equal 'distribution'— with a 'substance' that is a Benthamesque 'Utility' of the greatest good for the greatest number (sc vi, 974)— yet this prospect is conceivable only if w e acknowledge and even celebrate the capacity in 'mere names' (964) to drift widely from one supposed 'substance' to others, 'the flexibility and compre­ hensiveness of . . . language' which allows it to be 'a many-sided mirror of ever changing thought' (982). Am ong texts by Shelley, the Philosophical View is thus the most revealing about the cultural conditions bound up with the linguistic conditions of meaning, as Shelley both wants them and finds them to be. The most revealing moment about signification in this reveal­ ing account, it so happens, is the one where the poet uses the word 'sign' the most, again in a fairly broad sense but also in another 'peculiar' one that exposes an 'education of error'. In his detailed discussion of the inequities of English 'public credit' since the abolition in 1797 of anything like a gold standard for bank notes, Shelley—following David Hume, William Cobbett, David Ricardo and others6— describes how the divorce of paper currency from the old requirement that it be backed by Bank of England gold has led to inflation and reduced purchasing power for many, as well as to a national debt and increased taxation on goods (the income tax having been abolished in 1816), all so that the government— along with the landlords, speculators and money-lenders who

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support it— 'may derive advantage from the unlimited multipli­ cation of this mark [the paper note] entitling the holder to com­ mand the labour & property of others' (sc vi, 1010, bracketed segment mine). N ow , Shelley goes on to say, all great transactions of personal property in England are managed by signs & that is by the authority of the possessor expressed on paper, thus representing in a compendious form his right to so much gold, which represents his right to so much labour. A man may write on a piece of paper what he pleases; he may say he is worth a thousand when he is not worth a hundred pounds. If he can make others believe this he has credit for the sum to which his name is attached. And so long as this credit lasts, he can enjoy all the advantages which would arise out of the actual possession of the sum he is believed to possess. ... [In that way] bills of this sort ... defraud those who have gold & silver & goods of the advan­ tages legally attached to the possession of them, and they defraud the labourer & artizan of the advantage attached to labour, by increasing the nominal price of the products of labour, and such a participation in them as their industry [should] command, and they render his wages fluctuating and add to the toil of the cultivator & the manufacturer, (sc vi, lo io -ii, bracketed segments mine) Such a lament might not have surprised those conscious at the time of the huge increase in bank-note forgeries since 1797, wherein cases recorded by the Bank of England increased from 3,000 in 1806 to 29,000 in 1 8 1 7 (Fetter, 71). But this is a remarkable state­ ment if we consider that it comes from a semi-disinherited aristocrat whose chief activity is to establish his author-ity by 'writing on paper what he pleases' (albeit in verse), who is famous and infamous for signing many monetary notes (forms of ioi/s, really) that he never did repay, and who is in the process— in 'On Life', the Philosophical V im and the Defence of Poetry (which incorporates whole para­ graphs from the V im )— of working out a general theory of signifi­ cation, cognitive and linguistic as well as monetary, so much so that all these types of signs are as similar to each other for him as thoughts, objects and signs are in the essay 'On Life.' What Shelley articulates in this passage is a far-reaching evaluation of how self­ representation and the representation of what the self might possess and know can basically come to be, and can come to be misused, in the early industrial-capitalist England known to the literate, and even the labouring, classes in the 1810s.

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The act of offering signs in this scheme assumes that 'authority7, expressions of rights and assertions of possession can all be poten­ tially fraudulent and entirely groundless claims rooted in nothing but a desire for rights and possessions at worst and in a mystery about the author's degree of possession, even self-possession, at best. The grounding in assumed authority of possession comes less from a knowable truth inherent in the act of writing and more from assumptions in the receiver of the note (the reader of the text), who adopts a 'belief in the authority and 'actual possession' of the writer. Usually, as Shelley knew from using his status as aristocratic heir to give authority to his signature on notes when he could never provide the gold, the receiver's belief involves an evaluation, the ascription of a class status to the writer, which can be completely unfounded or at least detached from the economic foundations that would normally give a person of a 'higher7 class sanctioned 'rights' to gold and labour. The abstract notions in 'On Life' that signifiers ultimately refer only to other signifiers and that nothing exists except as it is perceived and interpreted paral­ lel and re-enact this basic economic and social condition, and for a very clear reason: it has become possible for self-representation in signs to be an utter, deceptive breach between signifier and pre­ sumed signified. Inscribed signs on paper may refer only to what is on paper, here or elsewhere, or to a belief among readers in the referentiality of mere signifiers and signatures. Granted, there is a more authentic level— or actually a set of grounding levels— for which Shelley longs in retrospect and pros­ pect here, as do most of the writers he echoes on this point. Paper notes should be (as they are usually assumed to be, even after 1797) references to amounts of gold coin that are themselves references to amounts of human labour for which gold can be exchanged and which gold (in that sense) always signifies. Even though he does not agree with all the assertions in The Wealth of Nations, Shelley, like Cobbett and Ricardo, wants to continue Adam Smith's axiom that 'Labour' of all kinds, as what gold comes from and pays for, 'is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities' from products to money (Smith, Inquiry, I, 47). But the Shelley of the Philosophical View can never write 'labour7 without writing the representations of it alongside the very word, differentiating the representations from the labour— and thus the labour from itself— even when labour is being explic­ itly rendered as an absolute, unified ground: 'Labour & skill and the immediate wages of labour, & skill/ he must write, 'is [yes, he attempts to use a singular verb with a compound subject] a

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property of the most sacred & indisputable right, & the founda­ tion of all other property' (sc vi, 1036, bracketed section mine). Labour here becomes the wages for itself in its singularity while still being the entity for which wages cure supposed to be representations. Moreover, when Shelley recalls w h y gold has long been seen as more the equivalent of labour than paper, aside from the fact that gold is dug up in acts of labour, he writes that 'the precious metals have been from the earliest records of civilization employed as the signs of labour and the titles to an unequal distribution of its produce' (sc vi, 1004, my emphasis). Labour's 'signs', even when they can be classed as 'true representation', must be seen as inclined from the start not to return an exact value-equivalent to the labourer in exchange for what the labour has produced. The signs, even coins, as Smith insists, are affected by market exchange-values (valuations of the signs in relation to their own circulation) that are different from sheer use-value equivalents. Hence a monetary return for labour in a coin-based purchase can give back less— or more— than the initially supposed value of the labour from the labourer's point of view. The signifier (an amount of gold) can drift enough from its signified (the labour behind the product) to grant some surplus value, an 'unequal distribution', to the holder of the signifier, either the labourer or the buyer depending on who gains more than the initial estimated value of the labour. A s a result, Shelley writes, it has been possible since 'antiquity', well before modem paper notes even existed, that 'the distribution of the sign of labour' can become a 'source of private aggrandisement' to non-labourers 'at the expence' of labourers, to the point of 'public confusion' about how much labour or rights to labour are actually represented by an amount of money (sc vi, 1010). The contradictions and potential fraudulence inherent in paper notes, obviously the signs of signs, are really present for Shelley in gold, the more immediate sign of labour, and thus in all relations between any labour of the self and any signifier of it. Shelley's Philosophical View, of course, puts a liberal-to-radical spin on the significance of these contradictions in 1819, one that deliberately echoes Thomas Paine, Godwin, Cobbett, Leigh Hunt, Bentham and others, as though sometimes contradictory English voices of the previous thirty years were able to speak together in one interweaving of political directions (see Cameron, Golden Years, 115 -4 9 ; Dawson, Unacknowledged Legislator, 179 -210 ; Scrivener, 2 10 -18 ; Hogle, 256-8; Behrendt, 212-25). Shelley, after all, wants to present an agenda and a combination of discourses that unite nearly all anti-government and anti-moneylender factions from

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the liberal bourgeoisie to the quasi-gentleman farmers speaking for the working classes displaced from the land to the mills. He also wants to unite them around the aim, among others, of restor­ ing a fair return for labour to every kind of labourer— including the kind of thought-worker he calls the 'genius' (sc vi, 1033)— a return that is closer than the national debt now allows to a 'true representation' of the value of expended labour or genius. Yet, when he focuses on the sign of labour in a kind of language shared among nearly all the voices he echoes, he is forced into a conflicted view of the anomalies that we have just seen him face as he confronts the problem of use-value vs. market-value. On the one hand, he must acknowledge how every submission of the prod­ ucts of labour to a market exchange of its signs, even gold, can open labour (and thus 'genius') to the sheer interplays among signs of signs, to the effects, among other things, of inflated cur­ rency rates, fluctuating wages, taxation to support the national debt, the substitution of potentially forged papers for gold specie, and class-related perceptions about a buyer's or seller's signature, any of which can fail to return a measure of value equivalent to what was expended in labour. This virtually inevitable depend­ ence on the floating signifiers of exchange, as we have seen Shelley write, is what can 'defraud the labourer & artizan' of compensation that is a 'true representation' of their industry. On the other hand, Shelley must celebrate the 'surplus value' that gained from the proceeds and signs of labour when they are cast into a marketplace of other signs which may add amounts of value to the initially supposed value of what labour produces. Even as Shelley worries about 'defraud[ing] the labourer & artizan', he fears that what they could lose is 'the advantage attached to labour' that comes from 'increasing the nominal price of the products of labour, and such a participation in [those higher-priced products] as [a labourer's] industry [should] com­ mand'. The fluctuating difference between use-value and market price does allow some kinds of labourers to make a profit, and this profit can lead to the desirable advancement of presently down­ trodden workers into higher economic classes, provided that hereditary or supposed aristocrats are not allowed to advance beyond their actual economic levels, as Shelley did, by using paper-money fraud to divert the profits that should actually go to labourers. Shelley is the semi-agrarian reactionary lamenting the displacement of land-workers (up to a point), the pre-Marxist leveller urging equivalent returns of use-value for labour, and the bourgeois and gentleman-farmer supporter of equal-opportunity

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profits from cottage industries; in the Philosophical View he is all these figures (and more) that different historical and literary crit­ ics have found him to be (see Reiman, 'Shelley as Agrarian'; Foot, 22 7 -7 3; Cameron, 'Shelley and Marx' and Golden Years, 136-7). A principal reason w h y he takes all those positions, however, is the ideology of signification that grows from the sense of the economic sign which confronts him wherever he turns in several different class-based political discourses, each of which is already interact­ ing with and being affected by the others in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That ideology is pulled— and so Shelley is pulled— both in the direction of recovering the ground of personal labour which its signs extend beyond itself and in.the direction of the surplus of signification which signs of labour can gain by relating to and being exchanged with different signs that lose their earlier grounds while they also link up with new con­ texts and valuations. Though Shelley wants to distinguish be­ tween 'true' and 'false representation', each is to some degree drawn towards the other within itself, so much so that the truest representation of labour may be the falsifications of it that add dimensions to signs of labour that the labour itself cannot provide. Such a tug-of-war within an economic and political, as well as linguistic, sense of the sign makes a great deal of sense if we step back for a moment and look at the progression of socio-economic conditions in England over the previous thirty years that is both referred to and continued by the Philosophical View and the essay 'On Life' in 1819. A s we know, especially from the work of Siskin, Harold Perkin, John Rule, E.P. Thompson, Frank Fetter, and the team of Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, the 1780s and then the 1790s (the decade of Shelley's birth) saw an accelerat­ ing rise in wages and prices, touted as a spur to British productiv­ ity, which intensified the difference between the costs of physical production and the market value of what labour produced. The personal costs of work could not be matched by payment, despite its increased amount, because the prices for food and other sup­ ports for labour were rising as well, often faster than the wages of work could match. The value of the product became its market­ ability and potential for greater reproducibility, the shifting prices for and increased consumption of it, not its simple return of some equivalent for what the labourer needed to produce it. A t the same time, a person's class, like physical labour, became increasingly dissociated (as it already was somewhat) from any sort of predictable economic return on investment or inheritance. Older social standings and conditions of work, while many signs

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of them remained, could see their monetary foundations dwindle or increase suddenly so that the ability to command labour by the possession of inflated currency became much more unstable and more open to members of the middle or even lower-middle classes, who could change their positions by aggressive acquisition and money manipulation in new, albeit riskier (even fraudulent) ways. This instability was only increased when British foreign wars and the credit, even paper-money credit, extended by the Bank of England to fund war production led to greater inflation and an increase in sales taxes to pay the national debt, further drawing off the monetary returns for labour or investment. Self­ definition and self-declaration became dependent on the accumu­ lation and presentation of exchangeable signs with highly change­ able market values and possibly no relationships at all, save those of appearance, to past foundations of identity in work, land own­ ership, ancestry, social station, or balances of value between the costs and wages of production. These tendencies, for the most part, as in the proliferation of notes, intensified and multiplied between the 1790s and 18 19 and did so in an atmosphere of increased state restriction on verbal and public exposures of that process. This repression was de­ signed in part, we know, both to maintain and to conceal the basis of the power gained by the possessors (or apparent possessors) of most of those signifiers, particularly bank notes, now divorced from automatic connections to what seemed their previous grounds. The result, however, especially in the case of people— such as Shelley— removed from the traditional base of their osten­ sible classes, was still the placement of those who sought to signify themselves and their relationships between the poles of deep contradictions, ones that underlay and paralleled the tug-ofwar between the representation and falsification of labour by money. Property and rights of possession, even mental selfpossession, to begin with, became thought of as even more private than they had already come to seem in the eighteenth century. Amounts of private possession and social class were just not as predictably connected as they were once supposed to be. Objects, qualities and modes of self-display or self-understanding, includ­ ing the proceeds of labour, became more one's own by being acquisitions from elsewhere rather than social or political birth­ rights. Hence property rights and qualities of thought which appeared internal and self-made instead of predetermined, as this sense of things did try to make them, were actually made possible by the

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accumulation of external signs which others might have possessed almost as readily. These signs, in addition, gained their qualities more from marketplace relations between each other than from any certain or original ownership of them by the self, although ownership and an originality of selfhood were what those signs were often appropriated to announce. The 'internal' self or act of labour needed the 'external' sign, with all its intertextuality, so as to be able to refer to and establish an intemality (of mind and work) that was somehow different and free from the signifiers of it outside it. The problem here, though, went beyond the contradiction of the supposedly independent 'internal self being increasingly dependent on an 'externality' of signifiers with their own interrelations. Both the signifiers and the 'self' or 'work of the self' they were used to signify needed each other to achieve the significance they lacked on their own, because they both carried with them recollections of prior generic or class-based foundations that they could no longer simply claim to possess within themselves. That is why a signa­ ture on a note, the apparent possession of gold, or even the use of a generic style of expression could arouse an evaluative response based on certainty of class, and yet that reaction could be abso­ lutely wrong about the person's actual economic condition and the supposedly 'natural' link between signifiers and status. Each counterpart in the relation of self (or labour) and signifiers (or coined symbols) looked back to earlier social conditions of them­ selves of which they did retain vestiges but from which they were at least partly removed. The prior foundations of both subject and signifier seemed 'more natural' from the perspective of the present precisely because neither the self nor its signs could now claim certain or lasting attachments to those grounds, even though both were called towards pasts they could neither escape nor recover entirely. Hence the subject and its signifiers, or the labourer and the signs of labour, had to seek their groundings or fulfillments in their counterparts— as Shelley said, 'the mind cannot see itself unless reflected upon that which it resembles'— only to find that the other (be it self or sign) lacked the very ownership of a founda­ tion, despite its vestiges of one, which the seeker was striving to find in or by w ay of the other. That contradiction is an aspect of what Shelley writes in 1818 when he defines his main subject in his essay 'On Love': 'It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and

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seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves' (473). 'What we experience' here refers, after all, most immediately to 'the chasm', the sense of insufficiency, lost grounding and possible emptiness which the self seeks to cure by w ay of an other. That is what may most be shared, and may be overcome in the sharing, by self reaching out to other or subject reaching out to sign, and vice versa. Given what a sense of signification increasingly involved and assumed in the economic and social conditions of Shelley's moment and setting, there really had to be a receding depth of unreachable mystery, what Shelley calls the 'invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends' ('On Love', 474), in any outreach towards a signifying other or in any reference of a signifying other to what was sup­ posed to be its signified. The ever-widening gap between some solid ground and the signature on the bank note, possibly a forgery or at least a lie on every occasion, appears at every level of self relating to other or supposed substance relating to sign in the most basic cultural conditions that Shelley knew and imbibed. Other writers reacted to these conditions differently, of course, many to the point of attempted denial, given the powerful tug of previous grounds for absolute meaning. But Shelley, determined to restore the human freedom restricted by various forms of these denials, especially in the Philosophic View of Reform and 'On Life', described many of the contraries in the conditions of signification that the socio­ economic developments of his era actually prompted. He did so, moreover, in the hope of discovering the most fruitful kinds of 'profit' that could be gained by most people (and poets) when they faced the process of working with and through signs that both promised and denied them the permanent possession of their fullest selves. V Now, I hope, we are approaching a much richer evaluation of what is actually going on, and was fundamentally involved around the 1810s, in Shelley's mature definitions of the sign and the most suggestive accounts of the basis of those definitions. At this point, certainly, we can grasp some of the economic and ideological struggles that are really being remembered, though sometimes too abstractly, in the four recent explanations I re­ counted earlier of what prompts the Shelleyan definition of mean­ ing. Shelley's view of signs and their referents develops out of two different empiricist theories concerning the relation of language to

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thought in the late eighteenth century, we can now conclude, first because both theories were ideological ways of dealing with certain accelerating economic trends and then because such trends drew Shelley and others towards seeing the theories as related. For someone, throughout most of the eighteenth and the early nine­ teenth centuries, to view language as representing internal ideas acquired over time from perceptions— with the underlying sense that the perceptions are but recollections that lose their original memories— is for that theorist to parallel and transmogrify the notion that visible products refer back to personal labour and the acquired ingredients of labour and to see those ingredients as identical or similar to the merely monetary signs that are paid for labour. The Lockean mind takes in sense impressions that it turns into ideas, in other words, much as labour fuels itself with the money it uses for sustenance and materials. The sense of language as creating distinctions of thought, mean­ while, points to the emerging sense, even for an Adam Smith, that the values and distinctions assigned to acts or aspects of labour are determined greatly by the relationships among the market signs that have been used to represent and exchange the products of labour, including the productions of 'genius'. A t the same time, the recollection of a 'natural language' prior to the more recent verbal abstractions that organise ideas is allowed by linguistic signs in this scheme to pull the verbal creation of thought back towards a receding base of supposed 'authenticity7 and 'author­ ity7 because this device is an adaptation of the w ay that market signifiers of Shelley's day (such as bank notes requiring signa­ tures) attract customers by seeming to offer them older powers of possession that no one really has for certain any more. These powers are rooted in supposedly primal links to nature and in seemingly age-old traditions of class distinction, power and ownership that are really vestiges of fading economic orders or unities of signifier with signified that never really existed, all of these vestiges being marketable because they seem to provide the groundings that the users of signs most lack at the present time. In addition, we now have more informed ways of evaluating and appreciating Rajan's 'disappearance of actualization', Baudrillard's passage from sign as 'counterfeit7 to sign as 'industrial simulacrum', and the Foucauldian organic depth intimated and kept distant by signs, the three other partial descriptions we have noted of what basically animates the sign as Shelley understood it. T h e disappearance of actualization' is an excellent phrase for describing the passage of the sign of labour (and the marks of

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genius) from product to circulated commodity to payment by coin or paper governed by market forces instead of labour conditions. In this process, after all, the sign of payment became increasingly divorced from gold's illusion of a basis in labour, and gold was itself exposed as removed from the 'presence' of labour it once seemed to betoken. Baudrillard's metaphors, in turn, point more precisely than others at two stages of the historical progression I have just recounted: first, at the fact that self-presentation in signs, even in gold but especially on paper, became an easily forged (indeed, often 'counterfeit') representation of class status around 1800, and, second, at the increasing similarity of products, coins and words on paper, all signs in circulation, that led to a valuing of these signs for their sheer ability to be duplicated by different, but very similar, ones in a kind of mechanical reproducibility (a 'thought' leading automatically to 'a train of thoughts') closely related to the early stages of industrial production both noted and feared by Shelley. Finally, Foucault's symbolised but always receding depth, of­ ten a depth of mind, pointed to and opened up to scrutiny by language in the early nineteenth century can now remind us of several socio-economic conditions among those I have just re­ counted from that era. It refers to the distance that always appears between labour, including 'genius', and any consequence of it; to the widening gap between class foundations of ancestry and eco­ nomic means of self-presentation (Christensen's recent subject in Lord Byron's Strength); to the desire for grounded reference in every human 'mark' always left incomplete because of the mark's deferral to the values of other marks; to the tendency of signs, as in paper notes, to create the sense of depth (including the recollec­ tions of old orders or classes) and then to hold these off at an inaccessible remove; and finally to the resulting sense that the self which needs signs to reflect it to itself is always in a condition of having lost some of its groundings even as it seeks them in coun­ terparts that are equally ungrounded and drawn towards other signs. The question of the accuracy of these several proposals about the basis of the Shelleyan view of signs can be answered with a 'yes', but that is especially true if the proposals are linked, more than even their proposers have linked them, to the social and ideological dynamics that are actually at the root of them. Above all, though, it is in Shelley's own multi-dimensional statements on signification— the ones with which I began— that those dynamics, once we recognise them, turn out to be quite basic. N o w that we see the immediate context of the 'On Life'

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discussion of signs in the Philosophical View and the social circum­ stances it both reflects and enacts, we find that the contradictions in Shelley's relational yet ground-seeking approach to how thoughts and words mean, or should mean, make a kind of sense that has not been understood enough because it has been divorced too long from a sense of the conditions it re-enacts. For Shelley, at least by 1819, objects of perception are thoughts and thoughts are signs, all reinterpretable (or open to re-valuation) by other thoughts and signs, not simply because he accepts certain forms of sceptical empiricism and their senses of how thought and language relate, but because he is also living through, from a certain set of vantage points, a socio-economic transition. In this transition, actions or thoughts of the person or mind are at every moment presentable, even understandable, only in re-presentations that are sucked into market relationships (albeit ones recollective of past economic orders), relationships which can entirely change what seem to have been the initial intentions of reference or declaration. Mis­ prision is a condition of strong poetic reinterpretation in Harold Bloom's psychology of the best Romantic writing (especially in A M ap of Misreading) mainly because it has already occurred for many people of the time in the movement of any personal or poetic labour towards becoming any form of representation or recirculation of it. What labour or self-declaration work from, after all, are signifiers, even if they are the thoughts or coins which the self seems to own, which are marked before any one person takes them up by rapidly changing relationships of social circula­ tion in which the meanings in one context for signs can be changed by the movements of those signs to other contexts out­ side of any one person's control. Words and even the thoughts that are so like them can never reach their original psychological or objective basis, if there is one; they are 'inefficient and meta­ phorical— most words so— N o help', Shelley laments in a note to 'On Love' (474). That is because every social, economic, or ideo­ logical performance of signification is to some extent an act of counterfeiting similar to writing one's name on a bank note and having that act of writing evaluated in the marketplace as having a foundation behind it that it does not completely have. These conditions also help explain Shelley's longing for the grounds (such as 'labour7 or imaginative 'genius') that are posited as well as distorted by signification and this poet's placement of the ends of such longings in projected senses of unity (such as the 'one mind') located far beyond where thoughts and signs can reach them at the present moment. On the one hand, even when a

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receiver of representations in the marketplace Shelley knew projects a misinterpretation on, say, a Bank of England iou, there is the assumption of a reference to a foundation in labour, thought and class on that person's part. There is equally the hope, from the writer's perspective, of successfully representing a ground of in­ tentionally, a power to labour and to have power over labour, that may well prey— as Shelley did with his own bank notes— on assumptions in the receiver that tend to look back at class-orders or genres of writing which seem to be more stable and enduring than they really are. The very system of sign-exchanges that distorts the act of self-representation uses signs to suggest grounds behind or beyond them that can at least be supposed or sought in any transaction by givers or receivers. The assumed signified may always be located in the place behind the other signifier in every interaction; 'the invisible and unattainable point to which [desire] tends' is thought of as being in the purview of the interpreting figure by the figure seeking to be interpreted, even though neither figure possesses any solid social or personal grounds on their own. Still, the possibility of an attainable, though always distant, signified has to be assumed on every side if there is to be any quest for meaning at all. On the other hand, assumptions about actual attainment can be dangerous. They can suggest an entrenched, absolutely sanc­ tioned set of grounds for meaning to which all relevant signifiers are subservient and all interpreters should refer all appropriate signs. For Shelley, who was clearly more than half-conscious of the social conditions I have discussed, such a view was a lie about, and ultimately a repression of, those conditions. Especially as it was employed by politicians, conservative poets and all kinds of moneylenders and profiteers now in positions of growing power, this notion used the nostalgia for older class and sectarian groundings for signs to promulgate a hierarchical ideology that was made, in more words from the Philosophical View, to 'clothe' a 'system' of 'domination & imposture' which tried 'not7 to 'acknow­ ledge the necessity'— or the fact— 'of a material change in [exist­ ing] institutions' (sc vi, 963). A n y acceptance of an assumption of this sort turned longings for signifieds into submissions to certain ones that were far more provisional and contingent, more merely ideological, than they appeared and claimed to be. Hence, for the sake of both individual freedom from political oppression and accuracy to the nature of signification as it had come to be at his time, Shelley's writing announces the desire for ultimate unions between signifiers, and between signifiers and ultimate signifieds,

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without submitting or urging submissions to the idea of an attain­ able or singular Absolute Signified. Shelley hesitates, with some deliberation, I think, between making all signifiers too much the same or too completely different and between seeing signifieds as really just signifiers or positing some provisional or momentary distinctions between the two. He knows that all these inclinations as inclinations are there in the conditions of meaning he confronts, and he will not wrench those tendencies completely towards one extreme. He will not join what he sees as the forces of 'imposture' and 'domination' in pressing human representations, particular people, or even labour and the wages of it towards unchangeable similarities among them or fixed distinctions between them. A thinking person is actually faced with a number of evaluative choices, as Shelley was, when he or she encounters conditions and assumptions of representation of the kind that were emerging in the very late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even though many people were not fully conscious of them. One could choose a retrograde belief in fixed hierarchies and the inequities that go with them, or one could despair at the signifying images of the self always separate from it that will never be matched or repossessed by those who would live up to them; Shelley's Triumph of Life offers a vivid parade of human types who have made such choices, ones to which the poet himself was sometimes drawn. But there are also the more hopeful w ays of thinking that Shelley suggests given the conditions of meaning he faced, the most complex of which appear in poems and lyric dramas that will have to be considered in this light during some other study. Am ong those better options is the 'accommodation' between signifying 'forms' and signified 'substance' that Shelley holds out as a desirable 'far goal of time' in the Philosophical View of Reform. Instead of the mere acceptance of any standard 'style' vs. 'sub­ stance' distinction, this prospect envisions 'existing forms' (from institutions to word-patterns) as being so malleable and un­ grounded that they can be thoroughly altered, evaluated and then revaluated, into 'unapprehended relations' among them. A t such points these altered figures can help form and carry out a 'sub­ stance' that is neither an entity nor a single thought, but a process of progressive economic redistribution among virtually all types of people, a highly relational version of a Benthamesque 'Utility' that might move towards a 'one mind' of less divided individuals without leaping to a monolithic destruction of individuality. A more personal option, the one with which I would like to close, is the choice offered in the essay 'On Life' by which each

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person can evaluate him- or herself, amid still contradictory con­ ditions of meaning, as being, not what a person fixedly 'is', but what that person 'has been, and shall be' in the different ways there are of signifying the self, all of which can change the self from what it seemed to be before it transfigured its possibilities using new modes of representation. Here is a w ay of, as it were, 'making a profit' by using signs to recoin oneself that both ac­ knowledges the drift of relating and re-relating signifiers in a public market place and the desire of the represented subject to receive a return on his or her investment in a process that divides the self from itself, possibly to make that self more than it was. Over two hundred years after his birth, Shelley still offers us the hope of prospects such as these, along with insights into the problems with them. Such hopes, we now see, consist not in trying to repress or reverse the conditions of meaning that he and we have encountered in our worlds. Hope is fanned most when we take up the challenge of those conditions so as to re-evaluate and revalue our self-images and our ways of relating to each other. It is in that w ay, for Shelley, that w e can rediscover in our thoughts, labours and articulations of them 'that freedom with which [we might] have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs.' NOTES

1. De Man's distinction between the 'performative' (the entirely rhetor­ ical and figural) versus the 'constative' (or hermeneutic) dimensions of literary texts— a notion reworked from an opposition suggested by J.R. Searle— is brilliantly, if questionably, exemplified in his now (in)famous essay 'Shelley Disfigured', which first appeared in Bloom, et al., Deconstruction and Criticism, 39-73. My own half-agreement/half-disagreement with de Man appears in Hogle, 22-4. 2. See especially Peterfreund, 'Shelley, Monboddo, Vico, and the Lan­ guage of Poetry'; Fry, The Reach of Criticism, esp. 137-43; and Hogle, 12 -15. 3. Declarations of their senses of language (ones all known to Shelley) include: Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 51-^8, 169-74,283-300; Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and Discourses, 2 13-2 1; Monboddo, O f the Origin and Progress of Language, I, 5-174 ; Tooke, Diversions of Purley, 9-22; Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 156-63; Coleridge, The Statesman's M anual, in The Collected Works, vi, 28-31 and 78-80, which should be read in conjunction with McKusick, Coleridge's Philosophy of Language; and Jeremy Bentham, Essay on Language, in The Works of Bentham, vin. 4. In L'Echange symbolique et la mort (1976), a substantial portion of which is translated by Charles Levin as 'The Structural Law of Value and the Order of Simulacra' in The Structural Allegory, ed. Fekete, 5 5 7 3 .1 quote from this latter version. 5. All my citations from the Philosophical View of Reform are taken from

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Jerrold E. Hogle Donald Reiman's complete transcription of Shelley's holograph in sc vi, 962-1066, and I present the citations, usually, in the most finalised state that the transcription seems to indicate. 6. This issue is discussed by Hume in 'Of Money7 and 'Of Public Credit', Essays and Treatises, 1, 3 1 1 -2 5 and 383-400; by Cobbett in Paper Against Gold (an 18 17 reprinting of thirty-two editorials pub­ lished from 1810 to 1815 in Cobbett's Political Register ); and by Ricardo in, among other pieces, The Price of Gold', Works and Corres­ pondence, m, 15 -2 1. Helpful studies of this entire question—and other contributors to it—at Shelley's time include Cameron, 'Shelley, Cobbett, and the National Debt', and Fetter, 1-63.

Shelley and the Revolutionary Left W ILLIAM KEACH

Rise like Lions 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. Percy Bysshe Shelley These lines appear on the back of a T-shirt I bought in London on 15 July 1992 on m y w ay to hear Paul Foot talk about Shelley at the annual week-long conference called 'Marxism', sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party. (I'm a member of the International Social­ ist Organization, the swp's sister-group in the u s a .) On the front of the shirt, underneath the figure of a wide-awake and aroused lion holding an s w p flag in his paw, is the motto 'Rise like Lions'. I'd heard from Kelvin Everest that Paul Foot had been talking in a remarkably moving w ay about Shelley during his bicentenary year, and I was eager to see how 'Red Shelley' was doing in the wake of the Tory's election victory and the pervasive consensus— pervasive everywhere but at such events as the s w p conference— that the Marxist left has been safely dumped into the dust-bin of history. There were between five and six thousand at the s w p confer­ ence: I'd been unable to get into two or three sessions earlier in the week (including a session on Marxism and language) because the University of London lecture rooms had been filled to overflowing. So after I bought my T-shirt from one of the s w p members standing outside the building where Foot was to speak, I hurried inside to get a seat. It was fifteen minutes before the talk was scheduled to begin, and the room was nearly full. When he began, he was speaking to 450 or 500 people. This was more than twice the size of any other audience I had seen during the Shelley bicentenary. The audience was very enthusiastic, and very attentive: comments

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from the floor following the talk all showed that. Foot's celebra­ tion of Shelley was, as Everest had said, amazing. He quoted long sequences of lines from The Mask of Anarchy and 'Ode to the West Wind' from memory; I have never heard Shelley's verse more impressively spoken. I was inspired. I was also agitated— partly in ways that Foot has in mind when he speaks of Shelley as a great agitator, but also because I could not get past the difficulties and complications that arise when I try to think through what it means for Shelley to be claimed by the revolutionary left: not by the social democratic left, or the academic left, or the postmodernist left, but the revolutionary left. I worried about some of these difficulties and complications several years ago in a 1985 review essay that considered Foot's Red Shelley together with Michael's Scrivener's Radical Shelley and Paul Dawson's The Unacknowledged Legislator. M y judgement then was that while Foot's desire to claim Shelley for the real socialist left was deeply important, his book did not address some of the difficult questions of Shelley's political writing as convincingly as Scrivener's and Dawson's had done. M y perspective today has shifted substantially from what it was in 1985, when I had just finished an avowedly formalist study of Shelley's style and was still a member of a social democratic group called the Democratic Socialists of America. I have come to have a much stronger com­ mitment to the political tradition from which Foot's work on Shelley springs, and I see strengths in Red Shelley that I had not seen, or had not been able fully to realise, before. A t the same time, I still think that the questions posed by Scrivener in his case for an anarchist and utopian Shelley, and by Dawson in his case for a reformist Shelley, need to be confronted. It is not that Foot himself is unaware of these questions. I was struck, rereading Red Shelley, by his acknowledging Shelley's doubts and uncertainties and contradictions. I was also struck by how effectively the perspective of 'Reform or Revolution'— announced in the title of Foot's sixth chapter and rooted in his understanding of Rosa Luxemburg's great argument that revolu­ tionaries make the best fighters for reform because they see them as coming from below and contributing to a fundamental trans­ formation of society— I was struck by how effectively Foot used this perspective to relate the tactical changes in Shelley's political writings to their overarching drive. Still, Foot's declared purpose, 'to pass on Shelley's political enthusiasms to today's socialists, radicals and feminists, in the hope that their commitment will be strengthened and enriched by Shelley, as mine has been' (Foot,

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13), means that he often moves very quickly past doubts, difficul­ ties and contradictions. There is something to be gained, I think, politically as well as critically, from slowing down and staying with the hard points, with things that do not fit or that fit only uneasily or very complicatedly with the 'enthusiasms' that Foot so engagingly transmits. What I propose to do here involves a double agenda. On the one hand, I want to keep alive the main points at issue in recent scholarly assessments of Shelley's politics: the implications of his epistemological idealism and scepticism; the problem of Shelley's audiences, of his writing for 'a select class of readers' more often than 'for the people'; the consequences of his class position for, among other things, the social and cultural circumstances of his Italian self-exile; the question of Shelley's practical relation to political organisation and action, including his relation to armed resistance and struggle. On the other hand, I want to give the views of Shelley's readers on the militant left their own independ­ ent validity and interest, whether they correspond to what Shelley scholars take to be his 'actual' politics or not. That is, I am con­ cerned with what leftist radicals have made and can still make of Shelley's writing. Ultimately, of course, I would like to see the doubleness of this agenda dissolve. To say this may be, as Maddalo says in chiding Julian, to 'talk utopia'— or perhaps to entertain an ideal of intellectual work that is more Gramscian than Shelleyan. But Julian, not Maddalo, has the last, grimly antiutopian word. And what Gramsci and Shelley share is a revolu­ tionary social transformation in which the seemingly ineluctable division between intellectuals and 'the people' disappears. More concretely and practically, I want to look at some of the poems Shelley would probably have included in the volume of 'popular songs wholly political' he thought of publishing in 18 19 and ask this question: what doubts, uncertainties and complica­ tions might people encounter who have been inspired by Paul Foot to read Shelley? I am not suggesting that these moments do not, or should not, present difficulties for scholarly academic readers, or for readers with other than radical left politics. But I want to explore these moments with Foot's most responsive audi­ ence especially in mind. Among other things, doing so will allow me to focus on the little volume of Shelley's 18 19 political poems, together with 'A Philosophical View of Reform' and a wonderful introduction by Foot, published in 1990 by RedWords, a division of the s w p publishing co-operative Bookmarks. Everyone who works on Shelley's poetry, including Mary Shelley, talks about

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this projected volume, but Foot and Bookmarks have actually made it a reality.1 The volume is called Shelley's Revolutionary Year. It costs £3.95, not too bad given the current price of books in the u k , and as of August 1992 Bookmarks had sold some 2,000 copies. It stands in the great tradition of cheap editions of Shelley brought out by radicals who lay claim to him as one of their own. Even the typographical error on the excellently designed front cover— the subtitle is The Peterloo Writtings of the Poet Shelley, a mistake that the s w p was of course truly embarrassed by— probably has its analogues in some of the Chartist and nineteenth-century socialist editions of Shelley's poems. The reading texts of the three poems from the volume that I want to look at are as good as those in any available edition of Shelley, I hasten to add (though, as you might expect, there is no scholarly apparatus). So imagine that someone hears Paul Foot speak, buys Shelley's Revolutionary Year and reads 'Song to the Men of England' on the basis of Foot's claim that it is one of the poems which 'are direct and deliberate appeals to the masses to rise up and trample their oppressors' (Foot, 169). In line 24 the poem is explicit and un­ flinching in its call for armed insurrection: 'Forge arms,— in your defence to bear.'2 It is also, as Scrivener says, unique among radical texts of its day in its 'uncompromising view on labor alienation' (Scrivener, 232). A n understanding of economic exploita­ tion that generates alienation for workers and surplus value for 'the lords who lay ye low7 is unmistakeably articulated in the poem, through diction, imagery and cadences that a very broad range of readers could and can respond to. But the tone of the poem, the mode in which Shelley addresses the Men of England, might well present a problem. (I am responding particularly here to a very good article in the 1978 Keats-Shelley Journal by Richard Hendrix called 'The Necessity of Response: How Shelley's Radical Poetry Works'.) The poem might have been titled 'Challenge to the Men of England': the sequence of questions in the first sixteen lines conveys critical dismay at, as well as sympathy for, the oppressed condition of its audience. That Shelley's 'appeal' to the oppressed here primarily takes the form of critical challenge becomes even clearer in the shift to declarative and imperative rhetoric in stan­ zas 5 and 6. But the real difficulty comes in the final two stanzas: Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells; In halls ye deck another dwells. W hy shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

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With plough and spade, and hoe and loom, Trace your grave, and build your tomb, And weave your winding-sheet, till fair England be your sepulchre. Bernard Shaw tells us that Mr G.W. Foote (no relation), President of the National Secular Society, recited this poem before a large audience of 'working men who took Shelley quite seriously' at the Hall of Science in St Luke's parish, East London, on the occasion of the 1892 Shelley centenary. There was, says Shaw, 'thunders of applause' ('Shaming the Devil about Shelley', The Albemarle Re­ view, September 1892, in Pen Portraits and Reviews, 244). M y stu­ dents have tended to respond differently to this poem— with respect and admiration for Shelley's poetic analysis of economic oppression, but also with puzzlement about how to take the last two stanzas. It is surprising to me that the Shelley critics who have commented in any detail on this passage have not themselves been more puzzled. Kenneth Cameron acknowledges that 'the conclusion is at first puzzling': Shelley, after urging the workers to arise and take back the wealth they have created, defending themselves by armed force, here seemingly tells them to retreat. The mood, how­ ever, is sardonic, the motive that of shaming the workers into action, implying that unless they act, they will become lethargic. (Shelley: The Golden Years, 343) And Cameron leaves it at that, without any further comment on what we— or Shelley's immediate audience among the oppressed— are to make of being shamed into action. The only detailed analy­ sis of these lines that I am familiar with is Stephen Behrendt's in Shelley and His Audiences. 'Shelley concludes', Behrendt writes, 'in a disturbing tone of bitter irony.' The poem's 'argument', he says, is 'sceptical': [T]his poem comes as close as Shelley ever comes to sanction­ ing violence as a last resort, and I believe that the reversal in both sense and tone in the final two stanzas suggests that he did not consider the 'men of England' actually capable of so decisive an assertion. ... The poem's conclusion is a varia­ tion on the reverse definition. Having presumably raised the audience's ire in the opening stanzas ... Shelley's final lines are a calculated challenge to the audience to reject their subhuman images ... and to assume their full status as human beings. ... The deluded masses fall into the habit of

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William Keach nursing their oppressors, literally 'giving them all they have' rather than risk the destabilizing trauma of resisting this unjust arrangement. (195-6)

What I find striking, and also disturbing, about Behrendt's reading is its emphasis on the complicated sceptical irony of Shelley's tone. If you think he has overread the last two stanzas— I don't think he has, though I disagree with some of his interpretive inflections— then I would like to hear a simpler and more straightforward reading that accounts plausibly for what Shelley says to his read­ ers in these lines. I can imagine why Mr G.W. Foote's audience in 1892 gave 'thunders of applause' to the poem's call, challenging as it is, for workers to defend themselves by force against economic exploitation and alienation. But I cannot imagine w hy that audi­ ence, or Paul Foot's audience in August 1992, or any of us reading Shelley's poem now, would give 'thunders of applause' to a sar­ donic request that workers do what Marx and Engels said the capitalist bosses do— dig their own graves. Bracing defiance, per­ haps even wincing appreciation for a dose of necessary medi­ cine— but 'thunders of applause'? Behrendt's commentary begins to get at the political and poetic difficulties here, and those of us who believe that Shelley is powerfully on the side of the working class need to do more to meet his elaboration of Shelley's challenge. Related questions— and comparable points of fierce political insight— arise in the poem that immediately precedes 'Song to the Men of England' in Shelley's Revolutionary Year. Thomas Medwin titled this poem 'Lines Written During the Castlereagh Adminis­ tration' when he first published it in the Athenaeum in December 1832, and editors have accepted the title ever since. But as Scrivener notes, by changing Shelley's own title as it appears in the Harvard Library transcription— where it is simply headed 'England'— Medwin 'distances the political meaning of the poem for the 1832 audience' (Scrivener, 227). Shelley's 'political mean­ ing' in this case arises from an address not to the oppressed but to 'thou Oppressor', although this rhetorical situation does not emerge clearly until the third stanza. The poem opens with a variation on the image of the grave that haunts all the political poems of 1819; the tone in the first two stanzas hovers between anger and— not hope, in this case, but— despair: Corpses are cold in the tomb; Stones on the pavement are dumb; Abortions are dead in the womb, And their mothers look pale— like the death-white shore

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Of Albion, free no more. Her sons are as stones in the w ay— They are masses of senseless clay— They are trodden, and move not away,— The abortion with which she travaileth Is Liberty, smitten to death. It is hard not to think that in these lines Shelley was somehow responding to Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion. A reader eager to respond to Shelley's vision here might encounter two difficulties, and she would get very little help were she to turn to the professional Shelleyans: there is virtually no critical commen­ tary on this text. The first problem concerns Shelley's characterisa­ tion of the sons of Albion 'as stones in the w ay— / They are masses of senseless clay.' Is Shelley again experimenting with the tactic of shaming or goading the oppressed into action? The word 'masses' in line 7 is interesting: the o e d gives an example from 1837 as the earliest use of the phrase 'the masses' to mean 'the populace or "lower orders'", but Shelley's 'masses of senseless clay' certainly anticipates this usage while preserving a figurative sense of aboriginal materiality. The question any reader might have, and especially a reader coming seriously from the left, is: what attitude towards the capacity of the oppressed to resist and liberate themselves is being communicated here? H ow would you dissuade such a reader from believing that Shelley, for all his liberating enthusiasm elsewhere, is here being either defeatist or condescending, or both? You could tiy moving right on to the second difficulty: what is Shelley accomplishing, politically and poetically, by saying not only that Liberty is dead but that it or 'she' has been, or is being, aborted? In his remarks at the M ay 1992 Shelley conference in N ew York, the late Kenneth Cameron said, among other things, that if Shelley were alive today he would be a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade, the us Supreme Court decision upholding a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. I haven't the slightest doubt that, as a woman's absolutely minimal legal guarantee to an abor­ tion goes, Cameron was correct, despite Shelley's own personal dislike of abortion and his denunciation of its use as a means of Malthusian population control. But in this poem and elsewhere in Shelley, abortions are images of horrible, deathly prematurity— negations of all those images elsewhere in his writing of yet unborn potential and future rebirth. (Anarchy itself, in The Mask, becomes 'the ghastly birth' that 'Lay dead earth upon the earth'

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[st. 33], aborted by the emergent spirit of Liberty in an exact reversal of the image from the poem we have been looking at now.) So w hy is Shelley saying that Liberty is being aborted, a reader genuinely drawn to this poem should want to know? Who commits this abortion— mothers themselves, out of despair that their 'sons are as stones in the w a y ... masses of senseless clay'? Or the 'Oppressor', in a pre-emptive strike against a dangerously proliferating antagonistic class? W hy should Shelley leave us in doubt on this point? The mock epithalamium which unfolds in the last three stanzas of 'England' is a brilliant piece of Shelleyan grotesque. But the savage taunting of the ruling class depends upon an extension both of Shelley's taunting the working class— Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor! For thy victim is no redresser— and of the imagery of abortion from the first two stanzas: Thou art sole lord and possessor Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions— they pave The path to the grave. The 'Oppressor' in this poem, like Anarchy in The Mask, though without any evident intervention by a living spirit of liberty, will abort itself in the very act of celebrating and consummating his marriage to 'Ruin'. A reader might be forgiven for thinking that this is not a revolution but an anarchist nightmare. And by the way, she might ask, what is an 'Epithalamium'? The word is right there at the end of the fourth stanza in what w e can safely assume was one of the 'popular songs' Shelley wanted to publish in 1819, a vestige of the position of inescapable cultural superiority from which Shelley reached out to 'the people'. Foot recurrently acknowledges Shelley's cultural and social distance from the oppressed and often takes up the task of helping the people he wants to read Shelley to negotiate that distance without any undue bother. In his talk at the s w p 'Marxism' confer­ ence, he did an exemplary job of explaining what a 'masque' was to those in the audience who did not know or needed to be reminded, so that they would grasp the force of Shelley's pun in the title of The Mask of Anarchy. Foot calls The Mask 'one of the great political protest poems of all time' (Shelley's Revolutionary Year, 15), and I entirely agree with him. But this greatness is inseparable from doubts, hesitations, even contradictions that make some passages of the poem confusing for all kinds of

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readers. The passage I want to focus on here— and in this instance the difficulties have received attention from almost everyone who has written on Shelley and politics— is the sequence of fifteen stanzas that begins with the appearance of the 'maniac maid' and leads into the rousing call to resistance that makes up the rest of the poem. Whose voice utters the great call to resistance? This is one difficulty the passage presents, and it is linked to a range of others having to do with the politics of the 'maniac maid's' actions; with the figurative dynamic of the 'mist', 'light', 'image' or 'Shape' that rises up 'between her and her foes'; with the relation of passive resistance to violent action; with Shelley's own self-representation in this poem. In the introduction to Shelley's Revolutionary Year, Foot sets most of the difficulties to the side: 'Anarchy is itself destroyed in Shelley's poem by a "maniac maid" who calls herself Hope, though she "looked more like Despair". She rouses the people to free themselves from their oppressors, by supplying them, among other things, with a powerful definition of freedom' (15). N o w it may be perfectly possible to interpret those fifteen stanzas in a w ay that conforms to Foot's summary of them, but what worries me is that someone who reads his introduction will turn to the poem itself and find her expectations— say, of a power­ ful feminine voice and agency at the centre of the poem— frus­ trated by writing that is quite demanding and elusive. There is no explicit indication in the text either that the 'maniac maid' destroys Anarchy or that she utters the culminating song of resistance and freedom. Instead, as Foot himself shows in his more detailed reading of this passage in Red Shelley, there is an extraordinary figurative intervention at this juncture upon which the entire poem turns. Just when the maid lies down in despair and, as Foot says, There is nothing for it but the most desperate direct action ... suddenly in between her and the advancing horde, 'A mist, a light, an image rose.' It is 'small at first', but then 'it grew' into a great shape in armour, with luminous wings and a helmet which glistens like the sun. The image cannot really be seen by human beings, but they know it is there.... And it has the most astonishing effect: A s flowers beneath M ay's footstep waken, A s stars from Night's loose hair are shaken, A s waves arise when loud winds call, Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall.

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'Thoughts sprung/ People start to think about their condi­ tion, and the w ay out of it. Nothing, in Shelley's view, is more powerful. (Foot, 176- 7) And nothing in Shelley criticism, in my view, gives us a more powerful sense of the political point and force of Shelley's extra­ ordinary 'imagery drawn from the operations of the human mind' (Preface to Prometheus Unbound) than what Foot says here. Thoughts sprung' in a process horribly and tragically 'ankle-deep in blood' and yet so miraculous in its unfolding of collective mental life that only a sequence of explicit figurative proximations can communicate it. In this aspect of what the passage accom­ plishes, Shelley's effort to get people to rethink and reimagine without ever forgetting the Peterloo Massacre is, to use Foot's word, 'astonishing'. So a reader who looks into Red Shelley will find just the right kind of help with some of the questions Shelley's stanzas provoke. But not with all of them. The question of whose voice speaks in the rest of the poem is still open. 'Who makes the speech is not quite clear,' Foot writes in Red Shelley, in contrast to what he says in Shelley's Revolutionary Year, 'though the speaker is certainly fe­ male' (177). 'Certainly female'? All the text tells us is that These words of joy and fear arose A s if their own indignant Earth Which gave the sons of England birth Had felt their blood upon her brow, And shuddering with a mother's throe Had turned every drop of blood By which her face had been bedewed To an accent unwithstood,— A s if her heart had cried aloud: 'Men of England, heirs of Glory,'etc. Cameron realises the force of the two 'A s ifs' in these lines and compares the effect to a passage in The Revolt of Islam, 'where at the beginning of the revolution, before moving into action, the people: heard the startling cry Like Earth's own voice lifted unconquerably To all her children.' (ix, iii) 'Shelley did not say', Cameron goes on to observe, 'that the voice

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is the Earth's, only that it is 'like' the Earth's' (Golden Years, 348). Shelley's similes here powerfully transmute the blood of political oppression and violence into 'an accent unwithstood'— but w h y does he make the matter of vocal agency, much as he makes the matter of physical agency in the destruction of Anarchy, so inde­ terminate? Paul Dawson struggles with this indeterminacy— and then recycles it: 'Shelley disguises his voice as the voice of the Earth, or the voice of the Earth is making itself heard by borrowing the voice of the poet' (Unacknowledged Legislator, 207). Behrendt too has to resign himself to 'ambiguity': 'the speech— even though it is quoted as direct address— is presented within the framework of a simile: a transfiguration occurs, and ... We may infer that the words are the apparition's [not, on Behrendt's reading, Mother Earth's], but Shelley's equivocation permits us equally to infer that they are those of a universal spirit of England and not unlike the elemental spirits who speak in Prometheus Unbound' (Behrendt, 198- 9) . This kind of uncertainty about voice in the last part of The Mask of Anarchy gets strangely propagated in Chapter 1 of Animal Farm, where Orwell's parody of Shelley's song of freedom is sung, you will remember, by 'old Major,' Mr Jones's 'prize Middle White boar'. Old Major recalls in a dream the words of a song which 'when I was a little pig, my mother and the other sows used to sing' but which 'have been lost to memory for generations' ('Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland / Beasts of every land and clime ...'). What I think we need to tell ourselves, and our students and other readers who want to understand 'one of the great political protest poems of all times', is that for many reasons Shelley needed this indeterminacy. He wanted the course of the poem to turn on the heroic actions of both a despairing woman and a militant 'Shape arrayed in mail'; he wanted to generalise the effects these figures produce by transforming the 'maniac maid' into Mother Earth and by having the voice of political insight and protest arise not from any single individual, not even from any single allegorical figure, but from the collective consciousness of the oppressed; above all he wanted to face what he saw as the inescapability of armed rebellion— 'He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable' ( o s a , 588) , M ary Shelley says in her note to the poems written in 1819 — and yet somehow minimise the possibility of mob violence and rioting which, instead of putting an end to the perpetuation of authorised state violence of the kind he had read about at Peterloo, would only provoke further massacres. He wanted to do all this, and he produced a text filled not just with powerful political protest but

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with all the complications and contradictions and fears— 'These words of joy and fear arose', the poem says in introducing the call for resistance and liberation— that a writer who 'eagerly ranged himself on the people's side' would have had to acknowledge to himself and his potential readers. We can acknowledge The Mask of Anarchy's indeterminacies as aspects of Shelley's politically motivated poetic practice— as as­ pects inseparable finally from the poem's power of protest— with­ out forfeiting our critical judgement of them. Commenting on those passages in The Mask that urge passive disobedience as a w ay of responding to a situation such as that at Peterloo, Foot says, 'Shelley's was bad advice— The only w ay the masses could have stopped the yeomanry at Peterloo was by pulling them off their horses, disarming them with as much violence as was neces­ sary, and organizing an insurrection' (Foot, 18 1-2). I once wrote that this remark demonstrates the distance between Foot's own politics and Shelley's, and I still believe that it in certain respects it does. But Foot is right politically here; what he advocates is not at all what Jerrold Hogle means, in his analysis of The Mask of Anarchy, by 'mimetic violence' (Hogle, 134-48). And the rightness has behind it the force of Shelley's own refrain, 'Y e are many— they are few', as well as of that line from 'Song to the Men of England': 'Forge arms,— in your defence to bear.' I want to move back now from the protest poems of 18 19 and look for a moment at The Revolt of Islam, partly because of its specific bearing on the questions of women's political agency and of political violence that come up in The Mask of Anarchy, but more generally because of its problematic place in the w ay Shelley is currently being taught and read. The Revolt is, after Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's most ambitious political poem, and it ad­ dresses the historical circumstances of political struggle in the early nineteenth century more explicitly. But the problems it presents to academic as well as non-academic readers, though different in many respects from those presented by Shelley's ex­ perimental metaphysical drama, are formidable. Paul Foot is char­ acteristically upfront and undaunted: 'This poem is difficult to read. The narrative twice doubles back on itself, and is clogged by complicated imagery. Yet it throbs from first to last with energy and excitement' (Foot, 116). Foot may be right about 'first to last'— there are moments of powerful writing throughout The Revolt. But there are long stretches in between that are bewilder­ ing and trying. Shelley describes the poem in the Preface as 'an experiment on the temper of the public mind, as to how far a thirst

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for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live/ ( o s a , 32). I know I am not alone in feeling either that the experiment sometimes does not work, or that I must not belong among those whom Shelley thought of as 'the enlightened and refined'. Still, I have long felt that it was a distortion of Shelley's career not to teach The Revolt of Islam, and in the spring of 1991 I was provoked to do something about it. The immediate provocation was the war in the Persian Gulf: I found myself getting ready to talk to a large class at Brown University about Romantic orientalism, and somehow the gruesome spectacle of watching George Bush and Saddam Hussein compete for the distinction of being the Ozymandias of our days led me to add to the syllabus the brief excerpts from The Revolt in the Norton Critical Edition, about twenty double pages of additional excerpts from four key moments in the narrative, Shelley's Preface, and Mary Shelley's Note from the 1839 Poetical Works. Since I basically agree with Paul Foot that 'N o idea shines through the poem with more un­ bounded and sustained enthusiasm than that of women's libera­ tion' (Foot, 116), the excerpts I gave my students included Cythna's account in Canto 7 of her isolated imprisonment in a cave surrounded by the sea. The students responded strongly to this episode, and they had questions about it— and about Shelley's evident feminism more generally— that I could not answer very effectively at the time. They were able to deal with what it would mean to think of Cythna as an Islamic woman— a week on Byron's The Corsair had alerted them to some of the confusions of orientalist disguise. It was the questions they raised about Shelley's image of a woman transforming the conditions of confinement into possibilities of liberation that were so challeng­ ing. They specifically wanted to know if there were other female figures in Romantic writing like Cythna. Some of them were familiar with Spenser's Britomart and the Renaissance tradition of the chaste woman warrior— but they wanted to know about more immediate Romantic precedents. And they had another question, one which I now think is crucially connected to the question about voice, gender and political agency in the last part of The Mask of Anarchy: w hy are the stanzas representing Cythna's account of her experiences set off in quotation marks, unlike the stanzas belong­ ing to Laon? M y students' question about previous Romantic women warri­ ors led me back to Southey's (and in the first edition also

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Coleridge's) Joan of Arc, and I now think that Shelley's representa­ tion of Cythna's access to discursive and political power can be usefully understood as a critical rethinking of Joan of Arc's rela­ tion to the voices of visionary prophecy in Southey's epic. And their question about the representation of Cythna's voice in rela­ tion to Laon's led me to work my w ay again through Jerrold Hogle's remarkable account of specular projective reciprocity in The Revolt of Islam, and to see, with his and m y students' help, both the radical brilliance of Shelley's response to the problem of wom­ en's vocal and political authority and the contradictions that remain in his revisionary alternative to Southey's Joan of Arc. Cythna, not Laon, is Shelley's real hero of self-projective love and liberation— but in the rhetorical structure of The Revolt of Islam it is only through or within Laon's voice that she speaks. I introduce these current critical interests of mine realising that to do so near the end of this essay may seem tendentious or merely anecdotal. But I want to suggest that there are advantages of running more risks in deciding what Shelley we ask students to read, and of not assuming too quickly that the difficulties and obstacles of contending with Shelley's most ambitious poetic experiments will necessarily turn non-specialist readers away. I do not mean to imply that students in a university literature course will raise exactly the same kinds of questions as the 'social­ ist, radicals and feminists' that Paul Foot is most concerned to address— though there are many university students in the s w p and the iso and in other militant left organisations. Socialist, radi­ cal and feminist readers of Shelley who are not in universities bring their own distinctive expectations to bear— expectations which are often energised, I have found, by anger at the w ay they were made to read and admire Shelley's lyric fragility at school. We could all learn something, I believe, from trying to talk about The Revolt of Islam to an audience such as the one that heard Foot speak at the s w p conference in London. I am under no illusion that most readers of Shelley today share the political perspective that informs this essay, or even find it pertinent to the fin-de-siecle revaluation of his writing. But we should all be able to acknowledge certain inescapable historical and political aspects of the Shelley bicentenary moment, some of which I tried to sketch out in introducing an informative but somewhat nostalgic session called 'Shelley and the Socialist Experiment' at the N ew York Shelley conference in M ay 1992. If Shelley had been bom in the Bastille year of 1789, or in 1790 when Wordsworth took part in those revolutionary celebrations in

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France, most of us would have celebrated his 200th birthyear believing that the promised return to the Reagan-Thatcher busi­ ness boom might indeed be just around the comer, watching with relief or triumph the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Stalinism, listening either optimistically or resignedly to George Bush's prattle about a N ew World Order. But Shelley was bom in 1792, and in 1992 we had to face what a Guardian leader called 'A N ew World of Grinding Disorder7: a deepening worldwide eco­ nomic crisis; savage civil war in what was Yugoslavia and in other parts of the old Soviet bloc; the re-emergence of religious and nationalistic fanaticism and fascism; disgraceful famine in Soma­ lia and other parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America; continuing threats of war in a Middle East devastated and made more unsta­ ble than ever by Operation Desert Storm; violent urban uprisings and riots, of the kind that Shelley feared but saw as unavoidable, in south-central Los Angeles and in other western countries, including Britain. This is the context in which we had to celebrate Shelley in 1992, and those who find that the tradition of claiming him for the revolutionary left is passe and irrelevant have to do so while facing the failure and paralysis, at this historical moment, of alternative political traditions that either wish to claim him, dis­ own him, or keep him safely in his place as one of the poetic revolutionaries, along with Blake, whom non-revolutionaries are pleased to admire. The work still to be done is of course multifaceted, and it ought as far as possible to be dialectical rather than merely at cross purposes. Not many readers, I suspect, agree with Donald Reiman's characterisation of Shelley as an 'agrarian reactionary7 (Romantic Texts and Contexts, 260-74). It is clear, I think, that I do not. But the evidence about the material interests and inclinations deriving from Shelley's class position set out in Reiman's essay, together with the additional vantage points brought out in Paul Dawson's piece on 'Shelley and Class' has got to be taken seriously; from it derive many of the sorts of poetic complications that I have focused on here. Scholars and literary critics have an obligation to uncover, define, analyse these complications— that, after all, is an important part of our work. But scholars and critics who are also teachers have a further obligation to evaluate: to assess the relative importance of such complications and to help students and other readers confront them as part of a larger experience in which what is most vital and most historically con­ sequential is kept to the fore. This further obligation needs to be honoured even more intensely by scholars, critics and teachers

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who think of themselves as political activists, and who, in the case of Shelley, feel politically as well as aesthetically and profession­ ally committed to what is great about him. NOTES

1. The only comparable effort I am aware of is the 1979 Journeyman Press volume containing Shelley's Socialism, two lectures by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling originally published in a pri­ vately printed edition of twenty-five copies in 1888, together with Popular Songs wholly political, and destined to awaken and direct the imagination of the reformers. This volume does not include 'Ode to the West Wind' or A Philosophical View of Reform. 2. Quotations of 'Song to the Men of England', 'Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration', and The Revolt of Islam are from Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Hutchinson, corrected Matthews. Quota­

tions from Mary Shelley's 1839 notes are also from this edition.

Shelley after Deconstruction: The Poet of Anachronism TIMOTHY CLARK

In his contribution to the anthology The New Shelley (1991), Ross G. Woodman writes that T h e world that Shelley's poetry and critical prose legislated into existence is now at last amongst us' (Woodman, 177). If only this were true! Woodman's claim is limited, however, to the modem critical institution and its readings of Shelley as 'one of Deconstruction's recognisable and acknowledged found­ ing fathers' (177), as witnessed by his almost central place in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979). Since this manifesto appeared there has been a second wave of readings of Shelley engaged in debate with deconstructive thinking, notably work by Jerrold E. Hogle (1988) and by Tilottama Rajan (1990), along with several essays in The New Shelley. M y question, in giving critical readings of these recent constructions of Shelley, is this: how far does this interlacing of past and present, of Shelley's practice and modem theory, constitute an inadmissible anachronism? Secondly, what might 'anachronism' mean in relation to this poet? Even though he has now passed his two-hundredth birthday, Shelley remains, in many senses, the poet of anachronism. This is so nowadays more than ever, when Shelley so often seems a contem­ porary. Anachronism not only names, one might suggest, features of the history of Shelley criticism; it embraces much that is pecu­ liar or forceful about Shelley's own thought and career with its complex temporalities of 'the abortive' and 'the prophetic'. This is the poet of both 'Ozymandias' and the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, one whose career can be characterised, broadly, as an attempt to recreate during the 1810s many of the intellectual and political conditions of the late 1780s and the 1790s. Poets for Shelley are yet also figures from the future. This sense of temporal dislocation often provided Shelley with a w ay in which to view the vicissitudes of his own career. Even physiologically, a poet is as if 'bom in a happier age' (A Defence of Poetry, 493), with a sensibility painfully out of harmony with his or her present, a situation Shelley attempted to conceptualise by elaborating a

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complex dialectical theory of historical change. A n y poetic text, as Shelley understood it, is the intersection and contestation of diverse temporalities. Dante and Milton, we read in A Defence of Poetry, appear differently as a result of altering circumstances (498-9). In a sense my study is a consideration of varying w ays of interpreting the following celebration of anachronism as a crea­ tive principle in A Defence of Poetry. A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its diverse effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight. (500) In considering three recent texts that embody deconstructive tech­ niques m y particular aim will be to characterise, along generic lines,1 the methodology according to which these texts process their evidence and generate their arguments. The three texts at issue are a 1991 essay on Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814) by Sharon M. Setzen, Jerrold Hogle's Shelley's Process (1988) and the reading of The Triumph of Life in Tilottama Rajan's The Supplement of Reading (1990). M y thesis is a variant of a 'Romantic Ideology' argument. That is: close analysis of these texts which claim to be deconstructive, or even to surpass deconstruction in some re­ spects, reveals them to be carrying over a textual dynamic that finds its model in the Romantic period and which must now be seen to constitute a mere anachronism. (i) The Model M y generic model for these critical works is the German-Romantic practice of writing in fragments, as instantiated by the work in this form of Friedrich Schlegel. The German-Romantic project directed itself towards the possi­ bility of the work-of-art as the reflexive self-presentation of the movement of creative consciousness (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 10- 13). It is less a matter of producing so many fine, determinate works of art, than of the conditions of representation in general, understood in terms of the transcendental subjectivity of German idealist philosophy. Poetry is conceived in terms of the process of a creative consciousness reflexively meditating upon its own act. The hypothetical transcendental mode of poetry would be the poetry of poetry as the consciousness of consciousness.

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W hy did Friedrich Schlegel advocate writing in fragments as a response to these extraordinary ambitions? A fragment, as inher­ ently incomplete, is valorised in terms of its setting the reader to work in a dialectic, beyond itself, towards the totality that would complete and determine it. It thus instantiates the ideal of Roman­ tic poetry as 'still in the state of becoming'. Fragment relates to fragment in a movement in which each participates in an openended process of mutual determination; the text's 'real essence' becomes active, verbal. It is forever becoming in the reader's mind, yet 'never perfected' (Athenaeum Fragments No. 16; Schlegel, 175). Blanchot has suggested that this project is doomed by the very conditions of its success: the poetic becomes everything, becomes nothing, 'pure consciousness without content, a pure speech that can say nothing' (Blanchot, 356). Another w ay to read this would be to consider the effects of a tautology in Schlegel's notion of writing in fragments. The series of fragments set their reader to work in quest of a unity that must not be static but which remains open-ended as the very process of poesis itself as it relates frag­ ment to fragment indefinitely. One could argue then that, within the terms of Schlegel's notions of form, unity and understanding, the success of the fragment form is assured in a merely circular manner. For Schlegel (a) defines understanding itself as the con­ struction or synthesis of wholes (see Higonnet, especially 175) and (b) valorises a notion of wholeness or unity as process, as an activity reflexively formulating, escaping and transcending itself. The argument can seem merely self-justifying: what Schlegel affirms in or as the text is no more than the formal structure of the nofron of understanding or reading applied to it. The circularity of Schlegel's project could be said to be grounded, maybe even justified, in the Romantic version of the GermanIdealist concept of the subject. Fragmentation and Romantic Irony, converting incompletion into a movement of self-transcendence, remain bound to a notion of Bildung as continuous human growth, just as the very concept of becoming is incoherent with­ out the possibility of an unchanging substratum. The fragmentary text is thus the scene of the transcendental subject's self-recogni­ tion in the affirmation of its potential and its freedom. Many modem critical essays of a 'deconstructive' persuasion can be seen to be actually a practice of Romantic Irony for which Schlegel's fragments can serve us as an illuminating model; they are thus vulnerable to the objection that they employ a danger­ ously circular procedure in reading of the sort that emerges in Schlegel, but without the justification of that transcendental

Timothy Clark conception of subjectivity and human creativity that bolsters Schlegel's programme. Instead modem employments of Roman­ tic-Ironic method are anachronistic in a limiting sense and dis­ turbingly self-justifying, since they finally affirm, not transcen­ dental subjectivity (a philosophical option probably closed to us),2 but merely reading and rereading themselves as an open-ended process. M y use of Schlegel as a generic model in what follows does not imply close historical influence or knowledge. It instanti­ ates modes of reading that arise all too easily from our concern with process and fluidity in Romantic texts if we are not suffi­ ciently attentive to the textual ruses of Romantic idealism. (ii) Instances of the Romantic-Ironic Method of Reading Sharon M. Setzen's 'Excursion into the Wilderness' (1991) is a consideration of the vision of the city in the clouds to be found in Book n of Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814). Historical scholar­ ship into possible antecedents and sources for the passage, based on close verbal analysis, can reveal no one obvious source. Miltonic analogues, for instance, include both the Pandemonium of Paradise Lost and the Jerusalem of Paradise Regained. Moreover, Setzen demonstrates that the visionary city possesses three quite different significances to its three 'readers' in Wordsworth's text, the Solitary, the Wanderer and the Pastor. From this play of possibilities, admirably rooted in historical research and close analysis, her essay generates the following conclusion: The Excursion becomes a self-regenerating endeavour for poet and reader alike. It becomes a cooperative effort to sustain the death-defying process of refiguration. Wordsworth's re­ fusal to name the imaginary city in Book 11, the refusal of his imagination to be arrested in any one source or figuration, generates a series of deferred readings that ends only with the ultimate deferral implied by the Pastor's reading of the sunset: the heavenly city, the good of all earthly pilgrimage, must remain, to mortal eyes, something that is evermore about to be. (389) This reading recognisably, if implicitly, affirms Wordsworth's text as an embodiment of Romantic Irony. The passage concern­ ing the visionary city could be said to involve, in David Simpson's definition of Romantic irony, 'a system of meaning-production which is ever expanding and proliferating, and yet ever evasive, ever digesting itself as a means of its ongoing process' (Simpson, Irony, 193-4). Moreover, this 'death-defying process of refiguration'

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also embodies the method of Setzen's article. She gathers together possible allusions and readings in the text in order to affirm the process of relation between them, viz. the unarrestable play of possibilities that can be read as moving between these separate references. The essay is not merely about Romantic Irony in some form; such irony constitutes the argument's generative principle, the method whereby it recuperates sections of Wordsworth's text, their possible sources, and their interrelation. Jerrold E. Hogle's magisterial study, Shelley's Process, is a monu­ ment to both the liberating force and the dangerous ease of a Romantic-Ironic approach to Shelley, encapsulated in Hogle's master-term, transference or transferential drive. Broader than terms like 'metaphor' or 'play7, and based on close analysis of Shelley's aesthetics, transference names figural mobility in general, under­ stood historically as the basis of Shelley's thought. It is a mobility affirmed by the poet in a series of iconoclastic gestures that release hitherto suppressed or unforeseen possibilities of meaning and relationship. Transference is clearly, I think, a version of Romantic Irony. M y concern, however, is the extent to which Romantic-Ironic pro­ cedures, as exemplified in Schlegel's theory of fragments, constitute the method of Shelley's Process, along with other recent readings of Shelley.3 M y concern is not with the rich historical scholarship of this study but the manner in which it is processed to provide an overall argument about Shelley. For example, Hogle's account of Adonais (1821) contains a powerful discussion of the elegiac genre itself, its status as an anti-urban discourse in Theocritus, Virgil, Spenser and Milton. Adonais, by virtue of its intense generic selfconsciousness, is also argued to embody Shelley's attempt to 'press elegiac conventions' so as to force them to reveal their fundamental conditions of possibility, viz. the figural mobility of transference itself as 'the one Spirit's plastic stress' of stanza x l d i . A s with Setzen's reading of The Excursion, the working hypothesis is that identifiable allusions or echoes in Shelley's text are to be read as a species of referential act such that the w ay the preceding text is transformed becomes in itself the prime bearer of meaning. The significance of Adonais lies in the movement of transferential displacement that a juxtaposition of precursor texts may seem to render legible, to the extent that Spenserian and Miltonic Chris­ tian figures are said to manifest, in allusion, their classical or pagan precursors as occluded subtexts. For instance, images of withered or torn plants in Adonais are read as themselves readings

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of Lycidas, the 'rough and crude' (that is, unripe) berries picked in honour of the dead man. Thus: Shelley forces the distance in elegiac language to confront its own grounding in transference at every stage, even in Lycidas. Words about death even for Milton, Shelley sug­ gests, must be exposed as 'killings' of their connections to their foundations (tearings from the stem) and yet as repeti­ tions of this basic displacement of death that mainly revive the need of signifiers for other signifiers. (299) Thus the relation of Shelley to Milton is read as affirming a fundamental mobility or negativity inherent to language and at work in both Lycidas and Adonais. It seems a neat conflation of stylistic, thematic and formal analysis: yet it is precisely this con­ flation of form and content, even in the guise of a continuous mobility, that also renders this critical method 'Romantic' in a problematic way. The method then, is often to (1) identify a possible allusion and then (2) to affirm its transferential relation to other parts of the text or to other readings, with a view to underlining the mobility of language itself as making such interrelationship possible. It can take purchase upon the smallest textual detail as well as long extracts. For example, Hogle argues that the very name 'Adonais' is itself an affirmation of transference, inscribing Keats into received myth and elegiac tradition. The name recalls the story of Adonis and the boar, suggesting in turn the beast of a critic who gored Endymion (1818) as well as various idealised young men in Keats's verse. The added 'a' in Adonais draws Adonis 'toward his alternate Greek name Adonai and then again toward the word for the Greek mourning ceremonies or festivals once devoted to that slain hero: The Adonias.' We thus conclude: 'The resulting com­ posite [the name 'Adonais'] as a shifting across successive forms, points to the inevitable conversion of the dead person into several metaphors for what he was or still seems' (302) (emphasis added). The poem's title thus seems to affirm a transferential regenera­ tion— a renewal of meaning— even in death itself. The method of reading here and in Setzen might be schematised as follows: (a) historical scholarship, either new work or that of previous criticism, is reviewed and, in a way, reaffirmed; (b) this is not done to uphold any one interpretation over another or the importance of one specific source but (c) to affirm the text as the crossing point of these possibilities and thus as the embodiment of transference as their condition of possibility (see, for instance the

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treatment of Alastor, 46-7). M y anxiety lies in the formal homology between this procedure and what Schlegel does with the fragment form, which was arguably a circular project. This Romantic-Ironic method must affirm a poetic process of continual becoming or transference not because of the particular content of texts which are its object but as the inevitable result of its mode of treating them.4 It is striking for instance that texts as different as The Excursion and Adonais are now rendered so improbably similar. M y third example is Tilottama Rajan's reading of The Triumph of Life in her book The Supplement of Reading. This is a study that employs a methodology (a new "literary history" (5)) which know­ ingly risks anachronism and circularity in its two-way relation of contemporary theoretical issues to the historical debates from which they arise. Ideally this methodology justifies accounts of Shelley in terms extremely remote from his own conceptual vo­ cabulary, for instance: "In Prometheus Unbound Shelley goes so far as he can in separating the pragmatic from the metaphysical, the positive activity of reading or more properly acting out, from what he sees as the deconstructive activity of writing' (323). Such accounts, both violent and enabling, do not always escape circu­ larity. Although there are differences between Rajan's theoretical position and Hogle's, just as there are between Hogle and Setzen, a common Romantic-Ironic method is to be found in all three studies, vitiating other and valuable work there because of its inherent circularity. The Triumph of Life, Rajan affirms, consists of a series of self by erasing scenes or figural movements, each a sort of repetition of the others. We have: the repetition of the procession [behind the chariot of life]; the repetition of 'Shelley7 as Rousseau; the temporal repetition of Rousseau's life in the form of a retrospective narration; and finally the repetition of Rousseau's attempt to under­ stand the core experience of the transformation of something beautiful into something hideous in the discursive form of a conversation with "Shelley", and in the symbolic form of a dream sequence unimpeded by conceptual filters. (328) Like Hogle's, Rajan's reading pitches itself against a 'decon­ structive' reading, defined as a negative movement of disfigura­ tion. Shelley's poem is translated as follows: 'the poem, while essentially deconstructive, does not present a process of pure erasure. Rather, it shows how the power of deconstruction at the heart of language actually produces meaning' (338). However, what Rajan calls "deconstruction' becomes in her practice only the

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negative moment in a dialectical play of Romantic Irony of the sort we have already seen in Setzen and Hogle. For example, Rajan is attentive to the scene in which lovers are imaged dancing madly round the car of life. This frenzy of mutual erotic destruc­ tion, however (lines 153-4), also resembles something more posi­ tive: the dance is as the movement of 'two clouds into one vale impelled / That shake the mountains when their lightnings min­ gle / And die in rain' (155-7). Thus repetition and erasure also refigure 'the pageant of error as a vital and Dionysiac dance' (330), a pattern of positive reversal to be read, she argues, elsewhere in The Triumph of Life. M y anxiety, as with Hogle's study, is the overall argument constructed from such observations to under­ write them: the argument is that each scene, as a conceptual and figural displacement of the others, is not merely negating; it also affirms at the same time that very movement of relating as a productivity which is the process of textual generation and dis­ placement itself (cf. Hogle's transference). In relation to our work­ ing analogy with Schlegel, one can characterise Rajan's method as treating each repetition in The Triumph of Life as a Schlegelian fragment, affirmed, through the play of its relation to the others, as a synecdoche of the poesis in general that bears them all. This procedure is most dangerously circular in the w ay it reads the relation of Rousseau and 'Shelley' in the poem as one of 'author' and 'reader'. We read, first, that: A s 'Shelley7 reads Rousseau and more importantly as Rousseau reads himself, narrating the growth of his mind not to arrange and monumentalise his past like Wordsworth in The Prelude but to reread it, he unweaves his past self in such a w ay so that his rereading unreads itself and creates a further language within language. The next sentence, however, unwittingly reveals the formal mechanism that may have generated the reading between scene and scene just given: 'It is, moreover, the fact that we can discover ever new relations within the poem that keeps us and future generations reading it' (340). Once again the Romantic deter­ mination to conflate formal and thematic questions means that what is affirmed in or as the text is no more than the structure of the movement of understanding applied to it, even if this is here precisely the space of conflict between differing critical positions (39)Let us return to the quotation from A Defence of Poetry that celebrates anachronism as a creative principle, describing a great

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poem as 'a fountain forever overflowing' with wisdom and delight. This might seem to offer justification for the Romantic-Ironic method of reading Shelley, since Shelley affirms this textual mul­ tiplicity as appearing in the manner in which different people and ages realise differing facets of the poem. However, Shelley's claim describes the reception of Dante over a period of centuries; it does not underwrite a procedure that affirms whatever interrelations may be prized out of the text as the basis for celebrating that text as a fountain of poesis. Shelley's account opens a poem to effects of history and institutional change; the Romantic-Ironic method­ ology is an act of critical totalisation. The new critics tended to make their aesthetic objects expand or balloon indefinitely by ascribing every possible irony or 'complexity' elicited by readings to some 'richness' of the text (Ferguson, 482), rather than to the fact that differing constructions of the object emerge through clashing practices of reading. Romantic-Ironic readings of Shelley seem caught in the same projection of a virtual object: a poem ib 'not just what a reader thinks it to be; it [is] what all readers [think] it to be' (Ferguson, 482). Perhaps this is a symptom of how little our basic institutions of criticism have changed, that is to say we are still, as before, principally concerned with making cases for or against individual authors and their work. Anachronisms such as claiming, improbably, that Shelley and Derrida or Paul de Man are saying the same thing5 bear out the pressures of this institu­ tional framework: sophisticated interpretation is often a simple form of evaluative criticism at one remove. (Hi) Anachronism as a Critical Principle A different mode of attention to questions of anachronism might enable readings of Shelley that are sensitive to questions of judge­ ment and value in postmodern thinking, yet run less risk of circu­ larity. Such a mode of reading could look to the deconstructive work of Jean-Franqois Lyotard on what he terms differends (Lyotard, 10), that is, points of difference where the two (or more) sides to an issue speak radically different or heterogeneous lan­ guages, such that their dispute cannot be phrased in either termi­ nology without by its very phrasing prejudging the issue in fa­ vour of that side. Criticism, therefore, should listen for differends within Shelley's texts. Should we not also be looking to complicate Paul Magnuson's argument that we should aim to make our students see 'that the Romantic poets were struggling with the same critical issues as contemporary critics' (in Hall, Spencer, 145)! Necessarily, those horizons of understanding we do share,

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or think we share, with Shelley will provide the starting point that enables our readings, but a responsible criticism will be sensitive to the possibility that there are differends between Shelley's texts and our critical practice, and that it is our duty to give voice to them. Anachronism, as the clash of temporalities between both our­ selves and Shelley and within Shelley's work may be one site of such differends. Evaluation, the guiding issue of this collection is itself a crea­ tive anachronism, designed (we hope) to open channels of dia­ logue between past and present ('Romanticism' itself being just such a retrospective construct). Since what we think of as the question of evaluation pervades Shelley's work, it is a surprise to find that the words 'value' or 'values' or 'evaluation' do not appear in A Defence of Poetry .6 This may be because these terms comport philosophical presuppositions from after Shelley's time; talk of 'value' or more especially, 'values' connotes a certain sub­ jective individualism, while 'value' suggests mere personal view­ point (Heidegger, 13-68). Shelley's argument with T.L. Peacock's attack on poetry concerns the notion of utility and of the 'highest' mode of pleasure, an argument with strong normative underpin­ nings (consider, for instance, the normativity implicit in such a statement as 'the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibil­ ity to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption' (A Defence of Poetry, 493). Shelley affirms the utility of poetry through an impassioned Platonic vocabulary— a strategic anachronism and one that was surely misguided, insofar as it led to emasculating readings of Shelley and his supposed 'Platonism' for many generations. The anachronism, however, may have been almost unavoidable if Shelley wanted to express a notion of the poetic as 'timeless' in a more complex w ay than as an immutable idea or eternal form. The temporality of the poetic, for Shelley, is open and futural in the mode of an event still in the process of happening, not yet deter­ mined. A poem may be timeless in the sense of something yet-tocome, prophetic in the sense of opening to a future in which it will speak. This is how Shelley read Dante, Milton, Plato etc. (A Defence of Poetry, 500). Like 'man' in the 'Essay on Life', the poetic is inherently and affirmatively anachronistic 'not what [it] is, but what [it] has been and shall be' (476). Poetry which finds its measure 'now' is only the product of those 'apes of humanity who make mouths in the glass of time' (letter to Leigh Hunt, 2 March 1822,11,394), unlike those writers who are, famously, 'the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present' (A Defence of Poetry, 508).

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Shelley's work has often been described as an attempt to com­ municate a certain optimistic interpretation of the French Revolu­ tion. It is more accurate to inflect this description and say that his work attempts to intervene, performatively, in the debate as to what, at some future time, the French Revolution may mean or will have meant. What Shelley actually lived was a disastrous epoch of precipitate change and despotic backlash such as he depicted in the failure and gruesome martyrdom of the hero and heroine of his revolutionary epic Laon and Cythna (written 18 17; Works 1,2 39 408). The text itself shows unresolved uncertainty as to how to interpret these traumatic events, containing, on the one hand, a mythical frame that affirms a Manichean view of the eternal strug­ gle of the forces of good and evil and, on the other, a preface that affirms the 'transient nature' of wrong and 'the eternity of genius and virtue' (Works 1,240). Shelley's engagement with anachronism entailed a recognition of personal finitude and liability to error not acknowledged in the Romantic-Ironic recuperations of his poetry. To rest much of the sense of one's poetry— on whether one is a poet— on its affect, its response, is necessarily a cause of intense insecurity. A s Shelley wrote to John and Maria Gisborne on 19 July 1821: The poet & the man are two different natures: though they exist together they may be unconscious of each other, & incapable of deciding upon each other's powers & effects by any reflex act.— The decision of the cause whether or no I am a poet is removed from the present time to the hour when posterity shall assemble: but the court is a very severe one, & I fear that the verdict will be guilty death (Letters 11,310). Shelley's seemingly obsessive complaints about public hostility or indifference have then a deeper source than personal vanity or insecurity, they are a product of the understanding of the dialecti­ cal constitution of identity he describes in A Defence of Poetry, 'neither the eye nor the mind can see itself unless reflected upon that which it resembles' (491). The impossibility, for Shelley, of unmediated self-knowledge underlies an awareness of anachro­ nism as a miscreative, disseminative force. A recurrent concern in recent and bicentenary criticism has been the w ay Shelley, aware of the unpredictable w ays a text could function in different and unforeseeable contexts, tried to predict and control the responses his writing would elicit in possible audiences. Such efforts are necessarily in vain. One thinks of a fragment related to Hellas (1821) in this respect, expressive of how thought must betray or

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compromise itself by its very historicity: Could one thought from its wild flight Return into the temple of the brain Without a change, without a stain— Could aught that is, ever again, Be what it once hath ceased to be Greece might again be free! ( o s a , 848)7 Irony of the sort at issue here, rendering one's efforts anachronistic in a pejorative sense, might be taken to be a basis of 'deconstructive' work, sensitive to historical difference, that would eschew that movement of reflexivity that both effaces historical difference and risks a dangerous circularity in argument. Shelley's career can be read as ceaselessly negotiating between creative anachronism as a mode of recuperable irony (dialectically affirming a future) and a non-dialectical sense of miscreative anachronism as the being limited, in unforeseeable performative aspects of one's texts and actions, to a time one cannot transcend. Shelley's career is a cease­ less and troubled revisionist engagement with anachronisms. These have in turn become the focus of many of the controversies surrounding Shelley's work: issues such as Shelley's use of Pla­ tonic terminology; his employment (as Richard Cronin points out) of terms such as 'king', 'throne', 'empire' and 'ruler' in ways that attempt (at least) to inscribe their historical force against them­ selves; his transformation of generic categories, such as the hymn or ode or epic, whose religions presuppositions are at odds with his thinking; his use of Christian iconographies of resurrection or of rebirth in relation to the poet's career and its possible posthu­ mous vindication, the reworking of pagan mythology.8 I conclude this discussion with a brief survey of the possibilities of reading in terms of questions of anachronism offered by a relatively unfamiliar yet fascinating text from Shelley's first visit to Rome in November 1818, the prose fragment The Coliseum (Works vi, 299-306). I consider this text because, while it offers itself so readily to readings of the Romantic-Ironic kind, it legibly resists them in provocative ways if one is sensitised to issues of the differend and anachronism. The Coliseum concerns the visit of two outcasts, a father and daughter, to the Coliseum at Easter. In the central speech of the fragment the old man, who is blind but 'sees' through the lan­ guage and sympathy of his daughter, improvises a description of the Coliseum that transforms it from a cultural icon of oppression and monstrous cruelty to an image of human potential yet to be

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realised, 'the shadow and the prophecy of that which then [Love] mayst have decreed that [humanity] should become' (304). This is Shelley's most extreme and ambitious reconfiguration of the anachronistic— a celebration of what the Coliseum will or may mean in the future. The father and daughter are observed by a third figure, explic­ itly dressed as a pagan in an 'ancient chlamys' (299). The old man, blind like an ancient seer, performs in the ruin a prose hymn of praise to a deity named simply 'Love', a speech reminiscent of those Homeric hymns to the gods which Shelley translated in 18 18 (Works iv, 243-8; see Webb, The Violet, 63-79). In choosing so unlikely and so brutal a site as the occasion of a hymn to love, Shelley is implicitly in debate with those who would argue, like Edmund Burke and William Hazlitt, that poetry and figurative language are inherently subservient to a rhetoric of power and domination.9 A Romantic-Ironic reading of this prose-fragment might well unfold as follows. It would concentrate on the manner in which the Coliseum, an embodiment of tyranny and imperialism, has become a ruin whose fragments, violently displaced from their original context, have become aestheticised into positive embodiments of human creativity. The ruin's force as architecture renders it the conduit of a spirit or power that transcends its previous finite historical instantiation. This regeneration and transcendence is further apparent in the w ay natural foliage and sunlight have transformed the place into a peculiar mode of the sublime, mountainous yet artificial. The potential for renewal embodied in the Coliseum as a work of art is realised in the language of the daughter and further intensified by the love and sympathy she simultaneously communicates to her father. He exclaims: 'It is your custom, sweetest child, to describe to me the objects that give you delight. You array them in the soft radiance of your words, and while you speak I only feel the infirmity which holds me in such dear dependence as a blessing' (301). Within the context of recent criticism it would become difficult to resist an interpretation of Helen as Shelley's figure for reading itself and its poetic force; for, as far as being in Rome is concerned, we are as blind as the old man and 'see' only through his daughter's lan­ guage and the transformative love it embodies. It is with this affirmation of the creative possibilities of transformative reading that the Romantic-Ironic method might begin to approach danger­ ously reflexive or circular ground. Thus one might draw upon possible sources for the text, the relation of Oedipus and Antigone

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for instance, and read what might seem to be Shelley's treatment of them as itself a reflexive embodiment of such a transformative rereading. Wordsworth's Tintem Abbey' (1798) might suggest itself as another possible source or a possible allusion. In the fragment's concluding paragraphs father and daughter discuss the transcendence of individual death, the transmission of thoughts, feelings and hopes from generation to generation, and they fend off the fear that Helen might die first. This might well be read as a transformation of Wordsworth's rather egotistical rela­ tion to his sister as a second self, and a potential 'monument' to his memory, should he die, in the second part of 'Tintern Abbey'. What was in that poem somewhat narcissistic has become, one might argue, a reciprocal relation in which the theme of regenera­ tive commemoration, already enacted in their relation to the Coli­ seum, reappears in the relation of father and daughter. When this frame shall be senseless dust, may the hopes, and the desires, and the delights which animate it now, never be extinguished in my child; even as, if she were borne into the tomb, my memory would be the written monument of all her nameless excellences. (304) One might also wish to extend the implications of the w ay terms like 'monument' and 'memorial' transfer themselves from architectural form to human forms, and analyse this relation fur­ ther in terms of Shelleyan notions of the relation between author and reader. In this w ay one can recuperate the fragmentary nature of The Coliseum itself (the textual monument), relating it to what the text itself can be interpreted as saying about fragmentation and thus recuperating the incomplete narrative as another synec­ doche of the poetic or the critical process themselves, rallying us to submit Shelley's textual labour to further acts of reading and rereading.... One might entitle this interpretation, 'Reading as love in Shelley'. Such a reading certainly works, but, once again, it works too easily. It needs to submit itself further to revision in terms of the dangers of anachronism and circularity. Sensitivity to the possibil­ ity of differends requires, ex hypothesi, that the text be considered an irreducible event and that to do it justice demands that one resists as far as one can any movement of synthesis or incorpora­ tion into what we already assume to know as 'Shelley' or, con­ versely, our given critical methodologies. Turning to The Coliseum in this respect, one would want to re-examine the issue of anach­ ronism as it appears in the contrast between the celebration of the

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ruined amphitheatre in the main text and a footnote in which Shelley, in the guise of a fictional editor of his own text, recalls its history ('schemes for wide-extended murder and devastation, and misrule, and servitude... We do not forget these things' (303). The ruin itself inspires a kind of sublime with its 'more than a thou­ sand arches, some ruined, some entire', 'immeasurably high and wide'. Does the footnote, however, conflate, as well as dissociate the aesthetic of the sublime with scenes of murderous barbarism in a w ay that demands further thought? Is the rhetoric of mental expansion associated with the sublime a psychological form of imperialism, a possibility recently aired by David Simpson? He asks if 'there is something ethically uncomfortable at the heart of our craving for bigness and our urge to set ourselves against enormity in a process of cognisance or conquest' (Simpson, 'Sub­ lime', 246). A s he becomes enthused by his daughter's language, the old man starts to elaborate his own fantasy about their sur­ roundings. Bearing in mind the original uses of the arena for gladiatorial shows and blood sports involving wild animals and human beings it is, to say the least, ironic that his aesthetic trans­ port, as he thinks of 'the shattered masses of precipitous ruin', should take the form of conjuring up frightened beasts. ('Are they not caverns such as the untamed elephant might choose, amid the Indian wilderness, wherein to hide her cubs.. 3 0 2 ) . There is still violence here, albeit internalised. Is there a relation between aes­ thetic and the spectatorship of acts of cruelty, as Hazlitt argues in The Round Table (1817) (Hazlitt, Works iv, 15-16 )? Suspicion is further aroused from the tensions unelucidated by Shelley in the rather absurd remarks of the strangely dressed scholar. Apologis­ ing for his mistake in not recognising that the old man was blind, he exclaims: The men who anciently inhabited this spot... respected infirmity and age' (305)— this only a few yards from the lions' cages! One also remembers that almost the first words he addressed to Helen's father were 'wretched old man...' (300). A full reading of The Coliseum and its ramifications for Shelley's oeuvre is another project (see Clark, 'Shelley's 'Th e Coliseum'"). M y purpose here is simply to stage the tension between two different modes of reading and to underline the danger that our fashionable concern for textual reflexivity may efface the histori­ cal differends both in the text and between Shelley's work and our own. A Romantic-Ironic reading of The Coliseum, so seemingly appropriate in many ways, would risk reaffirming the very universalising and historically questionable notion of the aes­ thetic process that text itself is unable to sustain.

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In conclusion, Shelley's inability to complete the narrative may have been due to the irreconcilable clash between his employment of an idealising aesthetic that renders the Coliseum a creative anachronism, a type of the future, and, with the realisation that the history of the place cannot be transcended, a sense of miscreative anachronism that infects and undermines the very language used in the attempt to transfigure the meaning of the ruin. In the resulting paralysis between incompatible modes of discourse, the fragmentary state of 'The Coliseum' bears witness to a genuine differend at the heart of Shelley's aesthetic. NOTES

1. By 'generic' I refer to the argument of Jean-Pierre Mileur in his The Critical Romance that differences in criticism that may seem theoreti­ cal are often generic. Thus the divergence between, say, critics like Michael O'Neill and William A. Ulmer partly arises from the fact that They are not so much arguing in the manner of philosophers over the nature of interpretation or literature per se, as they are choosing to practice different modes of writing, implying different (though not necessarily exclusive) conceptions of criticism of a genre' (31). I adopt this approach to be able to bracket such disputes, such as that of the 'real' nature of deconstruction, that would enable one to approach Shelley only asymptotically (see also Hamilton). 2. The materialist critique of Romantic idealism remains, the least an­ swerable. It discredits the notion that an advance in consciousness, as opposed to an alteration of material conditions, is a sufficient condition for liberation from history. Jerome McGann puts it as follows: 'This idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture is the grand illusion of every Romantic poet' (The Romantic Ideology, 137). For a survey of recent work on Shelley from a materialist position, see Paul Hamilton's 'Old Anatomies'. For a critique of McGann, see Frances Ferguson, 'On the Number of Romanticisms'. 3. Ronald Tetrault's essay in The N ew Shelley (15-33) also takes up a position that can also be called Romantic-Ironic: it affirms, against what is read as Paul de Man's stress on aporia and the paralysis of interpretation, the necessity of meaning-making, the process of signifi­ cation itself. Woodman's 'Metaphor and Allegory in Prometheus Unbound ' makes a similar case (Woodman, 178-80). The facility with which Shelley's work lends itself to these readings also poses certain dangers however: to affirm the process of making and unmaking sense ('metaphor' in Woodman's essay, as opposed to the illusory and oppressive stability offered by 'allegory') is to affirm a topic so general that one's conclusion risks becoming a de facto truism (such as that Shelley's figurative language 'far from effacing meaning, generates potentials for meaning that can be produced in different ways by different readers' Tetrault, 33). Secondly, to champion Shelley's text as principally the scene of the generation and undoing of meaning is to risk affirming the critical act itself as the subject or hero of every text—how many recent essays or books end with an untroubled affirmation of Shelley's texts as above all else calling for

Shelley after Deconstruction more reading and rereading...? 4. Ulmer writes that a 'transferential' reading could be extracted from 'any text or figure' (17) but does not substantiate this claim. M y anxieties concern the manner in which 'transference' sometimes becomes a circular methodology in the linkings of parts and whole in a text or between texts. 5. See, for example, Deborah Esch's reading of Paul de Man on Shelley; an illuminating elucidation of de Man's reading of A Triumph of Life is followed by an argument that A Defence of Poetry prefigures de Man, an argument that pivots on the way both Shelley and de Man use the word 'arbitrary' (71). This overlooks the differing senses of the word in the two thinkers, meaning surely 'b y convention' in Shelley's assertion that 'language is arbitrarily produced' and 'with­ out reason' in de Man's argument that The positing power of lan­ guage is ... entirely arbitrary...'. 6. The word 'undervalue' alone appears (507). 7. Along with other texts by Shelley that affirm a debilitating lack of power in the imagination, such as the prose fragment which Mary Shelley entitled 'Difficulty of Analysing the Human Mind' (Works vn, 64), this text plays a role in my study of the revolutionary poetic temperament and the limits of Romantic idealism in Shelley, Em ­ bodying Revolution , esp. 224-56. 8. For examples of critical studies that take up these respective issues see Cronin, Leighton, Webb, Shelley a Voice not Understood. Dawson, in The Unacknowledged Legislator , tries to defend Shelley's use of anachronistic monarchical or imperialist vocabulary (pace Cronin), 88-121. See Ulmer's fine discussion of this question (97). 9. The Coliseum is a cliche of the Romantic sublime. Though it is unclear to what extent Shelley undertook his prose fragment with the building's horrific connotations to the fore (see Clark, 'Shelley's "The Coliseum'"), it is obviously suited to meditations on the com­ plicity between much traditional discourse of the sublime and the language of power, a connection to which the old man's hymn to love in the Coliseum might seem to provide a revisionist answer. For Shelley's detailed knowledge of the tradition of the sublime see the first chapter of Leighton's Shelley and the Sublime. For Hazlitt and the complicity of the poetic imagination and the rhetoric of power see, above all, his essay on Coriolanus (Works iv, 214-21), which first appeared in The Examiner , 15 December 1816. Scrivener argues that Shelley's Laon and Cythna is partly an answer to Hazlitt (Scrivener, 120-2). Ironically, Hazlitt's own response to the ruin is as eulogistic and idealising as that of Shelley's protagonist (Works x, 232,234).

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II: Evaluating Shelley's Works and the Evaluations in Them

'W h a t's A u g h t But as 'T is V a lu e d ?':

A R eading of The Sensitive-Plant M ICH A EL O 'N E IL L

I 'Evaluation' is a term with a sepia tinge. We have come a long w ay from Yvor Winters's description of the critical process as culmi­ nating in 'the final act of adjustment' which is a 'unique act of judgment'. 'So much the better', one may think when listening to Winters adjusting to and uniquely judging the second stanza of 'O World, O Life, O Time'. Admirers of Shelley are only too familiar with putdowns masquerading as 'evaluation'. Too often the word has sought to validate ideological hostility, selective distortion, the priggish or bumptious display of ego. A ll the same, when Winters says of the stanza that it illustrates the careless use of words denoting emotion and the making of general statements that 'seem to refer ... to a particular occasion, which, however, is never indicated' ('Preliminary Problems', 312, 3 11), he does one valuable thing, despite being wrong about a fine stanza.1 He writes as though it mattered to him whether poetry, regardless of its canonical status, succeeds or fails. 'Regardless of its canonical status' is not meant to downgrade the significance or use of can­ ons; canons are needful since 'there is no magic by which imma­ nent value ensures survival' (Kermode, History and Value, 145). But value has only a virtual existence until actualised by a reader, even if one believes that value can transcend contexts and inhere in the object. For all its dogmatic insistence, the w ay Winters writes is implic­ itly dialogic, inviting assent or disagreement. In this respect, he is akin to another embattled evaluator, F.R. Leavis, with his 'This is so, isn't it?' George Steiner may idealise when he contends that the 'notion of dialogue is central to Leavis' ('F.R. Leavis', 623). You need keen ears to hear a counter-voice being allowed for (rather than caricatured) in Revaluation's attack on Shelley. But it is the case that Leavis demands that w e involve ourselves in the meet­ ing between text and reader which he seeks to re-enact. And, again, this is valuable, which is distinct from saying that Leavis is

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right about Shelley. Quite the contrary. Yet he brings into view the poetry as he has registered its impact. Leavis often describes penetratingly when writing about Shelley— 'there is certainly a sense in which Shelley's poetry is peculiarly emotional, and when we try to define this sense w e find ourselves invoking an absence of something' (194)— even if he draws disputable evaluative con­ clusions; yet the descriptive sharpness is made possible by the evaluative animus. The best evaluative critics compel less because they are right, though being right is vital to them, than because they underline the fact that criticism is a high-risk enterprise since it always exhibits the 'quality / of the affection' (Pound, The Cantos, no. l x x v i ) which the critic brings to the poem. To take a couple of instances from Shelley's own critical practice: his evaluation of Michelangelo may be unfair, too limitedly neo-classical, but it challenges us to consider the nature of art, his own in particular: He has not only no temperance no modesty no feeling for the just boundaries of art, (and in these respects an admirable genius may err) but he has no sense of beauty, and to want this is to want the essence of the creative power of mind. What is terror without a contrast with & a connection with loveliness? H ow well Dante understood this secret, Dante with whom this artist has been so presumptuously com­ pared! (Letters n, 80) Enlightening about Dante, the passage invites application to Shelley's poems, many of which connect and contrast 'terror' and 'loveliness' in fascinating ways. Again, Shelley's view, expressed in A Defence of Poetry, that a poet 'would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither' (488) intriguingly corrects aspects of his practice as a poet, and offers a lever to those who wish to prise apart readings that base themselves on preconceived notions about what Shelley's 'conceptions' were. A n y advocate of 'evaluation' must bear in mind Donald Reiman's remark that T h e temptation for the critic of Shelley, friendly or hostile, is immediately to give him or his individual poems a rank or niche in the English poetic tradition'. Reiman makes the cogent point that 'until one knows what the poet actu­ ally wrote and what it means, one can hardly determine whether his poetry is better or worse than that of other poets (whose work may or may not be better understood'. Thanks, in large part, to Reiman's own scholarship, 'the present state of Shelley studies' is

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in a healthier state than it was in 1965 when Reiman first pub­ lished the material quoted in this paragraph. Various on-going editorial projects, including the two facsimile series, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts and The Manuscripts of the Younger Roman­ tics, both under the general editorship of Reiman, mean that the problems and rewards of reading Shelley can now be thought about in an informed fashion. And yet it is also the case that one cannot say what a poem means without operating with assump­ tions (often covert, always present) about value. A moratorium on value-judgements is neither desirable nor possible, even if they may often have to remain 'perilously tentative and approximate' (Reiman, 'Purpose and Method', sp p , 543). Rather, there will and must be a continual process of evaluating w h y the poetry matters, which, for better as well as for worse, is likely to prove to be provisional and self-revising. Where Leavis, Winters and Donald Davie (influenced by both Leavis and Winters) disappoint in writing about Shelley has to do with the quality of the affection they bring to the poetry, with their reluctance to let judgement emerge from or co-exist with appre­ ciative surrender to the poetry. With only scant evidence of such surrender, judgement seems more the product of a priori assertion than of criteria evolved in the course of exploration. Writing about The Sensitive-Plant (the subject of the main body of the present essay), Davie discusses individual passages, before pulling him­ self up: The object of these many examples is not to pick holes in a masterpiece, still less to reduce judgment to some ridiculous balancing of good stanzas against bad. They are meant to illustrate what is after all the capital difficulty in reading Shelley— his unevenness. He has hardly left one perfect poem, however short. In reading him, one takes the good with the bad, or one does without it altogether. The business of private judgment on his poems is not a weighing of pros and cons but a decision whether the laxity, which is always there, lies at the centre of the poem (as it often does) or in the margin. I have no doubt that the faults of 'The Sensitive Plant' are marginal, and that at the centre it is sound and strong. (153-4) This is Shelley as the David Gower of English poetry: beautiful strokes, but lazy footwork and inclined to dabble outside the off-stump. Made uncomfortable by the workings of Shelley's lan­ guage, Davie produces the catch-all notion of 'laxity' to allow him

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to take with one hand what he gives with the other and read the poem as a 'masterpiece' that illustrates the poet's 'unevenness'. Though the last sentence seeks to undermine the preceding hints of undermining, it is a sentence that over-protests ('I have no doubt') its momentary solution to what is obviously an abiding doubt and, in its very shape, suggests that it could just as easily have gone the other way: that is, it could have asserted that the faults are central and the good qualities marginal. If such strate­ gies reveal more about the critic than the poem, Davie's approach can be viewed sympathetically. To give Shelley the benefit of the doubt this once and yet imply the persistence of doubt serves a deep need, the longing not to be caught out, the wish for psychic closure (despite the show of balancing fairness), the desire to know where you are and have reached with a text or author. The decision that the greatness of a text or writer has been conclu­ sively proved and can be taken for granted serves a similar need. Such psychic closure is a form of power over the text, one kind of seeming knowledge achieved at the cost of another kind, the knowledge inseparable from negatively capable empathy whose characteristic critical mode is attentive close reading; yet even the closest of close readings has to stop, is enmeshed in the play of substitution to which deconstructive critics have alerted us. What one wants is, to put it mildly, hard to attain, a criticism that demonstrates that value is discovered in the process of reading and yet inheres in what is read. This is not to make of value some reified essence; it is rather to see it as the product of a dynamic interaction between the work and the reading process. Reader and text will interrogate each other's values; ideally acts of reading should be alive to this mutual interrogation, to the ways in which value is at once abiding and in continual need of recovery and discovery. Perspectives shift, horizons alter; if value is 'immanent' (Kermode's word), it is endlessly negotiable. Or, as Shelley puts it, triumphantly if tricksily reconciling intrinsic value with the com­ plexities of reception, A great Poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their pecu­ liar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight. (A Defence of Poetry, 500) A s this passage indicates, Shelley was preoccupied with issues

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of evaluation, arguing in A Defence of Poetry that Treason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the per­ ception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole'. Yet if the instrument of valuation is imagination, imagina­ tion is caught up in (and set free by) the undecidable dilemma which A Defence of Poetry sweeps eloquently beyond: 'whether it [poetry] spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being' (480,505). The subordinate clause defines the main concern of The Sensitive-Plant; as I shall go on to suggest, it matters greatly in the poem whether the poet's 'modest creed' (Conclusion, line 13) is seen as spreading its own figured curtain or as withdrawing life's dark veil from before the scene of things. Earl Wasserman's account of Shelley's 'intellectual philosophy' argues that 'by removing the distinction between external and internal, Shelley opened up the possibility that the mind's most nearly perfect imaginative configurations of phenomena may be real'. Wasserman goes on to assert that 'the ground of likely truth for Shelley is the degree or intensity of belief (Wasserman, 149, 151). In doing so he helps one to see how the distinction of Shelley's poetry can often be traced to the w ay it engages imagina­ tively in the debate about value that Shakespeare sets out in Troilus and Cressida (n. ii). Troilus's W hat's aught but as 'tis val­ ued?' suggests the relativism hardly separable from any idealism, sceptical or otherwise. Hector's reply describes a logocentric dream which dies hard: But value dwells not in particular will: It holds his estimate and dignity A s well wherein 'tis precious of itself A s in the prizer.2I

II Such a debate is staged in The Sensitive-Plant, whose Conclusion voices playfully and gravely a logocentric dream (about which more in due course). One of Shelley's most daring structural inven­ tions, the Conclusion stands in a deftly ambivalent relationship to the rest of the poem; it sums it up and yet holds apart from it, acting almost as a form of commentary on the poem within the poem, a metatext that reads and is in turn read by what precedes it. If, as it must, the Conclusion sends us back to the rest of the poem, causing us to re-evaluate what we find there, what do we discover?

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A s Wasserman's ontological and Richard Caldwell's psycho­ analytic analyses bring out,3 the poem's depths and levels of meaning are easy to underestimate; it is also a poem which can be read over-ponderously. The Sensitive-Plant ensnares both the care­ less and the over-careful reader. Ingenuous yet sophisticated, Part First sees off the criticism which its lilting movement and seem­ ingly precious diction provoked in Ezra Pound: 'Shelley's Sensi­ tive Plant is one of the rottenest poems ever written, at least one of the worst ascribable to a recognized author. It jiggles to the same tune as A little peach in the orchard grew. Yet Shelley recovered and wrote the fifth act of the Cenci' {Literary Essays, 51). Pound's sense of the chronology of Shelley's works is shaky, yet he reminds us, despite himself, of the various w ays in which Shelley's poetry can be good; if it can deal in the tragic ironies of The Cenci, it can also encompass the subtle pathos of The Sensitive-Plant. Moreover, Pound reminds us— again, despite himself—of the importance of the poem's 'time', a tune largely deriving from the anapaests of which Shelley was fond in 1820 (as in 'A Vision of the Sea' and T h e Cloud'). Desmond King-Hele makes the helpful suggestion that 'Shelley no doubt chose anapaests because of a sensitive plant is a double anapaest'; but it is possible to disagree with his view that the poet's 'experiment fails. The struggle to avoid accenting the first syllable of a line results in too many false stresses else­ where, and when the metre does run smoothly it is apt to be monotonous' (King-Hele, Shelley, 233). What King-Hele hears as 'false stresses' or as rhythmically 'monotonous' can and should be interpreted as serving expressive ends. The catalogue of flowers in Part First sets in motion a lively dance of harmony by virtue of its repeated use of 'and' at the start of successive stanzas; the writing is alert rather than swooning, and Shelley is able, when he wishes, to insert firm stresses at the start of a line to sharpen or surprise, as in this summarising couplet: 'And all rare blossoms from every clime / Grew in that garden in perfect prime' (1,39-40). There, the emphasis on 'Grew' builds on the summoning to attention performed by the three consecutive stresses ('all rare blossoms') in the previous line. A s Robert Bridges observes, Shelley goes out of his w ay to avoid a 'pure stressed verse' in The Sensitive-Plant; while Bridges may 'not approve' of some aspects of Shelley's metrical licence, he does observe that 'A consistent prosody is ... so insignificant a part in what makes good English poetry, that I find I do not myself care very much whether some good poetry be consistent in its versification or not' (Bridges, 98,

99>-4

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Yet even this formulation does Shelley's prosodic art less than justice. In The Sensitive-Plant anapaests mingle with other arrange­ ments of stress to create a tune which unsettles the regularity of Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants, whose description of the 'chaste m im o sa ' finds an echo in Shelley's first stanza. Darwin's plant Shuts her sweet eye-lids to approaching night, And hails with freshen'd charms the rising light. Veil'd, with gay decency and modest pride, Slow to the mosque she moves, an eastern bride; There her soft vows unceasing love record, Queen of the bright seraglio of her Lord. (Loves of the Plants, 1,2 4 7,2 53-8 ) Darwin's eroticising personifications have left their mark on Part First of The Sensitive-Plant, but his elegant couplets balance humour and exquisite invention to achieve a knowing poise quite different in effect from Shelley's own kind of knowingness and poise.5 Together with its rhythms, Part First's similes and synaesthetic evocations of interplay and connectedness shape a constant shift­ ing between registers and implications. 'River-buds' are 'starry' (1, 46); 'daisies and delicate bells' are 'A s fair as the fabulous asphodels' (1, 53, 54); and the flowers generally are 'Like young lovers, whom youth and love makes dear' (1, 68). Big meanings hover in the poetry's heady atmosphere, but the writing mixes submission to its lyric materials with awareness of fictiveness in a w ay that makes a solely thematic account inadequate. This element of artifice caught the attention of the Rev. Dr W. S. Walker, whose piece for The Quarterly Review on the Prometheus Unbound volume of 1820 (in which The Sensitive-Plant was first published) did what one might call an 'F.R. Leavis' on the poem, evaluating negatively, but distortedly describing in a fashion that suggests the critic is on to something: Another characteristic trait of Mr. Shelley's poetry is, that in his descriptions he never describes the thing directly, but transfers it to the properties of something which he con­ ceives to resemble it by language which is to be taken partly in a metaphorical meaning, and partly in no meaning at all. The whole of a long poem, in three parts, called 'the Sensi­ tive Plant/ the object of which we cannot discover, is an instance of this. Certainly in the stanza about the hyacinth (1, 25-8) over which Walker pauses disapprovingly ('the tricks of a mere poetical

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harlequin'), Shelley does put on a virtuoso figurative display (Walker, in Redpath, The Young Romantics, 366,367). The hyacinth is immediately turned into metaphor as it flings from its bells 'a sweet peal anew / Of music' (1,26-7) before simile turns it back into a flower; its music was 'felt like an odour within the sense' (1, 28). The writing is evocative of interchange and alive to what it is doing, unravelling until it yields a sense of discovery, a movement enacted in stanza after stanza in Part First, many of which culmi­ nate in minor epiphanies, glimmering revelations. An example is the figuratively intricate unveiling of the nymph-like rose until 'The soul of her beauty and love lay bare' (1,32), with its shadowy foretaste of the Conclusion's trust in love, and beauty, and delight' (Conclusion, 21). The passage, like the hyacinth stanza, shows in miniature how Shelley's creativity builds, unbuilds and rebuilds over and over in the poem. So in the opening quatrains the sup­ posed 'self-indulgence' in line 9 ('But none ever trembled and panted with bliss'), about which Davie works up a moralistic head of steam, is played against the more restrained suggestiveness of 'the kisses of night' (1,4), as if Shelley were fully alive to the w ay his fable was flirting with 'ludicrous or unauthorized images', in his own phrase.6 The rhythmic bounce of line 9 projects the 'companionless' (1, 12) state of the sensitive-plant as slightly ridiculous. Yet by the time it reaches the line, 'A s the companion­ less Sensitive-plant' (1, 12), the poetry has forgotten its twitch of ridicule and invests 'companionless' with subdued pathos. The stanza half-mocks the w ay it bestows emblematic status on the sensitive-plant, while playing with the notion that such status should be bestowed. The rhythmic jiggling of Part First, which never becomes an anapaestic jogtrot, is a means of juggling with expectations; it alerts the reader to the fact that he or she is reading a poem sharply aware of its fictional status. Such awareness, to begin with, operates with subliminal delicacy, and has to be reached through tone, partly because, compared with Blake's The Book of Thel, Shelley's poem has a far less centred consciousness round which to play its 'delicate dubieties' (Holloway, 76). Soon, how­ ever, the poet's (or poem's) self-consciousness is flushed into the open in this description of the sensitive-plant: 'It loves— even like Love— its deep heart is full— / It desires what it has not— the beautiful!' (1, 76-7). It is no accident that 'only this stanza, in the narrative section of the poem, is in the present tense (as is the Conclusion)' (Caldwell, "'The Sensitive Plant'", 233 n. 15). The simile, 'even like Love', has a declarative insistence not found in

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previous comparisons. If the sensitive-plant experiences the pain of isolation, the poet is here obliged to allegorise and to that degree withdraw from the erotic incantation his flower descrip­ tion has been building up. Rather than blamed for being a 'jarring reminiscence of Plato' (Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, 159), the lines ought to be praised for showing the poet jolted, with the serio-comic ruefulness found throughout the poem, into a more direct recognition of his role as the pattemer of meaning. But this patterning is everywhere apparent in Part First. It shows in the w ay that words such as 'odour', 'music' and 'delight7— which seem to strengthen the sensuous appeal of description— impart a growing abstract resonance, as in the following lines: The quivering vapours of dim noontide, Which like a sea o'er the warm earth glide In which every sound, and odour, and beam Move, as reeds in a single stream ... (1,90-3) From a simile, 'like a sea', that conjures up, as if in hyper­ sensitive slow motion, a vaporously 'dim noontide', Shelley moves to a more conceptual comparison which affects merely to repeat the first but, in fact, has its eye on previous suggestions of harmony; the unexpected adjective, 'single', exercises and bespeaks this unifying pressure. The poet is part and not part of the harmony he describes; the sensitive-plant is among the most cunning doubles Shelley created for himself, one which allows him to study the processes of desire, dream and longing from a perspective that mingles amused detachment (the sensitive-plant is only a plant) and self-ironising compassion (it, too, 'desires what it has not— the beautiful'). What one finds in Part First is a fable-cumfantasy through which the poet wishes to discover, even as he concedes his responsibility for creating, intimations of signifi­ cance. The tension between wish and concession produces conflict of a quiet, even subliminal, kind. Towards the end of the section Shelley foregoes simile for the restrained authority of metaphor: And And And And

when evening descended from Heaven above, the Earth was all rest, and the Air was all love; delight, though less bright, was far more deep, the day's veil fell from the world of sleep,

And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned In an ocean of dreams without a sound Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress The light sand which paves it— Consciousness. (1,98-105)

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Shelley may draw on Milton's description of evening in Paradise,7 but he adds to Milton's account the modernising and ambivalent presence of 'Consciousness'. Milton's emphasis on 'Silence' (Para­ dise Lost, tv, 600,604) can be seen as sponsoring Shelley's evocation of a changed state in these lines. The garden's clouds, insects and so on, which in previous stanzas were 'like ministering angels' (1, 94), have given w ay to 'evening' descending like the least self­ announcing of deities 'from Heaven above'. Previous hints of fragility (the wings of the winds were 'unsustaining' (1, 78)) pass into more confident identifications ('the Earth was all rest, and the A ir was all love') which fulfil the promise of earlier similes. And yet fulfilment is haunted by a vision of fulfilment. In the weighted, long-vowelled line, 'And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep', Shelley s seemingly straightforward phrasing carries the enigmatic implication that sleep is not only an event at the end of day, but also the true ground of this 'undefiled Paradise' (1, 58). The reader seems momentarily to glimpse a different, or higher, or deeper, order of reality. But, as William Keach points out in discussing lines 10 2-5, 'Shelley's style asks us to be awake, even as w e read about what it's like to be asleep' ('Shelley's Workmanship', 39), a tug one senses as the 'ocean of dreams' is played against 'Consciousness'; dreams may surround and dwarf 'Consciousness', but it is con­ sciousness which registers this fact. Consciousness is the pre­ server and potential destroyer of the post-Miltonic poet's self-created version of Eden. Shelley, it seems, is caught and knows he is caught in a dilemma: the more he makes explicit the fact that he is shaping his fable the more difficult it is for his reader to accept the final value he attributes to his poem's experience as other than conferred. Whereas dreams or intimations in Part First often put them­ selves forward as suggestions, insinuations of meaning, Part Second opens with an assurance that admits no doubt: There was a Power in this sweet place, A n Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace Which to the flowers did they waken or dream W as as God is to the starry scheme: A Lady— the wonder of her kind, Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion, Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the Ocean— (11,1-8)

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This Tower' may well be a product of the sensitive-plant's 'dream',8 indicative of longing for a protective maternal presence less regressive than 'night' within whose 'embrace' the plant was 'Cradled' (i, 114 ) at the end of Part First. But the term appears as though it were an incontrovertible fact— whether the flowers 'waken or dream' the Lady is there for them— and yet it is a fact that is known to be a fiction. The poetry induces a waking state imbued by, yet conscious of, the pressures of a dreamed wish-fulfilment. 'A n Eve in this Eden' is a phrase jauntily aware of the poem's Miltonic and Biblical antecedents, while the subse­ quent analogy— 'a ruling grace ... to the flowers', 'as God is to the starry scheme'— is almost self-mockingly pat. Yet 'self-mocking' underplays the poet's imaginative engagement with his invented idyll, an engagement illustrated by the beautifully sustained simile in the next stanza; there, the seemingly dutiful patness of the opening two lines 'dilates', across the line-ending, into some­ thing unexpected and richer that shows how fiction has consoli­ dated its nature in this Part. Shelley intensifies that co-existence of self-aware fictiveness and surrender to what fictiveness creates which has already been discussed. For the most part, Part Second revels in the interplay between sophisticated poet and idealised subject-matter. Much of the writ­ ing deals in subtilised apprehensions, employing narrative de­ vices familiar from Lyrical Ballads: Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest; You might hear by the heaving of her breast, That the coming and going of the wind Brought pleasure there and left passion behind ... (n, 21-4) There rhythmically cunning lines, whose opening feet are suffi­ ciently weighted to imply a voice pausing and emphasising, tease yet endorse their suppositions much as the following lines from The Idiot Boy do: The grass you almost hear it growing, / You hear it now if e'er you can' (295-6, William Wordsworth). And yet, though the mannerism of 'You might hear7 is Wordsworthian, the ten­ derly humorous glimpse of erotic disturbance is Shelley's own. With refined exuberance Shelley the narrator intrudes in the lines 'I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet / Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet' (n, 29-30), lines which raise and exorcise the spectre of doubt. The writing's manner is similar when men­ ace is consciously held at bay, the serpent in the garden being reduced to the 'poor banished insects, whose intent, / Although they did ill, was innocent' (n, 47-8). Shelley inhabits an Eden

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which appears to be protected by delicate humour from the viola­ tions it is usually the fate of literary Edens to suffer; however, it turns out that this Eden is no more protected than any other, and one curtailed allusion serves as the lightest premonition of what is to come. This allusion occurs in the accounts of the 'soft moths that kiss / The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not' (n, 50 -1), which echoes Caliban's dream-like knowledge of 'sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not'. Shelley's lines simultaneously know about and imperfectly repress the pain of Caliban's 'I cried to dream again':9 a pain which can be seen as prompting the Con­ clusion of Shelley's poem. Certainly there is a too-good-to-be-true quality about the next stanza, where Shelley speaks of 'many an antenatal tomb / Where butterflies dream of the life to come' (n, 53-4). The use of 'butter­ flies' rather than 'chrysales' has been read as expressing the poet's special view of eternity. Wasserman writes: 'the chrysalis is in essence, though not in appearance, the future butterfly. Man's mortal life, together with its most nearly perfect sensory experi­ ences, is indeed the life to come; inherent in the shadow is the dream it reflects' (Wasserman, 176). But as if rebuking such intima­ tions, Shelley concludes Part Second with an unexpected reversal: the death of the lady, announced so baldly it half-seems a wilful decision by the fiction-creating poet: 'And ere the first leaf looked brown— she died!' (n, 60). Do we read the cadence of this line, the last in Part Second, as rising or falling? Supporting the former, unelegiac effect is the fact that both the 1820 volume and the fair copy made by Mary Shelley in the Larger Silsbee Notebook con­ clude the line with an exclamation mark.10 To m y ear, the line inflects itself as surprised and caught by surprise, even bracingly so, rather than as straightforwardly sad. A t the same time the line, once read, seems to have anticipated the shock its unforthcoming 'A nd ' prepares to deliver. Not that the shock of the line should be underestimated; the real surprise is the degree of readerly involvement with what is transparently a fable. It is Shelley's achievement to involve us in this fable. Though I have been stress­ ing his authorial control, that control co-exists— in the w ay that great art makes possible— with narrative shifts that are expressive of imaginative compulsions. If these compulsions are, ultimately, bound up with Shelley's own psychic needs and drives, the poetry is able to give them shape, design and suggestive power. The Lady, barely described, is a potent presence; so far as the poem, poet and reader are concerned, her loss is whimsically arbitrary yet tragically unavoidable.

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A key evaluative issue raised by the poem, and one which the foregoing discussion has sought to tackle, is the question of the relationship between the poem's texture and larger significance. Wasserman explains the relationship in this way: T h e poem ... is designed to be as deceptive on the surface as the superficial senses are and as true as the imagination at those incidental moments when imaging becomes imagining'. This comment restricts the play of Shelley's sceptical inventiveness, making a distinction between 'imagining' and 'imaging' which the poem finds tricky to sustain. To refer to the senses as 'superficial' is to ignore the fact that without the sensory the imagination has nothing to work on. Wasserman does concede that 'However unreliable the senses, they do constitute our experiential world'. But this concession is itself offset for Wasserman by his belief that Shelley's 'intellectual philosophy7 allows the poet to transform 'skepticism into a probabilism (Wasserman, 1 7 1 ,1 7 6 ,1 7 7 ) . What is disputable is the notion that the 'intellectual philosophy7 underpins the behaviour of the poem's language as systematically as Wasserman suggests. In fact, Shelley's fable casts its net of possible significances beyond the philosophical. He may have cut the description of the garden as a 'Republic of odours and hues',11 but, as throughout the 1820 volume, the seasonal imagery sympathises with the poet's political longings and fears. And if one cannot discount the impact on Part Third of Shelley's political anxiety following the Cato Street conspiracy,12 neither can one ignore the strength of the poet's subjective involvement, an involvement the more powerful for its obliquity. What attracts particular attention is Shelley's alertness to his role as creator and destroyer of value. For instance, the poem begins with an assertion of cyclic continuity: 'And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast / Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest' (1, 7-8). 'Rose' focuses themes of resurrection and aspiration; it is echoed, and its optimism bitterly reversed, in Part Third, that buoyantly grotesque litany of destruction. There Shelley tells how 'The vapours arose which have strength to kill' (m, 75), and there is no mistaking the sardonic irony of Part Third's final couplet: 'But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels / Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels'(m, 116 -17 )— where the irony is made more sardonic by the flicker of a pun, 'Rose' briefly calling to mind the flowers that are not reborn before its status as a verb is properly established.13 Does Shelley intend us to read this clinching bitterness as merely a mistaken vision of reality? Such is Wasserman's argument. 'Only the exotic Sensitive Plant, like man, is an annual', he writes (Wasserman, 169). Wasserman

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bases his case on the questionable view that the sensitive-plant had died by the end of Part Third; the view is questionable since the sensitive-plant is described as a 'leafless wreck' (in, 115), not a 'lifeless wreck' (see Caldwell, 250). It only appears, according to Wasserman, that the other flowers (all 'perennials in the climates Shelley knew7, Wasserman, 169) have not returned in the spring; but all that this seeming non-appearance proves is that our 'organs' (Conclusion, 23) are at fault. Yet the savage 'imaging7 of decay in Part Third avails itself unsettlingly of the tactics of 'imag­ ining', as in the phrase 'Rose like the dead', where the use of simile recalls previous means of shaping intimations of significance but reverses the positive implications which in Parts First and Second were associated with comparison. In fact, 'imaging' opposes 'im­ agining' with such power that the intimations of Part First and Part Second assume the shadowiness as well as promise of dream. To explain aw ay the impact of Part Third is to simplify the poem's duplicity of vision; if it is arguable that the 'tears' within 'each lid' of the sensitive-plant's 'folded leaves'(m, 83,84) are glued together because the plant's 'organs' are inadequate (as in Wasserman, 168), it is also arguable that the plant's organs see only too well that its fate is to be 'like one forbid' (in, 82), excluded permanently from what it wants. Quite unlike Cowper's sensitive-plant, which, in his amusing poem T h e Poet, The Oyster, and Sensitive Plant' (published in 1782), is rebuked as 'my Lady Squeamish' (line 55, H.S. Milford, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of William Coxvper), Shelley's plant suffers as and because others suffer. Part Third may keep in play the possibility that 'imaging' is deceived. But the momentum of the writing comes from maso­ chistic delight in punishing the pretensions of 'imagining7: dream has become a nightmare; the fairy tale a horror story. The verse enacts a systematic erasure of hope and desire, and of the images through which Parts First and Second had expressed them. Through­ out Part Third, and with great expertise, Shelley sets in motion an unusual alliance between zest and horror. Harmony is parodied: 'From their sighs the winds caught a mournful tone, / And sate in the pines and gave groan for groan' (m, 15-16 ). The longing for symbiotic union with the mother is replaced by a fearful yet energised image of abandonment, when the whirlwind is com­ pared to a 'wolf that had smelt a dead child out7 (m, 111): 'smelt7 not only implies decay but also mocks the 'odours' celebrated in Part First. Erotic longing has given w ay to a quasi-phallic and comically bitter morbidity, the agarics and fungi suggesting that 'the decaying dead / With a spirit of growth had been animated!'

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(m, 64-5). Here 'spirit' is a perverse drive, 'growth' a hideous simula­ crum of fruition. The idealist intimations of simile and surmise are rebuked; so the garden, after the Lady's death, seems 'Like the corpse of her who had been its soul / Which at first was lovely as if in sleep, / Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap / To make men tremble who never weep' (m, 18 -21). 'A s i f in Part Second opens up the possibility of 'some bright Spirif (n, 17) existing behind the 'veil of daylight7 (n, 20). In Part Third, 'as i f raises the possibility of survival only to expose the possibility as a terrible mockery of the fact of physical decay. Even the misprint of 'lively7 for 'lovely7 in the 1820 edition is drawn into the whirlpool of irony whipped up by the language. The crucial point that the 'destruc­ tion is almost as mythopoetic as the paradise' (Brisman, 148) does not negate the effect of the 'destruction'. Shelley may speak of 'plants, at whose names the verse feels loath' (m, 58), but narrative self-consciousness of this sort does not diminish the force of the writing. Imaginative virtuosity is present in the account of Winter with its ferociously achieved figurative effects: For Winter came— the wind was his whip — One choppy finger was on his lip; He had tom the cataracts from the hills, And they clanked at his girdle like manacles ... (in, 90-3) And yet to read this virtuosity as a sign that Shelley's vision is (merely) 'mythopoetic' is to risk overlooking the peculiar chal­ lenge of The Sensitive-Plant. It is little comfort to know that Shelley knows his vision of destruction is a fiction, or, at any rate, involves a mannered style of representation. Undercutting this knowledge, on the poet7s part, is a kind of helplessness before imaginative drives which impel him as Winter itself is 'fiercely driven' (in, 96). Hints of unreality provide little solace; the fact that the decay of the weeds (which are described as 'forms of living death' (m, 98)) 'was but like the vanishing of a ghost!' (in, 101) confirms the peculiar poetic achievement of this section: the achievement is to evoke a state that is, from one perspective, unreal, from another, all there is. If we wish to escape this supervivid world of ghosts, the only resurrection Part Third depicts is that of the continued unreal existence of the dead, as the mandrakes and so forth 'Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels'. The question may arise, 'What about all the other flowers?', but the Part's final couplet, with its pounding feminine rhyme, take us out of the empirical into a world where what we fear, rather than what we trust in or desire, holds true. The Conclusion is going to assert that love and

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beauty and delight survive transience; but Part Third demonstrates that for hate and ugliness and horror there is no death, and the only change is that of sickening repetition as the cleverly managed sing-song chiasmus of the ante-penultimate stanza suggests: First there came down a thawing rain And its dull drops froze on the boughs again; Then there steamed up a freezing dew Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew ... (in, 106-9) III The Conclusion keeps in play even as it seeks to put a stop to the poem's succession of perspectives. By this stage of the poem, these perspectives— for all their dissociated presentation— have en­ joined upon us the view, expressed in 'On the Devil, and Devils', that we live in 'an Universe where evil and good are inextricably entangled, and where the most admirable tendencies to happiness and preservation are for ever baffled by misery and decay' (Works vn, 89). The logocentric dream that mutability is a seeming, not a reality, recalls various Spenserian passages, but substitutes for Spenser's ability to repose U pon the pillours of Eternity' (Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, vn, viii. 2) a less stable assurance. Bloom, following Davie's lead, describes the Conclusion as displaying 'quiet conviction and gentlemanly tact' (Shelley's Mythmaking, 1969,162). However, such a description does less than full justice to the mix of uninsistent grief, uncertainty, sudden transition, assertion and irony, which gives the writing an affecting fluidity, despite its apparent efforts to stabilise the poem. The dream is ushered in with syntactically hesitant, mainly iambic poise, the poet unable to say whether the sensitive-plant or its spirit experienced Part Third's devastation, referred to with fine understatement (and potential irony when one recalls m, 20) as 'this change' (Conclusion, 4); unable, too, to say whether the plant was animated by a spirit since that which sat within its branches only did so 'like a spirit' (Conclusion, 2), a word which, as already suggested, has had to survive a knock to its dignity in Part Third (at in, 65). The poet is also unready to guess whether the Lady's 'gentle mind' survived departure from the 'form' (Conclu­ sion, 5, 6) it inhabited. The coupling of 'sadness' and 'delight' in line 8 compacts the poem's antithetical vision, as well as the riddle implicit in that vision. There should be little disagreement about the fact that the writing is very good. But the w a y we read the final affirmations involves our deepest instincts about how and for

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what we should value this undervalued masterpiece. The affirmations shape themselves out of the intuition, more Calderonesque than Platonic, that we are merely 'shadows of the dream' (Conclusion, 12). Shelley raises the rhetorical stakes by speaking of human beings as 'shadows of the dream' (emphasis added). The definite article is surprisingly assertive, and yet 'dream' is entoiled in the poem's hints and guesses. If 'dreams' involve fantasy (a word that can cover both a poet's fiction and the regres­ sive desire for symbiotic union described by Caldwell), then to be the 'shadows of the dream' is to have little sense that we make any rational sense. Not that 'dream' behaves— at face value— as if it wished to comfort; it is, so the lines ostensibly say, because we are merely 'shadows of the dream', because significance is indetermi­ nate and illusory, that we might find it agreeable to suspend disbelief in the poet's 'modest creed' (Conclusion, 13). Yet the word insinuates more hopeful suggestions. A s Wasserman reminds us (Wasserman, 175), Shelley asserts in Speculations on Metaphysics that there is 'N o essential distinction' between, on the one hand, 'those distinct thoughts' which occur 'during the passage of a multitude of other thoughts, which are called real, or external objects' and, on the other hand, 'hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness' (Works vn, 59). Again, the cumulative effect of repetition is at work; 'dream' takes the reader back to 'the dreams of its wintry rest' from which each flower and herb arose at the start, to the 'ocean of dreams' which is paved by the light sand of consciousness, to the plant's dreams which are mixed with the Nightingale's Elysian chant (1,108-9), to the Lady's dreams which the narrator interprets as 'less slumber than Paradise' (n, 16), to the butterflies dreaming of the life to come. The poem's handling of 'dream' in these two Parts is nuanced, delicate, affirmative and fragile, and Shelley's attitude has some­ thing of the detachment yet involvement apparent in Prometheus Unbound's reference to 'Dreams and the light imaginings of men / And all that faith creates, or love desires' (1,200-1), where the first line's airiness questions and is questioned by the passionate seri­ ousness of the second line. Indeed, it is hard not to read the first two Parts as in some w ay transcripts of 'dreams': the sensitiveplant's, Shelley's, a culture's. If we are such stuff as dreams are made on, the Conclusion hopes, as it harks back to earlier hopes, that we are dreamed, or dream ourselves, into some kind of meaning. Between the senses of dream as wish-fulfilment and as rewarding and rewarded intimation there is, the Conclusion suggests, both conflict and kinship.

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Similar complications to those surrounding 'dream' surround other words in the Conclusion, as in the use of 'own' in these lines: 'It is a modest creed, and yet /Pleasant if one considers it, / To own that death itself must be, / Like all the rest,— a mockery7 (Conclusion, 13-16 ). Shelley chose this verb with some care: according to H. Buxton Forman, the draft originally had 'say7 instead of 'own', while the Larger Silsbee Notebook shows Shelley replacing 'think' with 'ow n'.14 'Say7 and 'think' play up the ele­ ment of mere assertion; by contrast, 'own7, participating in the senses 'to acknowledge (a thing) to be what is claimed, or to be the fact; to confess to be valid, true, or actual; to admit7 (5a, o e d , 2nd edn), takes the reader by surprise. The stanza begins by advancing a 'modest creed7 that would be 'Pleasant7 to consider. By the end of the stanza the reader is cajoled into 'owning7 that death is a 'mockery7, as if admitting, even owning up to, a knowledge pos­ sessed almost reluctantly. And so into the apparently confident affirmations of the final two stanzas: That garden sweet, that lady fair And all sweet shapes and odours there In truth have never past away— T is we, 'tis ours, are changed— not they. For love, and beauty, and delight There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs— which endure N o light— being themselves obscure. (Conclusion, 17-24) The affirmations are 'apparently confident' because the more they climb free of hypothesis and surmise the more they appear vul­ nerable instances of the w ay that 'Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates7 (Prometheus Unbound, iv, 573-4). 'Wreck7, as used by Demogorgon, is an abbreviated figure. By the time Part Third of The Sensitive-Plant gets round to describing the sensitive-plant as 'a leafless wreck7 the implications of the noun have been violently forced upon us; 'leafless wreck7 anticipates our own idiom, 'nervous wreck7 (the o e d cites Wordsworth's Borderers (1795-6) to illustrate the use of 'wreck7 to mean 'A person of undermined, shattered, or ruined constitution' (2nd edn, 7b)). Certainly, hope's creativity is at its most tenuously sustained in the Conclusion. Prometheus Unbound does not completely draw the Conclusion of The Sensitive-Plant into the gravitational pull of its robustly sceptical idealism; there is a saddened irony at work in the shorter poem that never quite shows its hand and can never be

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wholly discounted. This irony glimmers through the final three lines, which, half wryly, acknowledge that the basis for trust in the stanza's absolutes— abstractions that withdraw from the particu­ larities of 'That garden sweet, that lady fair' (emphases added)— is the bleak fact that our 'organs' can 'endure / No light'. It consists, this irony, in the gap that widens as the lines unfold between the changelessness bestowed upon 'love, and beauty, and delight' and the condition of change which we cannot escape. Indeed, the poem's last phrase has a disenchanted intonation as it implies that our organs are irredeemably 'obscure', and may prompt the reader into wondering whether the stanza's affirmation expresses anything more than subjective longing. Moreover, if death, like all the rest, is a 'mockery7, then w hy should or how can the final assertions escape the possibility that they, too, are counterfeit, mocking human hopes? Prometheus Unbound's triumphant final act can accommodate the line, "Tis only mocking the Orb's harmony7 (rv, 269). The Sensitive-Plant offers its reader the option of interpreting the text both as mock­ ingly undoing its bravest assertions and as gracefully fending off its deepest anxieties. In Part Third, 'Swift summer into the au­ tumn flowed, / And frost in the mist of the morning rode, / Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright, / Mocking the spoil of the secret night' (in, 22-5), where the sun's mockery is at the expense of the 'spoil' and of the supposition that because the sun 'looked clear and bright' there has been no spoilage. 'Mock­ ery7 in the Conclusion wishes to imply an uncovering of falsehood and a consequent chance of glimpsing truth, but Part Third has suggested that uncovering the mockery of appearances may, in fact, disclose only the mockery of all acts of interpretation. The deconstructive fall-out of this Part goes forwards as well as back­ wards, exposing the most pessimistic implications of the poem's awareness that it is engaged in the process of making meaning and conferring value. The poem's theme is, indeed, evaluation or, rather, how evaluation and interpretation depend on one another; and the Conclusion is impressive because it senses that value is conferred even as it wishes to believe that value 'holds his esti­ mate and dignity / As well wherein 'tis precious of itself / A s in the prizer7. The mixed feelings permeate the writing's inflections. An evaluative consideration raised by The Sensitive-Plant is whether the reader should value it for offering some philosophi­ cal 'truth'. Harold Bloom took Yeats to task for passing 'from quoting the nobly agnostic quatrains that conclude The Sensitive Plant to the incredible deduction that those quatrains show

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Shelley's belief in the anima mundi or Great Memory in which all our smellier selves survive' (Yeats, 66). Agreed, yet 'nobly agnostic' grounds itself more firmly than the text will allow. Like the whole poem, the Conclusion twists and turns, interpreting the interpreter, evaluating our values. Without embracing 'belief in the anima mundi’ the poem makes clear how and why belief may be embraced, and in doing so does not necessarily hold itself aloof from belief whose origins in longing and desire it knows all about. After all, the poem shares with Prometheus Unbound a sense of the value as well as incompleteness of 'w ant': just as the lyrical drama comes into being precisely because 'a voice / Is wanting' (ii.iv.115-16), so The Sensitive-Plant converts into its own terms the Platonic idea that, to quote from Shelley's translation of The Symposium, 'Love loves that which he wants but possesses not' (Notopoulos, 440). Like the lyrical drama, The Sensitive-Plant is valuable for the art with which its fabling investigates the dialectic of scepticism and belief. Its last two stanzas seek to retrieve the poem from, yet do not wholly scotch the questioning implicit in, the searching stress Shelley has just given to 'Pleasant' (placed at the start of a line); their assurance is at once more arbitrary and less fatalistic than these stoical lines, spoken by the Chorus of Women of Trachis to Deianeira, the wife of Heracles, in Sophocles' Women of Trachis, read by Shelley a few weeks before writing his poem (Journal 1,306): Lady, we honour your grief, but cannot think it prudent To kill the root of hope; for the god that governs all Has given to no man life without chastisement Of pain, yet pain and joy alternate fall A s sure as the perennial Rotation of the Great Bear in the high firmament. Nothing abides; the starry night, Our wealth, our sorrows, pass away. Tomorrow another has his day Of happiness, of disappointment. (Sophocles: Electra and Other Plays, 123) In fact, the play will bring Deianeira tragic suffering, yet this choric speech itself 'abides', providing a suffering, but untragic, perspective from which to view the tragic. If 'Sophoclean mutabil­ ity' (J- Jones, 174) is altogether sturdier than Shelleyan idealism, the Shelley who wrote The Sensitive-Plant knows as much. The Conclusion discovers a consciously unsettled and unsettling fic­ tion to end a poem longing for but resisting closure: that there is, for the artificer of meaning, a 'creed' beyond his fictions.

'What's Aught But as 'Tis Valued?' NOTES

1. For an attempt to demonstrate the stanza's fineness, see my essay, "'A nd All Things Seem Only One": The Shelleyan Lyric', 117. 2. Lines 52 and 53-6, Shakespeare, Complete Works (ed. Alexander). Hector's lines are also quoted in Kermode, History and Value ; their application to 'a work of art', Kermode writes, 'seems to be possible to all parties' (145). 3. See Wasserman, 154-79, and Caldwell, 221-52. 4. King-Hele draws attention to Bridges's comments on The SensitivePlant in Shelley, 245 n.20. 5. For a succinct summary of likeness and difference between Darwin and Shelley, see King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin, 209. 6. 'Self-indulgence' is Davie's diagnosis; he also writes, 'W e know Shelley's eroticism is vicious only by the vicious diction it produces', 151; the Shelleyan phrase is quoted from a Bodleian manuscript by M.H., Abrams in Natural Supematuralism, 299. 7. Comparison between 1,98-109 of Shelley's poem and Paradise Lost, iv, 598-604, suggested in Baker, 197-8. 8. See Caldwell, "'The Sensitive Plant'" for the suggestion that 'Part Second is perhaps best interpreted as a dream, that dream which the Sensitive Plant commenced at the end of Part First', 240. 9. The Tempest, m .ii.131,138. Shelley read the play on 12 and 13 January 1820; see Journal, 1,305. 10. For the fair-copy reading, see Reiman, ed., The Harvard Shelley Poetic M anuscripts, 54. 11. Bodleian ms Shelley e. 12, pp. 145,146; quoted from Wasserman, 159 n. 10. 12. For an account of the poem's political dimension, see Crook and Guiton, 204. 13. For the suggestion that there is a pun concealed in the word 'Rose', I am indebted to Charles E. Robinson (in the discussion that followed a version of this essay given as a lecture at the International Shelley Conference, Gregynog, 1 5 -1 7 August 1992). 14. Forman, ed., Note Books of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1,201; Reiman, ed., The Harvard Shelley Poetic M anuscripts, 60.

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'Lethean J o / : M emory and Recognition in Laon and Cythna JOHN DONOVAN

I Evaluations of Laon and Cythna, from its publication, have typi­ cally proceeded by reckoning its aptitude for political persuasion. Its earliest commentators made their assessments in an atmos­ phere of tense polemical exchange. The first of several partisan reviews of Shelley's most ambitious poem, Leigh Hunt's threepart notice in The Examiner in February and March 1818 (Barcus, 10 6-14), appeared only a few weeks after its reissue as The Revolt of Islam (its incest removed and its anti-Christian sentiments toned down). Hunt's advocacy of his friend Shelley's work helps to establish the terms of a debate whose fervour, over the next year and more, owes something of its venom to the perception by writers in the periodicals that it was a poem which enjoyed the protection of a newspaper with a partisan axe to grind. In Hunt's view, the 'deep social interests' of Laon and Cythna merit a broad currency which they are unlikely to attain because of the poem's demanding style and metaphysical obscurities. Accordingly he provides an abridgement of its central doctrines, as he under­ stands them, for less assiduous readers. From this, Shelley's revision of the French revolutionary experience in his epic-romance emerges as unthreatening and charitable, pre-eminently the messenger of a radical secular benevolence. Hunt the veteran journalist is here mounting a defence that anticipates an onslaught; it duly arrived in some of the major reviews. Lockhart's terse condemnation in Blackwood's for January 1819, 'A s a political and infidel treatise The Revolt of Islam is contemptible', shares its essential position with J.T. Coleridge's notorious ad hominem assault on Shelley and his 'brethren' in the Quarterly Review for April of that year (Barcus, 115~ 35 s)- Lockhart insists upon the poem's very considerable qualities as poetry; J.T. Coleridge finds it 'insupportably dull'— both regard the author as a man of ability, and counsel that, to develop his gifts as a poet, he must alter his opinions. Every one of these reviewers takes the lead very clearly given

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by Shelley himself. The first paragraph of the Preface to Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam sets out the object of the poem as 'an experiment on the temper of the public mind' (the 'enlightened and refined' part of it, at least) which aims to revive the 'virtuous enthusiasm' for a Trappier condition of moral and political 80061/ which the events of the last quarter century in Europe have done so much to extinguish (99-100).1 Although party oppositions have long since quietened, the central concern of the contemporary reviewers to judge the poem as a political communication persists in an attenuated form even in recent criticism. Reformulated, the criterion of evaluation becomes the coherence and cultural inter­ est of the poem's strategies for recommending an image of the French Revolution as exemplary to a post-revolutionary age in England. Appraisals of Shelley's success in this particular vary with critics. A representative selection of opinons from the last dozen years or so would include Michael Scrivener's sense of the poem as constructing a fiction that declares its own compatibility with a democratic ideology (119 -33); Paul Dawson's T h e inten­ tion and effect of Laon and Cythna is to preserve the revolution as a monument, which functions to inspire and to warn at the same time' (The Unacknowledged, 3); and Richard Cronin's interesting perception that its essential design entails mending a structural fissure in the revolutionary paradigm of earlier works by bringing together the public endeavour and personal fulfilment that they take to be incompatible: 'Laon and Cythna is an attempt to cure the schism, to reunite public and private life' (102). Cronin's view has been subtly developed by David Duff, who demonstrates how Shelley recasts a revolutionary vision adopted from English writers of the 1790s after the generic pattern of a quest-romance (154-216). I find myself in broad agreement with these estimations which, again, accord with Shelley's own claims in his apologetic Preface to the poem. There Laon and Cythna is presented as uniting an imaginative vision of history as it might have been and could be with an ideal of perfected human intercourse—both being the manifestation of an overarching ethical principle: 'Love is cele­ brated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world' (106). The author's assurances notwithstanding, a steady gaze appears to show that where this double aim is concerned, the polemical tendency of the Preface and the practice of the poem itself diverge at important points. I should like to look more closely at the w ays in which Shelley's reunion of private with public life in Laon and Cythna subjects his representation of the

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French Revolution as moral example to significant pressures, which should figure in any critical evaluation of the poem. II Perhaps no episode is as testing in this respect as Laon's arrival at the gates of the Golden City in Canto v (xxxviii-xli). A s he enters at the head of an exulting multitude, he seems to attain the apogee of his project for a revolution conducted by the power of mind and eloquence vested in an exceptional leader— 'by the influence of individual genius' as Shelley put it in a letter of October 18 17 (Letters 1,564). The entry is one of the poem's great actions and, in the w ay of Laon and Cythna, it is an action that acquires its full scope and significance only when seen as one in a series of repeti­ tions. (In this case the larger sequence begins in the autobiography of the narrator's supernatural guide in Canto 1 (stanza xliv) and finishes only with Laon's and Cythna's separate returns to the city for execution in Cantos xi and xn.) Canto v is structured round two of these which take place on succeeding days. The second entry, the one that concerns us here, is elaborated so as to stand as some­ thing like a total symbolic image of human experience in poetry that insistently signals its own character as an act of instantaneous perception. The rush of sights and sounds that unfolds with all the sudden energy and cosmic scope of an apocalypse is artfully dis­ posed into a harmony that integrates nature and civilisation, earth and heaven, past, present and future. The resulting whole, in the image of a golden city reborn, emerges radiantly from the mists of morning to make a traditional figure of human power united with divine, their combined face now for the first time unveiled and directed to the general good. The four stanzas define the poem's supreme moment of social incorporation and, appropriately for an act of religious completion, they also realise a prophecy, by fulfilling the specific terms of Cythna's proleptic vison of Canto 11 (stanza xxviii). A s a group they are set apart by their exemplary lyric fusion of the text's twin impulses to plenitude and intensity, to comprehensiveness and enclosure. The passage continues: To hear, to see, to live, was on that morn Lethean joy! so that all those assembled Cast off their memories of the past outworn; Two only bosoms with their own life trembled, And mine was one, — and we had both dissembled, — So with a beating heart I went, and one, Who having much, covets yet more, resembled;

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A lost and dear possession, which not won, He walks in lonely gloom beneath the noonday sun. (2089-97) It would seem that two disjunctions, which are set in opposition to each other, are being pressed upon our attention at this moment of triumphant union between the indivdiual and the community. One is the mental discontinuity between the past and the present: those gathered 'Cast off their memories of the past outworn'; the other is an antagonism between collective and personal existence: T w o only bosoms with their own life trembled'. The nexus of these disruptive tensions is Laon himself; the secret desire (his incestu­ ous wish to recover his lost sister Cythna who, in her public persona of Laone, is the other, here unnamed, half of the desiring pair) which excludes him from uniting himself to the life of the joyous throng is purely a matter of a memory that he seems powerless to forget. Accordingly, and in the space of a stanza, his moment of jubilation is overturned: 'He walks in lonely gloom beneath the noonday sun'. It is a dramatic and an arresting reversal but one that, on consideration, appears perfectly consistent with the poem's repeated stress upon the fragility of any state of possession, as well as with its tendency to imagine the underside of every condition of feeling as a secret that is not, or not fully, articulable. This metaphysical and psychological ambiguity is skilfully woven into the rhythms of the Spenserian stanza. The pivotal rhyme of its medial couplet ('trembled ... dissembled') formalises the association of desire with disguise and deceit at this moment which ought to dissolve every impulse of the private self into the transparency of public festival. The conception of the psychic experience of the crowd in classical literary terms, the 'Lethean joy' of line 2090, gives w ay to an idea of the concealed guilt of the individual according to the moral categories of the Old Testament. Line 2095 takes up the common Biblical idiom for illegitimate appetites in 'covets'; and the final line of the stanza appropriates a characteristic Old Testament image for the absolute extremes that separate the sinner from the righteous man. T h e y meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night'. So the Book of Job (5:14) on the spiritual blindness of those whose perversion of heart turns them away from God.2 The passage has in effect brought into focus a second temporal dimension to the narrative at this critical moment. It begins at dawn as a perfection in concord, celebrating oblivion as the psychic mechanism that allows the revolutionary company to

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enter the Golden City and still to remain within the continuous linear narrative as it incorporates radical change, only to end by opening a view on the (essentially atemporal) diurnal round of desire as the the darkened noontide of an inward moral day. The analysis that serves to uncover the components of the passage in no w ay dispels the sense of strangeness attaching to this moment which realises in the highest degree the political aspirations of individual and community and is yet represented as conditional upon an act of amnesia. It is a paradox that seems to invite some investigation in a poem so haunted by remembering, so structured upon returns, so determined in its major forms by the past's grip upon the present that it should celebrate oblivion as the condition of a joyful fulness of being that is alone compatible with an ecstatically realised revolutionary ideal. The more so as the passage that carries out the celebration is itself an instance of textual recollection by which earlier texts are adapted and set in significantly new relation to each other. Closer attention seems to show that the special sense of the important allusions to the Old Testament at the stanza's end emerge only when considered in opposition to the prior allusion to the power of Lethe. In Greek myth Lethe (or Oblivion) was the sister of Sleep and Night. Hesiod (Theogony 22-32) places her among the daughters of Strife, an anodyne presence among such siblings as War and Battles, Murder and Slaughter, Famine and Sorrow. Anodyne too was the effect of Lethe the river of Hades from which the spirits of the dead drank in order to erase their memory of life in the body. Conversely, souls about to be reborn must drink from Lethe before entering material existence anew. The sort of amnesia offered by the waters of Lethe was the requisite precondition for decisive trans­ ition of being, the state of consciousness necessary for continuity and which rendered the pain of loss and, equally, the pain of renewal psychically tolerable. The oblivion it offered sacrificed personality in order to ensure some more essential continuance of life in accordance with the soul's larger scope for uninterrupted existence across a series of material identities. Such a transpersonal conception of being can accommodate a span of identity which is adapted to the ampler chronology of a historical destiny. This is precisely the concern of the text which enloses the most widely known representation of Lethe's effects in ancient literature, the final third of the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, which appears to lie behind the entry of Laon and his followers into the Golden City. Pursuing the object that the descent to the underworld in Book vi recounts, Aeneas and the Sibyl

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continue their journey through the infernal regions until they reach the Fields of the Blessed where Aeneas is granted an audience with the spirit of his father Anchises. The old man points out to his son the river Lethe flowing through a meadow in which the purified souls of those dead who are about to be bom afresh gather like bees in a field of summer flowers. From the jostling crowd Anchises identifies the souls of his descendants and fore­ sees their role in the founding of Rome down to the time of Augustus by the Trojan line that it is Aeneas's mission to perpetu­ ate. The process of metempsychosis is here both a figure for the dynastic continuum and the guarantor of its sacred character. The Lethean amnesia ensures that continuity which allows the Asian city of Troy to be reconstructed in the West through a dynasty that realises itself and completes its destiny in the walled confines of the city of Rome as hub of an empire. In the personal sphere the mental renewal offered by Lethe finds its analogy in the exile and suffering that induce a refined oblivion which enables the heroic individual to leave one city, one family and build another. Forget­ ting in this context is the positive foundation of soul necessary for undertaking one of the greatest of historical acts, the reconstruc­ tion of a city as the sacred space and defining centre of a culture. The enterprise is so momentous that an operation of radical self­ renewal is required at its commencement, a cutting of the mental ties that bind the individual soul to its contingent past, a psychic re-enactment of the void in consciousness that links the genera­ tions. Oblivion, quite as much as the more familiar exercise of memory, is an essential strand of that continuity which makes the dynastic and imperial undertaking possible. The exposition of the psychology of oblivion in relation to historical endeavour that Virgil gives to Anchises marks the final stage of the moral awareness that Aeneas acquires in his descent to Hell. The correspondences betwen the situations of their two heroes give the sixth book of the Aeneid good claim to be one of the co-ordinating points in classical myth round which the central cantos of Laon and Cythna develop. Each implicates an exiled and suffering leader (who requires schooling in the performance of his duty) and an oblivious throng with the historical destiny of recon­ stituting a capital city. In order to realise his goal, the hero must negotiate some practical treaty with the parallel claims of sexual desire. Queen Dido, whose melancholy ghost Aeneas has encoun­ tered in the underworld before meeting his father, had been aban­ doned in obedience to the prior dictates of a divinely-decreed destiny which is that of an entire people. Laon is never made to

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decide formally between the rights of erotic desire and civic duty because his public endeavour is checked before the conditions of sexual fulfilment can be united. The two impulses do nonethe­ less put each other strictly to the proof. That has already happened in the earlier cantos of the poem and more is to come. A s he enters the Golden City the unresolved opposition between political and private life that opens a gulf between Laon's external circumstances and inward disposition is brought into focus by the comparison with the Aeneid as a traditional problem of heroic literature and the one that is to dominate the middle cantos of the poem. Am ong other parallels the temporal conspectus of Book vi of the Aeneid, looking both backward and forward at once, gives it an interesting kinship with Shelley's attempt to face both w ays by writing a visionary and prophetic poem on a historical subject. That the image of the Golden City exhibited in Canto v should arrive through the ivory gate of false dreams, in the sense of being turned suddenly to an infernal nightmare of hatred and torment, agrees in the main with the moral estimate of the course of the French Revolution that Shelley makes in the Preface while trans­ muting it into the glaring contraries that are the poem's imagina­ tive idiom. Other suggestive ironies seem partly to emerge. If the entry to the Golden City adapts its major psychic motif from Virgil's idealisation of the Roman legend of foundation, it also reverses the direction of the migration of Troy to Italy by momentarily rebuilding ancient Athens on the moral ruins of Constantinople. If the city is possessed for a brief moment by a crowd as oblivious as the souls who will reanimate the Trojan line in imperial Rome, it also clearly incorporates elements of the original Homeric Troy as well as mythical Thebes, revolutionary Paris and the heavenly Jerusa­ lem of the Book of Revelation. The poem's poetic representation of the zenith of revolutionary achievement prepares for its crisis by constructing an eclectic urban landscape as the appropriate theatre for the interplay of those different sorts of memory that go to form the self as revolutionary. Intimately related to the psychological theme is a textual practice based on the appropriation of tradi­ tional literary motifs which form a syncretic layering that sets interesting problems of interpretation. This procedure constitutes Shelley's original means of reimagining the revolutionary experi­ ence as it enters its decisive phase by taking possession of a capital city, the locus that will gather the conditions for the final and most stringent testing of its validity.

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III Pausanias records in the Description of Greece (iv:35i) that those who presented themselves to undergo the strenuous ritual of rebirth at the Oracle of Trophonius were required first to drink from two fountains— one containing the water of forgetfulness, the other the water of memory. Their preparatory ritual insists that the essential refashioning of the self they aspired to involves reconfiguring its awareness of its own history by an operation in which oblivion and memory combine to satisfy the demands of a new life conceived of— as in the Aeneid— as both consistent with the past yet strategically liberated from its hindrances. So too in the Purgatorio (xxviii, xxxiii) of Dante's Commedia, the rivers Lethe and Eunoe, which water the earthly paradise at the summit of Mount Purgatory, offer first oblivion then purified remembrance as the psychic portal to Heaven. In the case of the oracle and the Commedia, as in Laon and Cythna, amnesia and memory, never easy to dissociate in practice, can hardly be imagined one without the other as twin impulses of the the human desire for the renewal from within that must accompany an altered condition of being. The entry of Laon and his followers to the Golden City is invested with a cardinal importance because such a disposition of mind is put forward earlier in the poem (11, stanzas iv-xiv) as the primary imaginative quality of Laon the aspiring revolutionary. The par­ ticular conception of the past's bearing on the future in this crucial passage of condensed autobiographical parable derives from the Philhellenism that is a principal influence on the poem's revolu­ tionary paradigm. Activated by a meditation on the architectural ruins of ancient Greek civilisation, whose broken domes and columns carry dim recollections of a primal artistic harmony emblematic of civil power exercised with wisdom and restraint, Laon's political vision is both clarified and energised by his singu­ lar receptiveness to the impulses inherent in the great forms of Nature which centuries of oppression have deadened in his com­ patriots. His status as prophet to his nation is authenticated by an imagination that can connect the regenerative virtue of its natural surroundings with the exemplary, though fragmentary and obscure, condition of its ancient heritage. Here is the key to a programme of renewal which can overarch intervening tracts of history in the course of which the self-perpetuating habits of scorn and guilt incident to a state of slavery have atrophied the mind's powers of conceiving of its future as any different from its immediate past. The twin co-ordinates of Classical Antiquity and Nature, chief

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directing inspirational sources of the revolutionary experience in France, are also emphasised as principal springs of those qualities that Shelley attributes to himself in the important paragraph of the Preface beginning, There is an education peculiarly fitted for a poet' (102-3). The autobiographical development that pairs author and hero in their defining imaginative gifts, ipso facto sets each at odds with an oppressive regime which is characterised as arising from a long and illegitimate Orientalisation of Western political and cultural institutions. The poem's representation of a revolution in which modem Greece would oppose its subjugation by the Otto­ man Empire is an evident instance. But Shelley also goes to some lengths to assimilate his own prophetic ambition in Loon and Cythna to Philhellenic aspirations. The origins of what he des­ cribes as a perennially conservative tendency in the culture of literary censure, by which he expects to suffer both intellectual opposition and personal opprobrium, he traces to an Oriental influence as well. His exemplar is the philosophical poet Lucretius who, in a disintegrating Roman Republic, braved the disapproval of an unworthy nobility served by a class of Syrian sophists who set the tone of intellectual and religious life: These wretched men were skilled to plead, with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, in favour of that contempt for virtue which is the portion of slaves, and that faith in portents, the most fatal substitute for benevolence in the imaginations of men, which, arising from the enslaved communities of the East, then first began to overwhelm the western nations in its stream' (105). In each case the prevailing oppressive orthodoxy is to be countered by a return to historical origins inspired and directed by the energy to which access can be had through the agency of the great natural forms. This combina­ tion can throw a Lethean bridge over the intervening period of imaginative torpor, so making a vital link between the present and that remote past which conceals the authentic heritage that might set it free. Well enough. But how are centuries of deeply internalised cultural influence to be forgotten? Can they ever be effectively cast off? Laon and Cythna addresses these questions so as to give them a central place in its conception of revolutionary possibility. So does the Preface, and not only in the context of the reception that the poem itself might expect in the reviews, but as a critical issue in estimating the moral status of the French Revolution as a pattern of modem political action. The w ay that it makes this assessment reveals the personal tincture of Shelley's thinking in relation to some leading themes in

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the English reception of the French experience (101-2). He explains the ferocity of the revolutionaries as a consequence of a temper of mind formed by ages of ignorance and injustice imposed upon them by the very system they were trying to replace; whereas the virtues required for carrying through a revolution that could endure are to be acquired only by long and patient application over generations. The position is in essentials that of Paine in Rights of Man— where the crimes of the mob were seen as the result of an aristocratic regime: These outrages were not the effect of the Revolution, but of the degraded mind that existed before the Revolution, and which the Revolution is calculated to reform' (Paine, 59). The influence of Godwin's and M ary Wollstonecraft's conviction that inevitable and progressive improvements in reason and political understanding would of necessity bring about cor­ responding alterations in civil institutions is also clear. So is that of the forthright yet forbearing tone in which Wollstonecraft analyses the shortcomings of the revolutionaries in point of self-restraint, moderation of conduct towards their enemies and reluctance to shed blood in her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (for example, 4 6 -7 ,12 6 -7 ). The examination in her final chapter of the specific conditions of urban life in Paris as bringing to a catastrophe the long-standing social and eco­ nomic injustices of the regime, and also as determining the more deplorable consequences of the sometimes ill-judged attempts to put them right, is essentially an attempt to rescue the principles of reform from the regrettable particulars of French practice, which themselves arose from the peculiar character of the French nation. Shelley's apologia for the crimes of the Revolution in his Preface is evidently inspired by these familiar and favoured authors. They furnish him with the terms in which to formulate what the Preface isolates as the principal moral issue of Laon and Cythna and which may well be its most exacting artistic challenge. Summarily put: how to deal with the problem of the historical guilt of the revolu­ tionaries in a poem which aspires to ideal and prophetic status? The question calls for an answer proportioned to its difficulty. We might begin to make it by noticing the absence in the poem of any representation of collective guilt that carries evident reference to the notorious revolutionary crimes of the 1790s. The outrages committed under the influence of religious superstition and bribery in Cantos x-xn, which end in the death of Laon and Cythna themselves, are the work of reactionary guile not revolutionary zeal. The presence of guilt in the text, very substantial and haunt­ ing, is individual; in particular the memory of Laon's personal

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transgressions exercises a powerful shaping force on the narrative of Cantos m to vi. Yet guilt, whether personal or collective, is passed over in silence in the synopsis of the plot that Shelley gives in the Preface (100) as well as in the account of the poem he provides in his letter to a publisher of 13 October 18 17 (Letters 1, 563-4), as it is in M ary Shelley's note to The Revolt of Islam ( o s a , 156-8) . Neither does Leigh Hunt's long review of The Revolt of Islam in The Examiner, which might be thought to have a certain authority because of Hunt's close association with Shelley during the period of composition, make any mention of the place of guilt in the poem. Hunt does quote in full (22 February 1 8 18 ,12 2 ) the third and fourth paragraphs of the Preface in which Shelley ex­ plains the causes of the Revolutionaries' excesses, though he makes no allusion to the poem's treatment of guilt as persistent and tenacious memory. The decorum that governs all these statements is a decorum of controversial prose— that of the defensive position in the public debate over the status of the French Revolution as moral example. They therefore give no sense of the major shift of emphasis from general to individual that the poem effects in fictionalising history so as to accommodate a disabling personal conviction of having done wrong that cannot be expiated. In his letter to a publisher of 13 October 18 17 Shelley describes his aim in Laon and Cythna as to convey 'the beau ideal as it were of the French Revolution' (Letters 1, 564). The expression he uses, which has become current in critical discussion of Laon and Cythna, is an anglicised form of the French aesthetic term 'le beau ideal', signifying 'ideal beauty', and was widely and loosely used in England to indicate an ideal concep­ tion. In France the most celebrated contemporary definition was Chateaubriand's in Le Genie du Christianisme (1802) as Tart de choisir et de cachef (681). He affirms le beau ideal to be the basis of a Christian art that must show things as more perfect than they are in conformity with an essentially modem and religious under­ standing of moral perfection, which is most clearly seen in medi­ eval romance. The idea is interesting in relation to Laon and Cythna. Some broadly religious view of history (though not an orthodox one), excluding the contingent and the local, would seem to dictate the abstract of the poem that Shelley provides in the second paragraph of the Preface. It is certainly inspired by an aesthetic of selection and concealment. The same imperatives are to be sensed in the outline of an affective poetics which immedi­ ately follows and by which he aims to recommend this beau ideal of the revolutionary narrative of Laon and Cythna to his readers.

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The portion of the poem that brings Laon from his penitential exile to the Golden City is another matter altogether. Here the concealments of the Preface show through so conspicuously as to suggest that the preliminary synopsis was written as a polemical antidote to them. The narrative, which has united its public and private strands for the first time in the early stanzas (stanzas v ixiv) of Canto m, quickly returns to Laon's individual experience in order to follow the course of his private penance. The ordeal that he undergoes, to all appearances for desiring Cythna and for slaying the three soldiers who have come to abduct her (stanzas i-x), is to relive in dream and trance his erotic and violent crimes while the revolutionary crisis gathers. When he regains full con­ scious awareness, the Hermit, in whom he has confided, brings him abreast of events. Apparently his suffering and the process of secular shriving that resolves it have been efficacious; he has been rendered fit to re-enter the public struggle. A s the revolution progresses towards the cardinal moment when it will have to demonstrate that its leaders have forgotten the generations-long moral atrophy, the habit of alternating submission and bloody revenge acquired during prolonged enslavement, Laon prepares to rejoin it. Moral time would seem to have been suspended during his delirium. The conception of the revolution as essen­ tially a personal trial of fitness for authority which he is to have another opportunity to stand by accomplishing what he failed to do before— abide the provocation of force— is a just one. His life story might become a tale of redemption which will extend to the public sphere. So the Hermit informs him, and strengthened in these assurances he sets out for the Golden City. IV It is important to give the dynamics of narrative their due weight in interpreting the movement of the poem from Laon's setting-out at the end of Canto iv until his return to Cythna at the close of Canto vi. Although we know that their revolution will fail like the historical one in France, indeed have been reminded that it will in the Preface, we read as if we didn't know because Laon doesn't. We perceive the incidents of the narrative through his eyes and are carried along by the force of the story's onward motion which is provided by the strength of his public and personal expecta­ tions. These are intertwined. The journey to the centre of events is for him also a journey towards Cythna, just as his original crime and subsequent suffering have associated an impulse to liberty with sexual desire. So much is revealed with his first conscious

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thoughts after his recovery (iv, stanzas xxix-xxxiv), and the tenor of the narrative from that point owes its peculiar features to that double object. The ambiguities that create both formal and psycho­ logical tension— youth and age, public and private, fear and hope, death and life, past and future— are epitomised in the great image of the Golden City that opens Canto v. A s Laon surmounts the final hill on his course, he receives his first view of the metropolis which has so long occupied his aspirings in a splendid image of strangeness and familiarity, wonder and menace: the moon was hanging low Over the Asian mountains, and outspread The plain, the City, and the camp below, Skirted the midnight ocean's glimmering flow; The City's moonlit spires and myriad lamps, Like stars in a sublunar sky did glow, And fires blazed far amid the scattered camps, Like springs of flame, which burst where'er swift Earthquake stamps. A ll slept but those in watchful arms who stood, And those who sate tending the beacon's light; And the few sounds from that vast multitude Made silence more profound.— Oh, what a might Of human thought was cradled in that night! H ow many hearts impenetrably veiled Beat underneath its shade! What secret fight Evil and good, in woven passions mailed, Waged through that silent throng— a war that never failed! (172 1-37) This moment at which the narrative discloses its destination also simultaneously arrests its forward movement to dwell on an im­ age that reaches back into its past as well as ahead into its future. The initial glimpse of the Iliadic3 geographical situation of the city under siege is immediately overlaid (1725-6) by an idea of it as terrestrial repetition of its celestial archetype on the model of the new Jerusalem of Revelation 21. The mediation of this ultimate source through Milton's description of the infernal Pandaemonium in Paradise Lost (1: 722 -31), in which: from the arched roof Pendent by subtle magic many a row Of starry lamps and blazing cressets fed With naphtha and asphaltus yielded light A s from a sky. (726-30)

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recalls the danger that any attempt to realise the archetype courts — the risk of constructing its evil parody instead.4 Thence to the throng of besiegers. C ro w d s are alw ays threateningly unstable in the poem. This one is perceived as a projection outward of that sense of a self divided that has dogged Laon's re-awakening to his political purpose. A s he approaches to take up his position at the head of the movement his ideas have created, his first apprehen­ sion is of the volatile moral life of its members, m urm uring through the quiet of sleep. During his dream of Cythna at the beginning of Canto m and again during the crisis of his madness, he has experienced the psychic multiplication of a self at w ar, first as 'legions of foul and ghastly shapes' (1149 ), then as thronging fiends— 'A ll shapes like mine ow n self hideously multiplied' (1314 )The text's recurrence to these earlier instances of the crow d as grotesquely multiplied from the depths of the erotic impulse endows them with the force of a prophecy which the scenes of carnage to come w ill prove to be accurate. But its reference carries further back than these incidents from Laon's turbulent psychobiography, beyond the epoch that he discerned in his contemplation of the ancient ruins of his country to the battle between the eagle and the serpent in Canto i (stanzas viii-xiv), and further still to the archaic struggle that it re-enacts. The daemonic wom an w ho guides the narrator in Canto i describes the primal events of the cosm ogony that hold sw ay in the poem: The earliest dw eller of the w orld, alone, Stood on the verge of chaos. Lo! afar O 'er the w ide w ild abyss tw o meteors shone, Sprung from the depth of its tempestuous jar: A blood-red Com et and the M orning Star M ingling their beams in combat. A s he stood, A ll thoughts within his mind w aged mutual w ar, In dreadful sym pathy; w hen to the flood That fair Star fell, he turned and shed his brother's blood. (352-60) This revelation, w hich establishes the larger principles of the poem's narrative as ambiguity, correspondence and repetition, also defines a kind of m em ory which is neither a directed movement of the rational will, nor the psychopathological rhythms of the desir­ ing self. It is the m em ory to w hich Laon's vie w of the sleeping hosts of the city under siege penetrates. This form of memory shapes the self as a perpetual psychic replica of the primordial act of division that imposed order upon chaos. The ontological-spiritual

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correspondence provides a global model of human behaviour which links the inner life to the cosmos and lays the metaphysical ground of a conception of moral action based in continuous memory of original strife. The reminder of cosmic origins at this point in the text is timely: from here until the meeting with Laon in stanza xlvii the tension between the progressive— and, its psychological corollary, the oblivious— drive of the narrative and its tendency to re-enact its past becomes acute. We might well feel that some metaphysical necessity is being carried out, so hopelessly does Laon's story reveal itself as wedded to a guilty past. Typically the plot manages its transitions by hallucinatory and recapitulative crises, a succes­ sion of dreams, faintings, trances and visions which seem compul­ sively to repeat the elemental motifs of his guilt. The resulting ironic oppositions increase as the two narratives converge. 'Join then your hands and hearts, and let the past/Be as a grave which gives not up its dead/To evil thoughts' (1819 -21), cries Laon to the patriots who are tempted to take revenge, anticipating the Lethean amnesia of the entrance to the city thirty stanzas later. Immediately he faints from loss of blood from the wound he has received protecting an enemy, repeating the pattern of his earlier crime of slaying the soldiers, this time apparently in innocent reversal. The text invites us to regard the incident as a phase in the penitential replotting of his past in accordance with the expiatory direction which seems to have been his since his rescue by the Hermit and which should take him, morally cleansed, to the head of his regenerated nation. And so it does, for a brief moment. For the present the narrative keeps the secret of the grimmer course it has to run, in which the master-plot of the amnesiac rebuilder of the city is re-scripted precisely by his inability to forget. The Amphion to whom Shelley compared himself in the Dedication (88), who first besieged Thebes and then constructed its walls by playing so sweetly on his Lyre that the stones leapt into place of their own accord, is one of the prototypes of Laon's role as poet of national renewal (1, stanzas xxx-xxxi); but as he approaches the city his songs have inspired others to rebuild after its celestial conception, the text repeatedly prompts us to think of him also as that Oedipus who brings the plague by his crimes of blood and desire. In his exile he has not forgotten. The object of his forbidden love is in the city which will be infected with disease on his return. If the Hermit is the shepherd who rescues him (like Oedipus) from dying of exposure and the Anchises who directs him (like Aeneas) to his destiny, he is also

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the Laius whom Laon's rash murders will eventually attract to his death (2466-8). The plague that Laon introduces will function as the physical circumstance that permits the oppressive alliance of monarchy and priesthood to regain the ascendant. Its common origin with a set of disasters that accompany war is stressed: 'Famine ... Faith, and Plague, and Slaughter, / A ghastly brood conceived of Lethe's sullen water' (3942-5). The invocation of Lethe, which is more than casual, adds a new dimension to the poem's investigation of the theme of memory which might at first appear at odds with the 'Lethean joy7 of revolutionary fulfilment. But a note in the manuscript notebook e.10 near the draft of this passage provides a revealing gloss: 'In the pestilence— its effects on man— destroying the memory of things' (Drafts for Laon and Cythna, 155). The loss of the short-term memory of revolutionary achievement is what allows the counter-revolution to succeed. A delicate equilibrium of memory and amnesia is required to sus­ tain the effort of radical human renewal, nothing less than a continual realignment of one's sense of the past with one's hopes for the future. Being delicate, it is subject to the failures which are registered through the faltering rhythms of the narrative in Cantos v and vi. These might be described (in formalist terms) as the struggle of the text to recover the story. Put in another w ay, the text manifests the efforts of the beau ideal, which receives its authorised formula­ tion in Shelley's resume of the poem in the Preface (100), to realise itself through the various discontinuities, concealments, mirrorings, elisions and returns of the plot. The degree to which it falls short of its aim measures the poem's determination to do justice to the presence of a guilt which is inexpiable because implicated in everrenewed desire. The phenomenon is perhaps most clearly evident in the recognition-scene that is repeatedly promised as Laon draws nearer to his lost sister. 'Could she be Cythna?' (1716); 'Where was that maid? I asked, but it was known of none' (1881). The deferral is so demonstratively prolonged as to insist that some exceptional attention is being solicited for it. Might it accomplish the ritual union of the private and revolutionary plots which could resolve their tension in a formal act of recognition now that Laon's penance appears to be complete? So we appear to be urged to think. When at the end of the public ceremony of Canto v the recognition is yet again deferred, this time quite egregiously— 'some impulse made my heart refrain / From seeking her that night' (2322-3)— the persistent frustration would seem to call out for commentary.

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In one sense the failure of recognition is integral to the ordering of the plot. The high point of revolutionary achievement is brought to the brink of full realisation only to pause, apparently so that Cythna may be recognised formally when some unspecified condition peculiar to Laon has been satisfied. In the interval events reverse the political situation utterly, and the refusal to lift Cythna's veil or pronounce her name is thereby given retrospec­ tive status as a crucial incompletion. It will be pronounced and she identified as Laon's sister in the second recognition-scene, accom­ plished in private, in vi, stanza xxiv. The initial refusal deprives the plot at this pivotal moment of the traditonal function of such recognition in the ancient epics of composing a heroic identity across time by supplying the missing fragment of an unknown character's story which the plot has contrived to lose. This will be recounted later, also in private, and to Laon alone once Cythna has been recognised erotically. The festival has been spared any ritual pollution by a recognition that, to be psychologically coher­ ent at this point, must reach back, as such scenes typically do, into a painful episode, here forbidden desire, in the past (Cave, 22-4). It seems clear that the two recognition-scenes, the second re­ playing and modifying the first, are intended to provide separate access to elementary domains of experience which the plot designs to keep apart. We might think of these as competing realms of the sacred which a city's walls traditionally enclose in an uneasy association, the one civic unity and coherence overseen by appropriate deities and affirmed by religious ceremony, the other centred in the home, domestic and generative (Scully, 14-40). A s priestess of the secular cult which has evident and interesting relations with the revolutionary fetes celebrated during the 1790s in France (Kennedy, 329 -53; McNiece, 113 -2 4 ) Cythna cannot be recognised. Only in her natural existence can the missing narrative of her past be made continuous with her present. The radically natural incest that Laon and Cythna share is removed from the enclosure of the city to a space where oblivion is finally achieved (2596-7) but only in an unrepeatable suspension of time. On their return to the temporal narrative, a dark parody of domestic life is played out between Laon and the female figure of Pestilence (vi, stanzas xlviii-liii). (This strange apparition seems to function in the plot as a Proserpine-figure, Cythna's infernal double, the underworld of death over which she reigns now dominating the realm of nature, a condition that Cythna recog­ nises in her great hopeful ode in Canto ix: This is the winter of the world' [3685].) The breach between civil and natural existence,

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which the opposing recognition-scenes have endorsed, is perhaps intended to be subsumed in the moral and aesthetic doctrines that Cythna develops in that ode (stanzas xx-xxxv). These aim to make some recuperation of the revolution's failure by assimilating it to the cycle of nature, whose repetitive pattern of creation and des­ truction, although it renders all conditions unstable, is at least predictable and, at intervals, gives reason to hope. The primary secret that the narrative has contrived to conceal, until Cythna's meditation in Canto ix finds the sense of the plot in the rhythm of Nature's cyclical self-sacrificing, is that its redemp­ tive function is to operate not in relation to the present revolution but to some future one. Filtered through Laon's expectations and desire, the narrative guides us through the stages of recognition that mark out the change from one expectation of redemption to another. Ultimately the plot is governed by the two ends which the first canto has placed conspicuously in view: the defeat of France, which is the political and psychological circumstance that generates the fiction in the first stanza, and the posthumous beatification of Laon and Cythna which forms the condition of narration in the last. Each is a beginning, the second superseding and qualifying the first, and the revolutionary (in the etymological sense) pattern they enact suggests the perspective of a perpetual narration, a fresh retelling germinating from each temporary com­ pletion. Such a model is indeed redemptive, also in the etymologi­ cal sense of the word, a buying back of what has been sold, a freeing from the bondage of defeat. It is the poem's w ay of liberat­ ing not the revolution it represents but the revolutionary plot itself. Which is not the same thing as guaranteeing, or even confi­ dently predicting, its eventual success. Despite Shelley's declara­ tion of revolutionary faith in the Preface which considers 'the temporary triumph of oppression' to be 'that sure earnest of its final and inevitable fall' (100), the poem, while celebrating hope, offers a comprehensive vision of the perspectives for human improvement that is thoroughly tempered with an appreciation of the human tendency to repeat old errors. In these terms a new revolution is certain to arise and is as likely to fail again. From this sober viewpoint one of the poem's chief critical aims is to substitute hope, as constancy of desire, for faith as submissive belief. Both had the traditional status of theological virtues, and the hope the poem recommends may be more like faith, regarded as tenacity of conviction, than the oppositional terms of the text can comfortably recognise. The substitution is partly an appro­ priation. Faith, as much as hope, would seem to be the basis of the

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recuperation of history in the synopsis of the poem that Shelley makes in the Preface by extracting its beau ideal A s Chateaubriand recognised, such an ideal conception is the expression of a reli­ gious consciousness. The plot of the poem in effect denies the sufficiency of Shelley's synopsis and replaces it with an exemplum, equally the expression of a religious sense of history though far from inspirational. It is constructed through the syncretic recollec­ tions which function principally to bring religious patterns, whether classical or Biblical, into sharp focus. Shelley's unfinished essay 'On Christianity', written apparently in late 18 17 after he had finished Laon and Cythna, is relevant here. The analogies it per­ ceives between the public action of Christ in relation to the epoch in which he lived and the revolutionary moment which had just passed in early nineteenth-century Europe make the comparison with Laon's endeavours and fate particularly suggestive (Prose, 246 -71; Bryan Shelley, 68-74). The similarities between Laon's entry into the Golden City and Christ's into Jerusalem, as engag­ ing their actors in the final stage of a sacrificial destiny, are evident enough. This re-enactment is complicated by another, by the Oedipal plot which attracts personal memory and desire to its pattern through the central cantos, and thus unsettles interpreta­ tion of the poem's erotic theme by complicating Shelley's defence of incestuous love in the final paragraph of the Preface. It is principally this plot which frustrates the narrative ordering that premises redemption upon forgetting. But it finishes by meta­ morphosing the Christian plot as well, for the exemplary sinner is, like Oedipus, mysteriously transformed by his exile into the saint whose protection guarantees the unbreakable continuity to which the sacred city aspires and which is represented in the idea of the Golden City as heavenly Jerusalem. The story of Oedipus has always been able to unsettle, even scandalise, the enlightened mind. M ary Wollstonecraft writes in her Historical and Moral View ...o f the French Revolution: What moral lesson, for example, can be drawn from the story of Oedipus, the favourite subject of such a number of tragedies?— The gods impel him on, and, led imperiously by blind fate, though perfectly innocent, he is fearfully pun­ ished, with all his hapless race, for a crime in which his will had no part. (112) The reformer's exasperation at the persistent fascination for this troubling parable in ancient literature results from the place it accords to fatalism and moral pollution in human conduct. That it

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continues to trouble in Laon and Cythna calls attention to a principal feature of the poem's treatment of the revolutionary experience. Advertising its progressive views in the Preface, it is nonetheless a poetic text constructed so as to accommodate a maximum of tension— between an idea of history that is both critical and ameliorating on the one hand and a religious and mythical representation of history on the other. NOTES

1. All references to Laon and Cythna, hereafter parenthetically indicated by canto, stanza or line numbers as necessary (or by page numbers for the Preface), are to the most widely available text, that in Volume n of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Rogers. 2. One of the curses laid upon those who disobey God's command­ ments in Deuteronomy is also apposite: 'And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness' (28:29). See also: Job 11:17 ; Psalms 91:6; Isaiah 16:3,58:10,59:10. Mary Shelley called atten­ tion to her husband's 'constant perusal of portions of the Old Testa­ ment—the Psalms, the Book of Job, the Prophet Isaiah...' in her note on The Revolt of Islam, and said that 'in English, the Bible was his constant stud/ in her note on the poems of 18 17 (Poetical Works, 156, 551). Leigh Hunt confirms Shelley's close attention to the Bible in 1817: 'His book was generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible, in which last he took a great, though pecu­ liar, and often admiring interest. One of his favourite parts was the book of Job' (The Autobiography of Leigh H unt, 269). An allusion to Comus (380-4) may also be intended: 'He that has light within his own clear breast/May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day,/But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts/Benighted walks under the midday sun;/Himself is his own dungeon'. Here, as in Laon and Cythna, the virtue of a transparent integrity of soul is set against the temptations of sexual attraction. 3. In addition to the city's location in a plain between the sea and the Asian mountains, which would be more or less appropriate to Con­ stantinople as well, Shelley appears to be recollecting Homer's description of the Trojan camp at night at the end of Book vra of the Iliad (540-65). 4. One might wonder whether the subtitle of the poem, The Revolution of The Golden City, carries the ironic ambiguity inherent in both of its terms which might signify some incessant cyclical mutation between the celestial vision of Revelation 21:18— 'and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass'— and the degraded Babylon (the city that is Jerusalem's antithesis in Revelation 14:8) cursed by the Prophet Isaiah: 'How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!'

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The Enigm a of "A Vision of the Sea', or 'W ho Sees the W aterspouts?' NORA CROOK

G.M. Matthews famously stated that evaluation of any poem by Shelley should be suspended until 'the nature and function of the poem have been inquired into'. Among his test cases was 'the maligned "Indian Serenade"', at that time (1969) widely regarded as mawkish self-projection, but really, Matthews argued, 'a dramatic imitation of an Oriental love-song', no more expressive of its author's personality than "Gerontion", or "Gretchen am Spinnrade'" (Matthews in s p p , 688,689). His argument resulted in a new perception and revaluation. T h e Indian Serenade', wail of the Ineffectual Angel, has been superseded by T h e Indian Girl's Song', playful and sexy piece of consummate craftsmanship. But might such a process of revaluation be reversed? Could the critical fortunes of a disregarded poem be improved in the late 1990s by arguing that it is pre-eminently a turning loose of personal emotion? The challenge posed would be given added piquancy where the complaint is that the poem (when read at all) is unintelligible. Would this effort rescue it from, or merely pro­ duce better reasons for, the neglect? Such reflections spring, of course, from a specific 'hard case', one which most critics look at and pass by fairly quickly. If ever a Shelley poem justifies Hazlitt's famous complaint that it is 'diffi­ cult to read through, from the disjointedness of the materials, the incongruous metaphors and violent transitions' or to 'guess the drift or the moral', 'A Vision of the Sea' would seem to be it (though Hazlitt was actually speaking of The Triumph of Life).1 It appears to be a sad let-down in that otherwise distinguished collection, Prometheus Unbound (1820). Yet it deserves better, a chance, if nothing more, to mean something to late-twentiethcentury readers; I find it moving, not least for limpid phrases like 'The wide world of waters is vibrating' and its evocation of that state of clear-headed serenity which can descend during a lifecrisis along with full awareness that worse is to come. So I push out my boat, disclaiming, like Wordsworth, the foolish hope of

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attempting to reason anyone into approbation. It is a very strange work, opening melodramatically with thun­ der, lightning and waterspouts. A black ship splits. On deck are twin tigers, a mother, her child and corpses of the crew. A hurri­ cane traverses the storm path; the resultant cataclysm self-destructs. The sun rises. The tigers are suddenly killed off. A s mother and child rest on the last fragment of wreckage ... the child and the ocean still smile on each other Whilst— And that's it. What does it signify, this polarity of violence and calm, vague­ ness and specificity; the bizarre dramatis personae, the apocalypse which unveils nothing? In 1972 Donald Reiman wrote (Jordan, 368) that a prize (I am not making a bid!) should be offered for a satisfactory interpretation. In 1985 Neil Fraistat related the poem helpfully to T h e Sensitive Plant', the adjacent poem in the 1820 volume, but added that it is 'difficult to interpret because its exposition (virtually all description) breaks off before reaching any thematic statement or denouement' (Fraistat, The Poem, 172).2 This essay (which owes much to a modest, and too little-known note by Elsie Mayer in 1979) attempts to demonstrate that descrip­ tion is thematic statement and the break-off a denouement. 'A Vision' is a 'manufactured fragment' unique in Shelley's mature work.3 W hy a fragment? In 19 1 1 C.D. Locock, not very wisely, suggested that Shelley 'did not think it worth finishing'. Its 'inferiority to all the contents of the [1820] volume' and its 'Byron-Moore' metre suggested a composition date possibly as early as 18 14 (Shelley, ed. Locock, 2, 509-10). This requires us to discount Mary Shelley's dating 'Pisa— April 1820' (Harvard m s English 258.2), to ignore contemporary admiration (of which more later), and to believe that Shelley used immature work to bulk out a volume which he hoped would be a succes d'estime. With M ary Quinn's demonstration in 1990 that the notebook containing the (sole) rough draft (Huntington M S H M 2177) is almost certainly of Italian provenance, making its entire contents post-1817 (Quinn xxxii, lv), Locock's conjecture can be buried. A more helpful theory is that it could be an 'improvisation', an offspring of 'Kubla Khan'. Based on an actual dream, it records the freaks of the dreaming mind; it ceases when the dreamer awakes. This is a good enough hypothesis to be going on with (I myself used to adhere to it) until something better comes along. Shelley's

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draft indicates rapid composition, like many others of his drafts; it neither supports nor disproves this theory. Turning to contemporary critical reviews of the Prometheus Unbound volume for insight, we find a sparse, but interestingly diverse record. Predictably, the hostile Quarterly castigated the impiety and unintelligibility of 'A Vision', weighing in with heavy irony: 'W e say nothing of the cumbrous and uncouth style [... ] nor do we ask who this "she" is, who sees the waterspouts' (Barcus 258-9). But other reviewers, including those deploring Shelley's opinions, surprisingly singled it out for praise,4 enthu­ siastically hailing its grandeur of expression and originality (Barcus, 239,247,249). This need not mean that sections of Shelley's read­ ers had means of interpreting it that w e have lost; it may simply be that they were more prepared to tolerate some obscurity in exchange for sensory excitement, and that the theme of shipwreck (it is contemporaneous with Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa) had particular resonance then. But neither cam w e assume that no one found it intelligible. 'A Vision' never consolidated this early critical favour or became a frequently cited text. But there are signs that it was meaningful to M ary Shelley and in her mind when writing the shipwreck scene (volume 3, chapter 29) of The Last Man. In 18 31, asked for a Shelleyan 'motto' for Chapter 89 (concerning a tiger shoot near a ruined jungle city) of Trelawny's Adventures of a Younger Son (Mary Shelley Letters, 1,4 10 ),5 she ingeniously prof­ fered a quotation from T h e Tower of Famine' and lines about the tigers (11. 92, 94-5) from 'A Vision'. I shall now consider the possible significance of her coupling a desolate Italian city with agonised tigers. Elsie Mayer's 'Notes on the Composition of " A Vision of the S e a "', which I mentioned above, related the poem to a passage from Mary Shelley's 'Note on The Cenci’ ( o s a , 335-6); this des­ cribed the removal to Leghorn after the death of William Shelley on 7 June 1819. Noting M ary Shelley's dwelling on the 'wide prospect' of the sea visible from Shelley's glazed study, the 'storms of a majestic terror' with their 'dark lurid clouds' which 'became waterspouts that churned up the waters beneath', Mayer concluded that 'A Vision' is 'a recreation of Shelley's grief over William's death'. After examining H M 2177, she decided that the poem was composed in the summer of 1819, not April 1820. Here she erred; Quinn's closer examination of H M 2177 ruled this out, vindicating M ary Shelley's dating (Quinn, xxx, lvii, 191).6 But Mayer's main propositions— that the child's death informs

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the poem and that the 'Note on The Cenci' connects the two— are not thereby disproved. Indeed, I consider that William's death is even more integral than Mayer proposed. 'A Vision' is neither primarily an exercise in 'wild' writing nor even a general recollection of a mood of anguish, but what the Shelleys would have called an allegory, written at a later, equally fraught period, remembering the weekby-week experience of living in a pestilence-stricken Rome in 1819 and watching a child die, an experience shaking to its foundations Shelley's hope that evil could be expelled not only from society but from nature itself. Shelley had headed his 18 19 fragment T o William Shelley' with a ritornello: 'Roma! Roma! Roma! Non $ piu come era primal' The motto might equally do for 'A Vision'. The Quarterly questioned more pertinently than it knew. Who indeed is the 'She' who sees 'black trunks of the waterspouts' (1.5) and (since she is not dismissed) everything else? The perceiving eye is that of a female visionary, as in 'Marianne's Dream' (1817). The metre and rhyme scheme, too— anapaestic tetrametre couplet— is relevant to a female narrative viewpoint. Scott, Moore and especially the Byron of T h e Destruction of Sennacherib' would have certainly been evoked, but the form also had strong associa­ tions with the informal female pen, conversational verse epistles and domestic themes. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's then wellknown T h e Lover' and Shelley's sister's Victor and Cazire poems (1810) are examples. But if the reading as allegorised biography has validity, 'She' is also an idealisation of Mary Shelley herself, brooding on a seascape in the aftermath of her Roman loss.7 The Shelleys had retreated to Leghorn from Rome's 'pestilential air' 'anxious for a time to escape a spot associated too intimately with his presence and loss' ( o s a , 335). But Mary Shelley wrote from Leghorn 'I feel it more now than at Rome— the thought never leaves me for a single moment.'(Mary Shelley, Letters 1,10 0 ).8 In March 1820, by then in Pisa, both Shelleys begged Maria Gisborne to stay with them instead of going to England— just how desperately, became clear only with the publication in 1980 of Shelley's 1 1 March invitation. In a piece of emotive arm-twisting, Shelley hints that only her presence can prevent a death in the household (whose, and whether natural or violent, are left open, with typical Shelley evasiveness). 'M ary has resigned herself, especially since the death of her child, to a train of thoughts, which if not cut off, cannot but conduct to some fatal end.' Mrs Gisborne will bring about 'a new habit of sentiment' to prevent Mary Shelley from dwelling on her 'inward sufferings'. Most remark­ ably, Shelley adds 'Mary considers me as a portion of herself, and

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feels no more remorse in torturing me than in torturing her own mind' (Stocking and Stocking, 2-3).9 Not, then, Shelley in his glazed study in July 1819, but Shelley in the spring of 1820 attempting to be that portion of Mary Shelley's self that he claimed she considered him to be, to torture his mind as if it were hers. It is a re-enaction of a re-enaction, as he recollects or imagines the mourning mother superimposing the seascape of Leghorn upon certain dreadful Roman realities occur­ ring between April and June 1819. In 1819 Shelley wrote a frag­ ment attempting to explain w hy he must not follow 'dearest M ary7 down sorrow's road. 'A Vision', where he acts as barometer of her tempestuous thoughts, shows that he did later try. The above provides a sufficient context for the poem's com­ position in the spring of 1820. Like the Letter to Maria Gisborne, which looks back from the summer of 1820 to that of 1819, it may be an anniversary piece. April 1819 had initiated the train of events leading to William's death. But that the poem is an allegory of a 'secret history' needs further exposition. Before beginning, I must insist that I do not hold the view that all details have some coded biographical significance; aesthetic determinants have primacy. For example, I would resist the speculation that 'each sound like a centipede' refers to a hundred hours of the Shelleys' watching by William's sick-bed. 'Centipede' unites the ideas of repulsion, menace and 'crawling hours'— that suffices. The sea is grief identified so strongly with Rome, that it merges with it; the depths of that sea are the grave itself. Nothing is more characteristic of Shelley than that he should compare the land to the sea,10but he is following a precedent; Spenser's Ruines of Rome, well-known to both Shelleys,11 compares the rise and fall of Rome to sea-storm and tempest which swell ever higher before the city collapses 'b y fatall doome': Like as ye see the wrathfull Sea from farre In a great mountaine heap't with hideous noyse [...] Like as ye see fell Boreas with sharpe blast Tossing huge tempests through the troubled skie [...] (xvi) In 'A Vision' sea and vapours are described in terms of a dynamic metamorphosis of the cityscape— buildings, fireworks, fountains, monuments— an elaboration of a sentence written to Peacock in March 1819 about one of the Shelley family's favourite view­ points: 'From [ ... ] Monte Cavallo you see the boundless ocean of domes, spires and columns that is the City, Rome' (Letters n, 88).12 In 'A Vision' surf is compared to fiery 'fountains' (1.22) hurled up

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above overhanging 'walls' (1.15 ). The 'pyramid billows' shine 'in many a spire' (1. 22-3)— poignant when you recollect Shelley's intention to memorialise his son with a pyramid near to Cestius'. Clouds like 'columns and walls' sustain 'the dome of the tempest' (11.10 9-10 ). After the hurricane passes, they are like 'the stones of a temple' (11. 113 ) scattered in ruin; light and air enter in like 'banded armies' through a 'gate' (1. 119) in the broken cloudbarrier. Normally one thinks of a city's inhabitants as alive, and the buildings as husks. Here its populace is dead and dying, while its ruins assume a monstrous protean life and vertiginously heave and rock as they swallow up the corpses. The black ship, the 'inanimate hulk', is the grieving 'spirit's bark'— projection of the perceiver's own being or life history, inhabited by its faculties, passions and interiorised mirror-images of self and companions.13 Prior to the tempest, it has been be­ calmed for 'Nine weeks' on the 'watery plain [. . .] Till a leadcoloured fog gathered up from the deep,/ Whose breath was quick pestilence' (11.45-50). This corresponds to the nine weeks of the Shelleys' planned stay in Rome (5 M arch-7 M ay 1819). On 9 April Mary Shelley wrote that 'nothing but the Malaria' would drive them from Rome 'for many months', but by the 26th she was fearing that 'the Roman air' was beginning to produce 'colds— depression & even fever to the feeblest of our party'. Nevertheless, on 7 May, the day of the intended departure for Castellamare, the Shelleys moved instead to Via Sistina, believing themselves to be safe in 'the best air in Rome' (Mary Shelley, Letters 1, 93, 94, 97). The decision proved fatal. The 'fog' corresponds to the malaria epidemic which was probably the cause of William's death. On the eve of the tempest only seven mariners remain. 'Six the thunder has smitten/And they Ue black as mummies' (11. 6 1-2).14 In the draft this originally read Tour did sicken And biscuit worms revelled' (Quinn, 268-73).15 If, as I believe, Shelley was here expunging over-specific personal references— he had originally cancelled the 'Nine' of 'Nine weeks'— then the original 'four' corresponded to the members of the famiy—Mary Shelley, William, Claire Clairmont and himself—and the 'biscuit worms' to William's 'dangerous attack of worms' in the latter half of May. (All four were ill.16) The seventh corpse is suspended: 'A n oak-splinter pierced through his breast and his back (1.64). The hanging figure pierced by an oafc-splinter suggests a type of Prometheus, heartstruck by a weapon from England.17 There are at least three circumstances for which this could be the emblem: reappearance in Rome of the consumptive symptoms which had driven Shelley

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out of England; the Quarterly article of 1818;18 persecutors like the stranger who reportedly knocked him down at the Post Office on 6 M ay 18 19 with an 'Are you that damned Atheist Shelley? (Jour­ nal 1 ,2 6 2 and n .). A t this point the tempest arrives, which I take to mark the onset, around 2 June, of William Shelley's final illness, the Destroyer. Twin tigers, contending passions normally contained within the breast, burst from the hold; they are, here, Fear and Hope, twin destinies. Their howl is redoubled by the force of a black hurricane 'trans­ versely dividing' (1.10 2 ) the path of the tempest. This hurricane passes from the west to 'the path of the gate of the eastern sun' (11. 10 0 -1), scattering the cloud bank 'at one gate' (1.119 ). In relation to the map of Rome, its path moves from St Peter's towards an eastern gate such as Porta Pia, or Porta Maggiore, visited by the Shelleys in March 18 19 (Journal 1,2 5 3); such a stream would pass, like the Angel of Death, over the roof of the Shelleys' papally named lodgings, 65 Via Sistina. Tempest and hurricane together make the sign of the cross over the city, a gigantic plague-mark (which accounts for the confusing and apparently unnecessary furnishing of the action with two storm paths). The 1820 Quarterly reviewer rightly if obscurely sensed that irreligion was operating; 'A Vision of the Sea' is also 'A Vision of the See'19— degenerate Rome, its Bishop, vicar to God Almighty, complicit in the trium­ phant moral sickness. A n underlying associative train links this sign of death with the predators of the deep 'feasting like Jews with this manna rained down / From God on their wilderness' (11. 57-8): exodus in reverse, the passover, the tenth plague of Egypt, the slaying of the first-born. 'W e do not quite despair yet we have the least possible reason to hope,' Mary Shelley wrote two days before William's death. 'Yesterday he was in the convulsions of death and he was saved from them— yet we dare not, must not hope (Mary Shelley, Letters 1, 99). The tiger Hope dies first, but only after a convulsive struggle with a sea-serpent. The tiger Fear hurries towards death 'with the speed of despair', and is dispatched by three marksmen in a boat; fear quickly yields to the resignation that arrives when all hope is gone.10 A marksman for each year of William's life; a three-gun firing was the traditional funeral salute for a sailor slain at sea.21 The boat is urged on by twelve rowers: a hastening to the destined noonday where the sickness destroyeth, the hour in which, Claire Clairmont's journal records, William died.22 The final version dropped an uncancelled penultimate draft line alluding to William's resting place in the Protestant cemetery as it would

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have been in the spring of 1820, 'Like a grave where sweet lilies & violets grow— ' (Quinn, 366-7; h m 2 17 7 f.26v rev.). The breakingoff in mid-sentence is not an equilibrium of hope and fear, nor an open-ended finish in which anything could take place. A s well might one say that Beatrice Cenci could escape the scaffold because the execution is not shown on stage. We have here an aposeopesis, a refusal to write the known outcome. It is like the broken-off entries in Mary Shelley's journal, those eloquent gaps.23 The poem, then, is necessarily a fragment, for reasons determined not only by tact but also by rhetoric. Critics averse to reading Shelley's poems as allegorised bio­ graphy will be uneasy with this interpretation. I appeal to them to consider whether the end might not justify the means here. We hear often enough of the dangers of such an approach and not enough of what an edict against it might lose. It would skew the experience of reading Shelley, who often admits that he 'idealises' his personal history and who, in his Advertisement to Epipsychidion, embraced Dante's dictum that a poet should be prepared to reveal any true story concealed under a veil of figurative language ( s f p , 373). Allowing the biographical to have its due place here— not, of course, exclusive rights— may, among other things, enrich our sense of the interrelationships of the poems of the Prometheus Unbound volume and lead towards the making more visible of the invisible Mary Shelley in Shelley's work.24 A developed argument lies outside the scope of this essay, but might start with observing that each poem in the Prometheus Unbound volume is about some sort of unbinding or release. 'A Vision' emerges as the least affirmative of them. Placed right after The Sensitive Plant, with its shocking line 'Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out', 'A Vision''s final image of a still living, still smiling, playing child soothes the mind yet offers a vacancy in counterpoise to The Sensitive Plant's creed that nothing delightful on earth is ultimately destroyed. The 'Ode to Heaven', immedi­ ately following, interposes a 'new habit of sentiment', 'cutting o ff a train of poetic thoughts which would otherwise have certainly conducted to a 'fatal end'; it resolves nothing, but views the cosmos (and, a fortiori, mere human sorrow) as an infinitely minute dewdrop. 'A Vision"s purely destructive western wind is later swept aw ay by a West Wind which is a destroyer of disease, in an Ode which has as subtext the celebration of the approaching birth of a child. When related to the last poem, 'Ode to Liberty', the mean­ ing of 'A Vision' shifts again. Both end with the idea of a spirit being suddenly withdrawn into the abyss, and of drowning

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amidst the tempestuous play of waves. In the first, private woe impends; in the second the drowning occurs as a similitude only, after the spirit has invoked publicly a freedom to be found on earth, not in the grave. The first poem adumbrates the second, as type does antitype in the old method of scriptural interpretation. But perhaps the most immediate reflections concern Shelley's presumed readership. The Prometheus Unbound volume was not planned to be popular; though it contains 'The Cloud' and 'The Skylark', the title poem was, 'written only for the elect' 'never intended for more than 5 or 6 persons' (Letters n, 200,388); that he should include an obscure poem is not surprising. But some of the above can be discounted as self-arming against disappointing sales; we may presume that he wished the volume to seek out and enlarge the number of his fit audience. H ow much help did he give them in 'A Vision'? I would suggest that he invites readers to position themselves not necessarily as intimates, but as initiates who could, without knowing anything of his personal history, still have followed the poem's emotional trajectory, reading it as a paradigm of the progress of any experience productive of the following sequence: 'vehement struggle', 'horror', 'deadly resolution' and the 'ele­ vated dignity of calm suffering, joined to passionate tenderness and pathos' ( o s a , 337).25 If they found in this sequence an analogy with their feelings about England in 1820, this would not have displeased him; allegory is polysemous. That the poem was alle­ gorical it required no great sophistication, nor even sympathy with Shelley, to discern;26 the title, the choice of shipwreck in a storm as a central motif, the interrogatives (Is that all the crew that lie burying each other? Are those twin tigers? Are these all?) would cumulatively invite them to penetrate to the 'realities' of which these are masks or forms; some of the cliches which the poem assembles had acquired for early nineteenth-century readers a cluster of possible significations. 'Two-tigers-in-the-breast', for instance, was common currency for 'opposing passions'. A s The Sensitive Plant grows out of the elaboration of the cliche of the 'unweeded garden' so 'A Vision' enlarges upon 'hopes wrecked'. Moreover, the application of the allegory to some domestic experience was accessible, to a degree. That the point of view is that of a woman looking at a ship in distress on a turbulent sea, paralleling and inverting the finale to Childe Harold, would strongly indicate the psychological and the subjective, and parti­ cularly the agitation of a female mind, under certain conditions; the pathos in the utterances of the mother to her infant and the

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overt expressions of fear of maternal loss, would suggest what these conditions might be. Shelley also places his trust in the activity of reading a poem as a 'sufficient comment for the text of every heart'. This phrase, which he applied to the utterances of the madman in Julian and Maddalo ( s p p , 113), reverses the expected proposition, that each man is free to interpret a 'dark' poem for himself; rather, a poem presents an analogy to a feeling or memory pre-existing within the heart and interprets us to ourselves, revealing in metaphor what we have in common; feeling hearts thus participate in a 'general confession', while remaining able to keep concealed the particular and the private. A poem like 'A Vision of the Sea' is difficult to evaluate because written partly to discover those who by sympathies and circum­ stance are attuned to understand it. Like Kipling's Rewards and Fairies, it is written so that it 'might or might not reveal [itself] according to the shifting light of sex, youth and experience' (Kipling, 190). Such works take the risk that the act of reading might seldom, if ever, coincide with receptivity. Unlike the great­ est poems, the effect of 'A Vision of the Sea' will be of its nature fluky, often leaving behind bemusement or indifference, but sometimes seizing a reader as a true expression of living in extremis and insisting on remaining in the memory to sustain, perhaps, when needed. Those to whom the poem is intelligible will tend to have earned their insight the hard way, which means that I have attained it (if indeed I have) rather too cheaply. Looking back on this reading, which has been reached partly via a rather step-by-step collation of notebooks, journals and letters and not through personal suf­ fering, I find little which another could not have arrived at rapidly and intuitively. When a mother watches her three-year-old child die, the poem asserts, all the crude tropes ever used to represent violent grief are proved on the pulses. It is like an earthquake, a hurricane, like being split in two, like tigers rending the breast, like a serpent crushing the vitals, like devouring by sharks, like bullets through the brain, like drowning. Clothed in such old garments, yet naked in its primitive fury, with its utter disregard for decorum, urbanity and purity of diction, 'A Vision of the Sea' attempts to represent the persistence of tenderness in the face of the evidence that the world is a slaughterhouse, until words fail and a veil is drawn over the final scene.

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1. Barcus, 341. 2. Fraistat, The Poem (to whose perceptions this essay is greatly in­ debted) dtes Ketcham's view (1977) that the poem asserts the empire of hope and love over 'Nature at her worst'. For Fraistat, however, the poem admits Jove's control of the ocean. 3. The nearest parallels are all juvenilia. No other mature 'manufac­ tured fragment' stops in mid-line; other canonical fragments are posthumously published unfinished drafts. 4 . 1 am grateful to Donald Reiman for pointing this out. 5. A revision of Bennett's tentative dating of pre-1829, confirmed by Charles Robinson, who has identified the addressee as Charles Ollier. I am also grateful to him for pointing out mws ' s almost con­ temporaneous letter to Trelawny about the 'fragments of my ship­ wrecked life' which strikingly recalls 'A Vision' (Mary Shelley, Let­ ters n, 140). Trelawny, one of the few to quote from 'A Vision' after 1820, took 11. 82-3 as the 'motto' to Chapter 1 1 of his 1858 and 1878 memoirs of Shelley and Byron. 6. The dating is satisfactory on a number of counts. 'A Vision' is influ­ enced by the shipwreck scenes in Don Juan, and The Tempest, pbs reread both in January 1820 (Journal 1,304-5). 7. Claire Clairmont and Maria Gisborne (see especially Letter to Maria Gisborne, 11.14 5 -15 0 — could also have identified with the perceiving 'She'. However, I would argue that this would still be to participate through sympathy in mws ' s experience. 8. See also Letters n, 104, July 2 51819 , telling Peacock that Mary bore her grief 'as you may naturally imagine, worse than I do'. 9. Maria Gisborne declined. For their farewell visits, see Journal 1, 3 1 5 16. 10. See, for example, 'Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills', 1. 90; Letter to M aria Gisborne, 11.19 3-4. 11. See Journal 1,251; Ruines of Rome, 'V irg il"s Gnat' (read by pbs aloud on 20 M ay 1820), Muiupotmos and 'sundrie poems' entitled 'Visions' are all found in Spenser's Complaints (1591). The influence of Complaints may be seen in an 1820 run (broken by Swellfoot the Tyrant) of quasiSpenserian poems: 'A Vision', The Witch of Atlas and Letter to Maria Gisborne; the last contains many direct allusions to Spenser. 12. Not that all details (for example, 'fire-flowing iron') suggest a Roman cityscape, but a sufficient number do. 13. Among the symbols used by mws ' s journal 'as an indication of trou­ ble', are two instances of what resembles a black boat-shaped cres­ cent moon. See Journal 1,170 and plate 1; 2,579-81. 14. The mummies might have been suggested by the displays in the famous charnel-house of Santa Maria della Concezione (near Monte Cavallo), described by Forsyth (187-8), whom the Shelley party read in Rome (Journal 1,256-7; Clairmont, Journal, 105. 15. hm 2177, ff 5 3 v rev-54v rev. 'Biscuit worms' echoes the original 1798 Rim e of the Ancyent M arinere, pointing towards pbs' s familiarity with this version, not previously noted. 16. Dr Bell ordered the 'very ill' pbs to spend the summer in Naples (Holmes, 513). mw s ' s journal contains Bell's prescriptions: vermi­ fuges for William and purgatives, tonics and opiates for the others (Journal 1,278-80). I differ slightly from the editors. In the journal ms, cancelled Greek characters identifying the first prescriptee look

The Enigma of ‘A Vision of the Sea’ intended for 'Mary' rather than 'Claire' and I take e a v z o v to refer to rather than William. 17. 'The oak'= England appears in 'Similes for two Political Characters of 1819'. 18. Felt keenly by the Shelleys in April 1819 (Mary Shelley, Letters 1,92). 19 . 1 owe this idea to Keith Crook. 20. The calmness of despair is a motif found at intervals throughout mws ' s writings; see for instance: 'Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul both of hope and fear7 (Frankenstein , 2.1). 'We have a power given us in any worst extrem­ ity, which [...] enables us to endure the most savage tortures with a stillness of soul which in hours of happiness we could not have imagined. A calm, more dreadful in truth than the tempest, allayed the wild beatings of my heart—a calm like that of the gamester, the suicide, and the murderer, when the last die is on the point of being cast—while the poisoned cup is at the lips,—as the death blow is about to be given' (The Last M an, 3, 29, describing the final ship­ wreck). 2 1 . See oed 'give' 14.C and 'gun' l.b. 22. Clairmont, Journal, 113: 'Monday June 7—at noon-day7. 23. Her journal breaks off with the word, 'Friday 4th [June]'. Similarly the day of pbs' s drowning has the entry 'Monday 8th'. She never filled it in. 24. Lines addressed to the 'sweet Spirit' of the child '[WJhat is death, what are we? [...1 What! to see thee no more [...]?' are adapted from the end of chapter 9 of her novella Matilda, written at Leghorn in 1819 in the aftermath of William's death, a rare instance of pbs quoting from m w s . Woodville exclaims to the 'sweet spirit', his dying bride: 'What is death? To see you no more?' In April 1820 Maria Gisborne took the fair copy to England to hand over to Godwin for (aborted) publication. A Latin rendering of 'A Vision of the Sea' might be either 'Visio maris' or 'Visio marina', which could be punningly translated back into English as 'Mary's Vision' or The Marine Vision', mw s was nick-named Marina by the Hunts. Conjecturally, the title was first conceived as a parallel to 'Marianne's Dream'. 25. mw s ' s outline, two pages after her description of the waterspouts and clouds) of the emotional progress of Beatrice Cenci, which strikingly mirrors that of 'A Vision'. 26. See Barcus, 335, for Hazlitt on pbs, who 'utters dark sayings and deals in allegories and riddles'. pbs

For permission to publish here, my warmest thanks are due to Professor Lilia Maria Crisafulli-Jones, of the University of Bologna, organiser of the international bicentenary conference Shelley e LTtalia (Rome, 9 -1 1 November 1992), where the original version of this paper was given.

163

S h elley's Peter B ell the Third: Relationship and the C an o n JOHN W ILLIAM S

The gap between the announcement in the press of Wordsworth's intention to publish his poem Peter Bell, and its actual publication in April 1819, was sufficient for John Hamilton Reynolds to pro­ duce a 'parody' of the poem before the public had had a chance to read the original. Wordsworth's poem (now the second Peter Bell) was followed by Shelley's Peter Bell the Third, which remained unpublished until 1839. Shelley completed it in October 1819, and in the process engaged directly with the issue of the contemporary canon. In 18 19 Wordsworth's reputation as a poet carried with it the likelihood of canonical status. His first experience of finding wide­ spread approval among the reviewers was in fact only a year away, when in April 1820 he published The River Duddon. There was no reason to expect this turn of events when Peter Bell appeared. Despite this, Shelley had responded very positively to the origi­ nality of Wordsworth's lyric poetry, and for him Wordsworth undoubtedly had been a candidate for poetical greatness, not least because his early work bore the stamp of a mind radically inclined towards both poetry and the political order of the day: 'his was an individual mind / And new created all he sa w '(3 3 5 , 11. 303-4). A s successive readings of Peter Bell the Third have pointed out, however, Wordsworth enjoys at best a marginal status in the poem. Working in what for him was the occasional and problem­ atic genre of satire, Shelley explored the viability of an alternative canon very different from the more predictable one he lays down in A Defence of Poetry: [I]t exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been bom: if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature

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had never taken place; if no monuments of antient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the reli­ gion of the antient world had been extinguished together with its belief. (502) Shelley's reading of his canon is, of course, determinedly sub­ versive. What the adoption of satire in Peter Bell the Third allowed him to propose was a far more radical agenda for the canon, where what might be conceived of as poetry of a fundamentally different type demanded recognition alongside the generally accepted great tradition. Given his own unease with the mode he adopted to explore this possibility, the seriousness with which such a proposal was made could remain ambivalent. This is to say no more than that Peter Bell the Third, for all its unusualness, is characteristic of the elusiveness that marks so much of his work. It is equally characteristic in the w ay its argument evolves from a commitment to the idea of community and relationship, a concept which is both central and elusive in his writing, and it is around Shelley's analysis of relationship that the reading of Peter Bell the Third offered here revolves. In her essay of 1981, 'Shelley's Mont Blanc', Frances Ferguson argued that Shelley saw things 'in terms of relationship'; relation­ ship is a pervasive concern throughout his writing because "his own, his human, mind ... cannot imagine itself as a genuinely independent, isolated existence'" (Ferguson, 207). Peter Bell the Third is a text which defines itself initially in relation to a very particular notion of the literary family or community to which it belongs. Shelley's appeal to a canon of other parodic and satirical texts also constitutes a critical examination of the genre, an exami­ nation frequently undertaken by other Romantic writers when concerned to establish lines of demarcation between themselves and an Augustan cultural tradition. The relationship explored was thus almost bound to be an ambiguous one. If we look first at the title of Shelley's poem, and then at its extensive preliminary matter— quotations from Wordsworth and Shakespeare, a Dedication and a forty-line Prologue— the stress is on where Shelley's Peter, and by implication the poem (and thus also, presumably, the poet), belong within an extended family. The title, Peter Bell the Third, implies legitimate succession. Knowing what we do about Shelley's attitude towards such titles, especially in the year of Peterloo when Britain was ruled by another 'in', 'old, mad, blind, despised and dying', we will understandably look with care at what Shelley is actually doing here ('England in 18 19 ',

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3 11). There is no doubt, however, that establishing literary rela­ tionships is Shelley's clear intent. The family tree which gives, in literary rather than monarchical terms, Peter Bell III his legitimacy begins with the first Teter Bell' by John Hamilton Reynolds. Working in a well-established parodic genre that originated in attacks on Lyrical Ballads, Reynolds simply used Peter Bell as a cipher for Wordsworth's habitual banality. Shelley's title, there­ fore, implies kinship with a substantial body of work (parodic poetry and satirical reviews) dedicated to demolishing Words­ worth's principle of 'simplicity' laid down in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and practised in poems like T h e Idiot Boy', T h e Thom ', and 'W e Are Seven'. In addition to this we have also a tangential link to fellow critics of George Ill's shortcomings, a political point of reference that Michael Scrivener, among others, has argued is a major theme for Peter Bell the Third, 'a Peterlooinspired poem' (Scrivener, 219). Shelley's dedication of the poem to Thom as Brown Esq.' does indeed indicate that he is appealing to a wider genre of political satire. Thomas Brown was the nom de plume used by Thomas Moore for his political satire of 1818, The Fudge Family in Paris. Assessing the legitimacy of this branch of the family has been the cause of considerable dispute among critics. Nowhere, it seems, has the full significance of the reference to Moore been properly picked up. Kim Blank, looking for the middle ground in Wordsworth's Influence on Shelley (1988), doesn't mention it at all (Blank 65). If w e allow Moore's photograph a space among the rest of the family portraits on the ancestral piano, I believe we can make some headway in this controversy. Thomas Love Peacock had sent Shelley 'the little work of Moore which I mentioned to you' in 18 18 along with the election news of that year, specifically as it referred to Wordsworth's support for Lowther's Tory campaign in Westmorland (Letters n, 26). He also mentioned that he had completed his own latest satirical piece, Nightmare Abbey. In this important letter, therefore, w e find the satiric genre, the election and Wordsworth linked together. Moore's Fudge Family is far from being the 'little work' Peacock refers to, presumably with intended irony. The first edition was 168 pages long, and bitterly condemns contemporary political cynicism. Moore was aiming primarily at those who had pro­ fessed liberal or radical political views in the 1790s, and who subsequently not only apostasised, but went on to inform against their fellow radicals of that era. In the Dedication to Peter Bell the Third Shelley envisages 'The Bells and the Fudges' being assessed

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by critics as interrelated personae. He points out that both texts apply themselves to the same task, speculating on the outcome of the disintegrating corrupt political systems of the Old World: when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo bridge shall become the nuclei of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream,— some transatlantic commen­ tator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and of their historians ... (325) For Shelley, the meaning of his poem clearly resides to a signifi­ cant extent in its relationship to a wide range of other specific texts, and given that The Fudge Family ran through five editions in its first fortnight, eliciting an enthusiastic review from Hazlitt and a reactionary riposte, Shelley could assume that the Fudges were as well known as Reynolds's parody (White, 137-9). The author of The Fudger Fudged, or The Devil and T***Y M***E evidently feared an enthusiastic response from a swinish multitude: Reptile lie there: thy wretched trash Had seem'd beneath the critic's lash, But that this rank, abusive gabble, Is just what takes the vulgar rabble, Who think themselves to elevate By lowering all that's good and great. (New Whig Guide, 17) The importance of literary relationship for Shelley is worth emphasising precisely because such a notion of family or commu­ nity could potentially become as destabilising as it promised to be reassuring and protective. Was Wordsworth in or out of this family? His fate in many w ays epitomises the issue, having about it what Blank describes as a 'double ambivalence' (Blank, 65). The negative aspect of the trope of family is what we must now consider. It is important to remember first that it was precisely Wordsworth's appeal to 'family' and community (frequently pur­ sued in a graveyard setting) that Reynolds, like so many other parodists, eagerly seized upon as a focus for ridicule. For James Smith, obsession with kinship was the key to Wordsworth's eccentric 'simplicity':

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M y brother Jack was nine in May, And I was eight on New-year's-day; So in Kate Wilson's shop Papa (he's my Papa and Jack's) Bought me, last week, a doll of wax, And brother Jack a top. Smith footnotes this verse by w ay of subverting the dreary domes­ tic stability it would seem to recommend: 'Jack and Nancy, as it was afterwards remarked to the Authors, are here made to come into the world at periods not sufficiently remote. The writers were then batchelors ...' (Smith, 76). Reynolds, in the absence of the text he purports to parody, reached for Lyrical Ballads and indited Wordsworth with dullness for the very reason that all his characters are 'family', to the point where they are interchangeable with themselves and with the poet; they are all idiot boys, and in the poem, with the exception of Peter Bell, they are all dead and buried (the game is one of spot the difference). Reynolds continued this line of criticism when in the same year he produced a sequel to Teter Bell', 'Benjamin the Wag­ goner, A Ryghte merrie and conceited Tale in Verse' (following Wordsworth's publication of The Waggoner in M ay 1819, just one month after Peter Bell). In his Introduction to this poem Reynolds describes a fictitious meeting with Wordsworth who is travelling to London with the manuscript of Benjamin the Waggoner under his arm (though he almost forgets it). On the way, Wordsworth hears that both his and Reynolds's Peter Bell are selling reasonably well, and that the publishers do not require a sequel. Wordsworth throws the package containing The Waggoner on the fire and returns at once to the Lake District to start a new poem. Reynolds rescues and publishes fragments of what turns out to be a continuation of his 'Peter Bell' (Lyrical Ballads) parody. The point, since all are one, is that to write of any single Wordsworth character is to write of them all. The whole exercise has reached such a debilitating degree of predictability that the presence of a text becomes hardly necessary; for the first parody it wasn't there, in the second case it is almost forgotten, then thrown on the fire: And then, methought, twas much the same; The Tale's the thing, whate'er the name, Whether of Bell, or Ben the Waggon— er. (Reynolds, 50) Reynolds extends this grisly family even further by having Wordsworth supply a footnote to his latest poem explaining that: 'If any one reads my 'Ideot Boy', and then the following passage

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from The Antiquary, it will be found that Davie Mailsetter was placed on no other than my Johnny's pony' (Reynolds, 76). Shelley's critique of Wordsworth is in essence the same as Reynolds's: He had a mind which was somehow A t once circumference and centre Of all he might or feel or know; Nothing went ever out, although Something did ever enter. (334 , 11.29 3-7) Jean Hall describes this as a 'vision of autonomy': 'the self cannot leave its own orbit and irresistibly draws the outside world within.... Shelley describes... a tendency to convert anything that is perceived into a vision of oneself' (Jean Hall, 205). Moore's Fudge Family is scarcely less critical of the idea of family. For Moore, 'family' is a metaphor for the Nation at its insular, cynical and corrupt worst, a kind of togetherness that leads far beyond poetic dulness. Phil Fudge enthusiastically describes him­ self and his friend Lord------ , as 'kindred spirits, / Like in our ways to two young ferrets ... / Creatures lengthy, lean and hungering, / Fond of blood and burrow-mongering' (Moore, 472). Moore's attack on the Government's record of repression, bloodshed and political corruption is also an attack on the idea of blood and family as a guardian of social stability. Dealing in Parliamentary seats is also about keeping power either literally within the family, or within a family defined by class and corrupt political relation­ ships. When we recall that Peacock described Wordsworth's po­ litical campaigning of 18 18 to Shelley as the means by which the Lake Poet could secure at least one square meal a day, we can see how Phil Fudge must have borne a strong but unpleasant likeness for Shelley not only to Wordsworth, but to Southey, Coleridge and others of that generation. On more than one occasion Fudge boasts of his 'radical' past: A s to my book in 91, Called 'Down with Kings, or, Who'd have thought it?' Bless you, the Book's long dead and gone,— Not even th'Attorney-General bought it. And, though some few seditious tricks I played in 95 and 6 A s you remind me in your letter, His Lordship likes me all the better: We, proselytes, that come with news full, Are, as he says, so vastly useful! (Moore, 315)

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It was passages like these that drew the swift Tory counterblast of The Fudger Fudged. Within the poem, Moore's own riposte to the corrupt familial voice of the Fudges is supplied by Phelim O'Connor, an outsider embittered by the collapse of all hope for radical reform since Waterloo: Who did not hope in that triumphant time, When monarchs, after years of spoil and crime, Met round the shrine of Peace, and Heaven looked on, Who did not hope the lust for spoil was gone ... Scarce had they met when, to its nature true, The instinct of their race broke out anew; Promises, treaties, all were vain, And 'Rapine!— rapine!' was the cry again. (Moore, 318) Shelley's ambivalent response to the idea of family is signalled in his use of Shakespeare's Hamlet when he comes to choose his own nom de plume of Miching Mallecho for Peter Bell the Third. Hamlet, as David Leverenz has written, is 'unsocialised', an outsider, taunting his bride-to-be Ophelia, and plotting the destruction of both his family and the state (Leverenz, 138). Shelley's voice, the voice of Phelim O'Connor, and of course Wordsworth's voice, all come out of the experience of being 'unsocialised'. Peter Bell the Third is therefore predicated on ambiguous and contradictory relationships. It recognises the need to belong with other texts in order to make sense; the poem is third in line to a specific text. It is related not just to other parodies of Wordsworth, but to other satirical texts. It is, however, a family marked by the elusiveness of its texts: Reynolds's poem is an 'antenatal' parody, Wordsworth's poems are themselves scarcely read, Phil Fudge's book also remains unread. The voice of these texts is that of the one who emphati­ cally does not belong, who cannot conform, and whose vision of relation remains fundamentally at odds with relationship in exist­ ing society. It is a 'double ambiguity' which, even while Shelley is pointing to the distance between himself and Wordsworth, tends to bind them together through shared experiences. By w ay of illustration, there could scarcely be two more different personae than Shelley's Prometheus, and Wordsworth in the guise of narrator in Resolution and Independence. But for all Wordsworth's claim that his loss of verbal contact with the leech-gatherer initi­ ates communion at a more profound level, the consequent threat to the poet's ability to communicate with his reader replicates the anxiety of Prometheus who, having thrown in his lot with the oppressed, discovers that he remains unrecognised and unheard:

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Know ye not me, The Titan, he who made his agony The barrier to your else all-conquering foe? .... W hy scorns the spirit which informs ye, now To commune with me? ... W hy answer ye not, still? brethren! (139 , 11.1 1 7 -2 9 ) This complex situation is arguably the result of what Brian Nellist describes as Shelley's 'intellectual pluralism', and he explores this in part by reference to the poet's use of genealogy. In The Witch of Atlas 'our rational expectations are systematically assaulted ... the witch is granted a genealogy', but her ancestry becomes 'progres­ sively more elusive' (Nellist, 18 1-2). We have here a recurring dilemma for Romantic poets in search of relationship, one which both links them, and isolates them. A s most commentators have pointed out, the ambivalence of Shelley's sense of relationship towards Wordsworth stated in his letter to Peacock of 25 July 1818, is amply reflected in the text of Peter Bell the Third. With the election news in mind, he wrote, 'What a beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth! That such a man should be such a poet! I can compare him with none but Simonides, that flatterer of Sicilian tyrants, and at the same time the most natural and tender of lyric poets' (Letters 11, 26). In Peter Bell the Third we find Wordsworth both admired and condemned: He had as much imagination A s a pint-pot: he never could Fancy another situation From which to dart his contemplation, Than that wherein he stood. Yet his was individual mind, And new created all he saw In a new manner, and refined Those new creations, and combined Them, by a master-spirit's law, Thus— though unimaginative, A n apprehension clear, intense, Of his mind's work, had made alive The things it wrought on; I believe Wakening a sort of thought in sense. (334 -5 /2 9 8 -3 12 ) The history of Shelley's unhappy relationship with satire is an important aspect of the ambivalence reflected here.

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In 'The Devil's Walk' of 1 8 1 1, Shelley employed a traditional satirical format incorporating hell and damnation to attack op­ pression in Ireland (Moore's abiding concern), the Peninsular War, the King, the Regent and religion. It was based on 'The Devil's Thoughts' of 1799 by Southey and Coleridge, and Shelley subse­ quently used Coleridge's image of 'an Apothecary on a white horse' like 'Death in the Revelations' in The Mask of Anarchy, where Anarchy rides 'On a white horse ... / Like Death in the Apoca­ lypse'. The place of T h e Devil's Thoughts' in the satirical canon of the day is further indicated by Byron's use of the same model for his satire of 18 13, The Devil's Drive' (Holmes, Coleridge, 241). Around 1820, however, Shelley was analysing his misgivings with the genre in the fragmentary 'Satire upon Satire'. According to Shelley here, satire is simply a replication in literary terms of the worst excesses of injustice in society. Stephen E. Jones argues that for Shelley the 'cursing invective' of satire 'becomes the psychologi­ cal and moral equivalent of judgemental damnation. The satirist stands accused of cursing his enemies rather than reforming them': Suffering makes suffering— ill must follow ill Harsh words beget hard thoughts, & beside Men take a stupid & a sullen pride In being all they [ ] shame ... (Stephen Jones, 1 5 2 ,15 9 ,1 4 3 ) Shelley's atheism (whatever that actually was) makes the almost obligatory satirical trope of the devil and hell a major stumbling block. In The Devil's Walk', 'Beelzebub' dons a disguise to become 'as natty a Beau / A s Bond Street ever saw', his satanic persona is then effectively registered as the creation of others (Shelley ed. Matthews and Everest, 231,233). Jean Hall goes so far as to argue that in Peter Bell the Third the devil is unaware that he is the devil, a significant point of departure from the religious ortho­ doxy underpinning Augustan satire, and in keeping with Andrew J. Welburne's view that for Shelley, 'the orthodox scheme of God and the Devil proved too simple to describe the workings of psychic energies which sometimes threaten the inherent balance of mind' (Jean Hall, 206; Welbume, 100). Augustan satire is designed to preserve sanity; Johnson's account of the solitary 'unsocialised' astronomer in Rasselas is a case in point. The astro­ nomer's isolation gives rise to eccentric delusions of grandeur, accompanied by a crippling sense of guilt. He assumes respon­ sibility for the natural phenomena he observes. Only in a healthy state of community with others will he regain a balanced view of

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himself in relation to society and to God, whose motives must be assumed to be wise even if they remain unclear to us. By w ay of contrast, Shelley's exploration of psychic imbalance assaults, as Nellist suggests, our 'rational expectations'. The Literary Gazette of 1820 announced that 'were we not assured to the contrary, we should take it for granted that the author [of Prometheus Unbound] was a lunatic' (Rossington, 112). Augustan satire was grounded in the concept of a literary community or establishment founded on good sense, taste and a common acceptance of Christian virtues; the rules governing it were 'of old discover'd, not devis'd' (Pope, 1 4 6 1.88). Pope's dictum in his Essay on Criticism insisted on general principles about crea­ tivity, originality and the function of art with which Shelley pro­ foundly disagreed. The prevailing Augustan position has been summed up by Jean Hall: [T]here was a widespread assumption in the eighteenth century that corporal punishment was the appropriate deterrant to anti-social behaviour, and that satires could and should act as verbal substitutions for physical punishment. (Jean Hall, 2 13-4 ) Shelley's instinct was to abandon the judgemental position that Pope and Johnson assumed, and with that went the concept of a varied but fundamentally homogeneous cultural establishment sanctioned by the God of Christianity, which in consequence was out of bounds to 'infidels'. Wordsworth himself was attacked by Augustan reviewers working from the premise that a bad Christian will produce bad poetry. Jeffrey's famous broadside at The Excursion in the Edinburgh Review (November 1814) takes exception— among other things— to the fact that Wordsworth, a poet of unquestioned gifts, had chosen to live outside the community of the literati of his day. His 'habits of seclusion' had turned him into a bad, even a mad, poet. Jeffrey complained about 'the devotion with which he has sacrificed so many precious gifts at the shrine of those paltry idols which he has set up for himself among his lakes and his mountains' (Hayden, 41). This, in other words, is pagan poetry from a poet whose political affiliations are known to be questionable. The author of The Fudger Fudged criticised Moore from the same basic premise. The Fudge Family was the product of a Satanic pen, and Moore's career is offered as a paradigm for a diabolic geneal­ ogy relating Godless, lascivious art to immorality and subversive political beliefs:

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A Ballad Singer, who had long Strumm'd many a vile lascivious song, Such as unwary youth entice, To follow in the paths of vice, Worn out and impotent become, Beats, as he can, sedition's drum; To feed his appetite for evil, And gratify his patron Devil. Moore had got there first, however, caricaturing his own critics, Jeffrey most specifically, through the sycophantic politician Fadladeen in Lalla Rookh (1817) who says of the young poet Feramorz, Moore's alter ego: 'he chose his subjects badly, and was always most inspired by the worst parts of them. The charms of paganism, the merits of rebellion ...' (Moore, 301). Shelley, casting doubt on the belief system that posited a battle between good and evil in these terms, relates to both Wordsworth and Moore, but is at the same time distinct. In the Letter to Maria Gisborne he describes himself as 'like some weird Archimage', though he then shrugs off this suggestion of a diabolic persona, scornfully relegating the clash between protagonists like Moore and his opponents to 'the war / Of Worms' ( 3 16 , 11.10 6 ,12 9 -30 ). The role he claims for himself is the one of autonomous, inspired irresponsibility enjoyed by his Witch of Atlas, and explored in A Defence of Poetry. Where Shelley shared a common cause with Moore was in his determination to speak out against a corrupt political system; but this did not entail a concept of belonging or relation­ ship which presupposed exclusion; it was a creed, as Peacock explains in Nightmare Abbey, committed to a belief in the process of reform. Annoying as Wordsworth's part in the Westmoreland election was, it was the political system beyond that specific case which inspired Shelley's anger. In this respect Michael O'Neill is right to stress the links that Peter Bell the Third has to what he calls the 'broadside and apocalyptic narrative' content of The Mask of Anarchy, and also of Prometheus Unbound. Shelley 'breaks down generic confines' (O'Neill, Shelley, 107) in search of an essentially anti-Augustan form of expression for which Wordsworth is (or was before his loss of true poetic identity) an ambassador: But Peter's verse was clear, and came Announcing from the frozen hearth Of a cold age, that none might tame The soul of that diviner flame It augured to the Earth ... (338 , 11.4 3 3 - 7 )

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Hall's article takes this point further by stressing the w ay in which Peter Bell the Third and The Witch of Atlas enjoy a relation­ ship which is reciprocal, not exclusive. Shelley's political motivation establishes Moore's text, not Reynolds's, as the problematic role model for Peter Bell the Third. Failure to understand this has helped to confuse the debate about how the text should be read. The Norton Edition of Shelley's selected poetry and prose, for example, footnotes the following passage from the Dedication on the assumption that Reynolds's parody is uppermost in Shelley's mind; it very plainly is not: Dear Tom - Allow me to request you to introduce Mr. Peter Bell to the respectable family of the Fudges; although he may fall short of those very considerable personages in the more active properties which characterize the Rat and the Apos­ tate, I suspect that even you their historian will be forced to confess that he surpasses them in the more peculiarly legiti­ mate qualification of intolerable dulness. (323) The note is understandably tentative: Tresumably the "Rat" is Reynolds' "antenatal Peter'" and the "Apostate" is Wordsworth's legitimate one'. The editors' wish to align the poem with a 'literary' debate has elbowed out the central political context. Shelley is in fact drawing directly here on the text of The Fudge Family, where an apostate is termed 'the useful peaching Rat': Rat after rat, they graduate Through job, red ribbon, and silk gown, To Chancellorship and Marquisate. This serves to nurse the ratting spirit; The less the bribe, the more the merit. (Moore, 316) Fudge proudly describes himself as one of the rats in his 'new costume adorned'; they wear their 'buff-and-blue coats turned': We have the honour to give dinners To the chief rats in upper stations. (Moore 316) Moore here reminds us of William Hone's use of the word 'ver­ min' to describe the same political animal. In The Political House that Jack Built (1819) Hone describes the printing press as the thing that will 'poison the Vermin / That plunder the Wealth, / That lay in the House / That Jack built'. Cruikshank's illustration shows the 'vermin' to include soldiers, priests, lawyers and also liveried footmen and flunkies of the kind Wordsworth becomes in Peter

............. w A race obscene, Spawn'd in the muddy beds of Nile, came forth, Polluting Egypt: gardens, fields, and plains, Were cover'd with the pest j The croaking nuisance lurk'd in every nook; Nor palaces* nor even chambers, ’scap’d ; And the land stank— sm numerous was the fry. TSS& E ARE

THE VERMIN That Plunder the Wealth, That lay in the House,

That Jack huilv. from The Political House that Jack Built, London, printed for William Hone, 1819.

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Bell the Third (Rickword, 40). Shelley's description of the inhabit­ ants of 'Hell' corresponds very closely: Lawyers— judges— old hobnobbers Are there— Bailiffs— Chancellors— Bishops— great and little robbers— Rhymsters— pamphleteers— stock-jobbers Men of glory in the wars,— (3 3 2 , 11.18 7 -9 1) Hone and Moore provide us with ample precedent for Words­ worth's change of livery in Peter Bell III once he has 'died' to poetry and forgets who he is, even as the devil loses self-con­ sciousness: 'Peter bowed, quite pleased and proud, / And after waiting some few days / For a new livery— dirty yellow / Turned up with black— the wretched fellow / Was bowled to Hell in the Devil's chaise' (330 , 11.141-6 ). Shelley is here disconnecting Wordsworth from the figure he criticises, Teter knew not that he was Bell' (329, 1.107). Wordsworth, as Wordsworth, scarcely matters any more; Peterloo does, and so also does the satirical rhetoric used by Moore and Hone on the subject of spies and turncoats. What remains is to emphasise Shelley's persistent and characteris­ tic refusal to be pinned down and defined by any of these points of reference. Indicative of this is the fact that 'Miching MaUecho' is not even a genuine nom de plume; it describes what Hamlet is doing, and Shelley's own inconclusive state is very much akin to Leverenz's assessment of the 'unsocialised', hesitant Hamlet: Unfortunately he is more socialised than he can perceive. He still takes refuge in the shared assumptions of those around him, who locate the self in the mind's obedience to patriarchal order, the body's obedience to abstractions. (Leverenz, 138) If it is Leverenz's Hamlet with whom Shelley is identifying, then the complexity and richness of Peter Bell the Third is rooted in something more than the intensity with which the poem expresses Shelley's determination to destroy a corrupt patriarchal order, sustained by blind obedience to 'abstractions'. Ferguson, as we have seen, argued that Shelley could not conceive of his mind 'as a genuinely independent, isolated existence'; given Shelley's need for relationship, for a canon— no matter how subversive the read­ ing of it might be— his experience may well have been that, like Hamlet, he was discovering the extent to which he had failed to establish his independence from the old order. What he loathed

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most may also have been a part of what he most needed. In an attempt to make his break with the past, Shelley's satire was driven beyond the traditional Augustan mode of discrimination towards an apocalyptic vision. The familiar rhetoric of political invective occurs in Peter Bell the Third only ever as a first step towards the attempt to establish a more profoundly radical position: There is a Chancery Court, a King, A manufacturing mob; a set Of thieves who by themselves are sent Similar thieves to represent; A n Arm y;— and a public debt. Which last is a scheme of paper money, And means— being interpreted— 'Bees, keep your wax— give us the honey And we will plant while skies are sunny Flowers, which in winter serve instead.' (3 31,11.16 2 -7 1) Here we have a satirical sketch of a society based on a set of shared assumptions which perpetuate a patriarchal order and a homogeneous establishment by the process of exclusion. Having stated the case in orthodox satirical terms, however, Shelley char­ acteristically proceeds to restate it in the light of his own quite distinct, apocalyptic vision. The outer darkness of 'Hell' is not confined to 'a city much like London'; London represents 'the frozen hearth / Of a cold age', it is thus universally unavoidable (330 , 1.14 7 ; 3 3 8 , 1. 434-5). There are no sheep and goats, no exclu­ sion other than a universal exclusion. Try as he might, therefore, Shelley cannot avoid identifying with Wordsworth: ... thus His virtue, like our own, was built Too much on that indignant fuss Hypocrite Pride stirs up in us To bully one another's guilt. (3 34 , 11.288-92) 'A ll are damned' means just that: 'good and bad, sane and mad, / The oppressor and the oppressed' (333, 1.2 5 2 -3 ) . Any notion that an uncorrupted society of poets might exist free from this Thick, infected, joy-dispelling' atmosphere is dismissed (3 33, 1. 258). The despair which threatens here is much more than the disappoint­ ment attendant on Wordsworth's disaffection (or 'death'); it re­ lates, as Greg Kucich has written, to 'the dashing of millennial

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hopes by the abortive apocalypse of the French Revolution'. It was this that 'drove many of the period's writers and painters towards a habitual mode of trenchant irony in their thought and creative productions' (Kucich, 67). Wordsworth's disappearance from Shelley's poem is a meta­ phor for universal annihilation, the prospect of which is only rendered palatable through its realisation in terms of comic satire: The gaping neighbours came next day— They found all vanished from the shore: The Bible, whence he used to pray, Half scorched under a hen-coop lay; Smashed glass— and nothing more! (328 , 11.7 1 - 5 ) Shelley's experiment in satire forces him to confront the bleakest of prospects. Elsewhere in his work such despair is countered by his determination to sustain the belief that the mind is capable of reconciling contending forces that would otherwise be irrevoca­ bly destructive. Terence Hoagwood has described this as Shelley's belief in 'inexorable reciprocity', where all art and philosophy, along with 'society and the conditions of history are products of the prolific human mind', and therefore subject to the mind. In this view there can be no final annihilation because 'all "topics" represented submit to the same dialectical methods of analysis' (Hoagwood, 79-80). Hall's pairing of The Witch of Atlas and Peter Bell the Third may be conceived of as a dialectical exercise under­ taken in the same spirit, the Witch existing as the embodiment of unencumbered creativity while Shelley himself experiences what Ross Woodman describes as 'the plight of the visionary in a society controlled by tyrannical forces' (Woodman, 660). This is to suggest that The Witch of Atlas ought not to be read without equally serious attention being given at some point to Peter Bell the Third. Once we begin to think in this way, and to see in Peter Bell the Third Shelley addressing themes which are central to his 'major7 works, the poem vigorously challenges the Shelley canon. It also contains the seeds of a challenge thrown down in the face of Shelley's own Great Tradition. Peter Bell the Third is a particularly appropriate text to turn to with this in mind, if only because in his 'Dedication' Shelley might be seen to have proph­ esied the critical revolution which has given the issue of the canon its new urgency for us; we are now living in that era when 'some new ... system of criticism' is weighing up 'the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and of their historians' (325).

Keeping Faith with Desire: A Reading of Epipsychidion BARBARA CH A RLESW ORTH G ELPI

In The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, with the ethics of psy­ choanalysis as his chosen topic and an ongoing battle against 'ego psychology' as a significant part of his agenda, Lacan sets up three ethical ideals of contemporary psychoanalytic practice: first, the ideal of human love, 'doctor-love, I would say if I wanted to emphasise in a comical w ay the tone of this ideology (love as hygiene); second, the ideal of authenticity, undercut by the fact that 'one cannot say that w e ever intervene in the field of any virtue'; and third, the ideal of non-dependence, although here too there is 'a fine boundary, which separates what we indicate to an adult subject as desirable in this register and the means w e accord ourselves in our interventions so that he achieves it' (8-10). Through circlings, digressions, repetitions, one moves toward the understanding that the third is a false ideal, the second an impos­ sible one, and the first much too complex to permit definition, much less the analyst's manipulative implementation. This peda­ gogical method, as Julia SavUle has pointed out, enacts precisely the deferral that characterises the nature of language that is at the heart of Lacan's theme, 'the paradoxical power to promise revela­ tion while remaining always bound to a threshold state of endless becoming. He draws attention to that power.... by the perform­ ance of a return, in each session of his seminar, to an earlier problem, promising to reveal 'the truth' at any moment, but con­ stantly deferring revelation to a prospective "next time'" (65).1 In the closing session of the seminar, nonetheless, after com­ menting w ryly that 'Part of the world has resolutely turned in the direction of the service of goods, thereby rejecting everything that has to do with the relationship of man to desire' (318), Lacan makes a straightforwardly gnomic summary: 'I think I have now sufficiently outlined the opposition between the desiring center [of the human subject] and the service of goods'— including, pre­ sumably, the goods outlined in the first session. He continues, 'We can now come to the heart of the matter.... I propose then that,

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from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire' (319). T o give ground relative to' translates the French ceder sun 'to give up on', and so carries a double, diametrically opposed meaning: one can be guilty only through renouncing desire, and one can be guilty only by giving in to desire. Freedom from guilt, then, can only be achieved (for brief and privileged moments) when desire, through the agency of language, balances, hovers, criss-crosses between the two. M y purpose in this paper is to read Shelley's Epipsychidion with Lacan's Seminar VII as m y scholarly gloss, for I believe that certain topics addressed by Lacan— particularly the discussions circling around desire, the Thing [das Ding, la Chose], and the linguistic conventions of courtly love poetry— make the poem more intelli­ gible, while Epipsychidion offers itself in turn as a textual metaphor for Lacan's ethical theory. I am, then, parallelling Lacan's strategy when he gives over four sessions of the seminar to a close textual reading o f Antigone. Because this literary analysis brings us closer than we are anywhere else in the text to definition, through exam­ ple, of 'goods' and 'desire' and the difference between them, I shall briefly summarise his thesis. Lacan turns with supreme uninterest from what he sees as the usual ethical debates over the significance of Antigone: 'Is there anyone who doesn't evoke Antigone whenever there is a question of a law that causes conflict in us even though it is acknowledged by the community to be a just law?' (243). Instead he makes the play a site for enactment of the conflict between the ethical, if also utilitarian, ideals of psychoanalysis and the unknowable gap or node that produces human desire. In this version of the stand-off, 'Creon exists to illustrate a function that we have shown is inher­ ent in the structure of the ethic of tragedy, which is also that of psychoanalysis; he seeks the good. Something that after all is his role. The leader is he who leads the community. He exists to promote the good of all' (258)— as, again, does any responsible psychoanalyst or, for that matter, any conscientious literary ana­ lyst. Creon's error, his fatal hamartia, in Lacan's reading, is to insist on promoting 'the good of all as the law without limits, the sovereign law, the law that goes beyond or crosses the limit'. Lacan notes specifically that he has no intention of signifying any idea of 'the Supreme Good' through the phrase 'the good of all', thereby making the point that the 'all' signifies the whole of each human subject as well as all of Creon's political subjects. By attempting to reign over this 'all' Creon sets himself to colonise

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that place 'where the unwritten laws, the will or, better yet, the

A lxtj of the gods rules' (259), the place where Antigone takes her stand. Repeatedly Lacan describes Antigone as placed along the bor­ der of a line or limit, identifying that barrier at last as 'nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugu­ rates in the life of man' (279). His justification for this interpretive move, which would seem to shift the ground of the action from a Sophoclean to a distinctly Lacanian area, lies in Antigone's curi­ ous avowal that she would not have risked the punishment of death had the body forbidden burial been that of a husband or a child, for those relationships are replaceable. 'But this brother who is adoutrog, who has in common with me the fact of having been bom in the same wom b... and having been related to the same father... this brother is something unique' (279). So Anti­ gone's stand bears witness to 'the desire of the mother [which] is the origin of everything' (283)— of subjectivity— but it 'is also a criminal desire'. Specifically, as the desire for such a return it is a death wish: 'She pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire' (282). And so, at crucial points in the poem, does the language of Epipsychidion. This is not the same as saying that the person addressed and described by that language, the figure of 'Emilia V — ' incarnates that desire; rather 'she' func­ tions as a veil before the poem's ultimate revelation: poetic lan­ guage, the speaker's language, in its materiality is the nexus— or, in Mieke Bal's perceptive metaphor, the navel— where urge for life intertwines with desire for death.2 That linguistic braid creates beauty. In Lacan's analysis, when Antigone laments her fate, the punishment which will shut her up alive in a tomb, 'in the zone between life and death' (280), she becomes transformed into an image of such beauty that her pres­ ence 'causes the Chorus to lose its head, as it tells us itself.... Nothing is more moving than that Xfiegog evagyr/g, than the desire that visibly emanates from the eyelids of this admirable girl' (281). The language of Epipsychidion creates at certain instances a similar representation of desire, its processes made at least imaginatively accessible, if not visible. Before turning to those fully realised poetic passages, we must return to their point of origin: 29 November 1820 in the Pisan Convent of Santa Anna. Mary Shelley's acerbic description of it in her 1824 story 'The Bride of Modem Italy' makes the convent something of a Yeatsian 'rag and bone shop', but it was nonetheless

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the heart's place where this Shelleyan dream started.3Through Claire Clairmont's journal as well as M ary Shelley's and from Mary Shelley's letters we can follow day by day the rapid progress of the trio's friendship with nineteen-year-old Teresa Viviani, who had already been lodged there for over two years while marital arrangements were made for her. The introduction to this beautiful young girl in her interest­ ingly 'Gothic' situation came through a Professor Pacchiani, who actually seems to have been an insinuating, raffish and rather unsavoury character, during the short period when he was enthu­ siastically taken up by the Shelleys as a man of 'the highest mind, a profound genius, and an eloquence that transports' (Mary Shelley, Letters 1, 165). In their commentary on M ary Shelley's Journals Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert mention that he introduced the Shelleys to Teresa Viviani 'in November 1820', and add, 'Pacchiani no doubt realized that to confront Shelley with a beautiful and intelligent girl, compelled by her family to remain immured in a convent, could not fail to produce an interesting situation' (n, 595). Very likely so, but if that was Pacchiani's ulti­ mate plan, he could not have carried it through without the active co-operation of Claire Clairmont and, even more importantly, of M ary Shelley, for— as was only appropriate— the ladies were first brought on their own to make the acquaintance of Teresa. They went on 29 November and again, still without Shelley, on 30 November and 1 December. Already, when recording the 30 N ov­ ember visit, Claire refers to the young woman as Teresa Emilia Viviani. Thus the re-christening of Teresa as Emilia may have been the concerned women's idea rather than Shelley's. All the same, as one can tell from M ary Shelley's 3 December letter to Leigh Hunt, 'Emilia' and her fate would certainly have been matter for excited commentary among all three in the Shelley menage. Shelley's participation seems particularly likely, since the name 'Emilia', according to Teresa Viviani's biographer, drew a parallel between Teresa's situation with two rival suitors and that of Emilia in Boccaccio's Teseide, a story of anguished courtly love that is the source of Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale', where she is named Emelye ( s p p , 3 7 1 ) . Shelley, who in October had received a copy of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems and had since had Keats much in mind (Letters n, 239-40, 244, 251-2), was at work on a romance poem in the Keatsian style, 'Fiordispina' (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts vi, 1 1-14 ) , written in the Chaucerian couplets that Keats had used for Lamia and earlier for Endymion. He would have reason to recall Emelye as he heard the

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women's descriptions of their new acquaintance, and so he rather than Claire or Mary may have re-named her before even meeting her. I harp on the matter of M ary Shelley's prior acquaintance with Teresa Viviani because I think the convergence of all three, when it came on 3 December, shows both Shelleys as compelled to repeat heartbreaking early scenarios in antithetical ways that could only produce yet more heartbreak. In a letter from Mary Shelley to Leigh Hunt, written, her journal says, on 2 December (Journal 1, 341), and thus while Teresa was still her own special friend and new discovery, there are signs that M ary's strong emotions have their source in her identification as an aggrieved daughter with the younger woman. In the sentence, 'Her mother is a terrible woman: and being jealous of the talents and the beauty of her daughter, she keeps her locked in a convent where she sees no one but maids and idiots' (Mary Shelley, Letters 1, 165) one hears all the old bitterness at her father's emotional abandonment of her by marrying the 'terrible' Mrs Clairmont (Mellor 6). A t the same time Mary Shelley's motherly concern for Teresa calls up the link to M ary Wollstonecraft she found at times a source of empowerment. This positive effect of her mother's influence from beyond the grave glows through the phrasing of M ary Shelley's letter to Hunt, as with Wollstonecraftian elan she copies out the whole of a Pisan marriage proposal contracted between two sets of parents for young people who have never seen each other. Emily Sunstein, however, takes note of depressed feelings of inadequacy that more often attacked Mary Shelley through her relationship to her revered and famous mother (34). This insecure and fearful side of Mary Shelley tended to cover her virtually endemic depression with a coldness that pushed aw ay the emo­ tional care she desperately needed. Thus I take it that when she brought Shelley to the convent of Santa Anna she was risking Shelley's abandonment of her in the w ay that one probes and exacerbates the throbbing of a sore tooth. The situation of the beautiful young woman triggered the repetitive scenario central to his life that I have analysed at length in Shelley's Goddess (90--101). Shelley's own ambivalence toward the maternal, with an attendant fear of abandonment, arising first per­ haps through the birth of his sister Elizabeth when he was twenty months old, gave him an insatiable need of mothering coupled with a strong, repeated impulse to take over the maternal position through 'adopting' a young girl. Mary, given a positive role in this recurrent scenario the first time she saw it in action— that is, when he fell instantly and desperately in love with her— had since

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had to bear the shifting displacement of Shelley's erotically charged urge toward 'adoption' any number of times, but this was perhaps the most frighteningly passionate re-enactment of all. The hold which Teresa Viviani took on Shelley's imagination had its roots in part in aspects of his personal psychological his­ tory, but as the language both of her letters to him and of Epipsychidion shows, the relationship between Shelley and Viviani is constructed by and through the discourse of sentimentalism. And this discourse, however mawkish it may now seem with the constant references to 'heart', 'soul', or 'brother' or 'sister' of the soul, and so on, maps a psychic landscape or (to change the metaphor) participates in an exploratory psychic narrative just as do the post-Freudian signifiers— 'ambivalence', 'repetition', depression'— that I have just been using. In other words, those involved in the intense expression of sentimental feelings— like Creon and like psychoanalysts in Lacan's characterisation of them — wish 'to promote the good of all' (Seminar V II258). The parallels between the three psychoanalytic 'goods' of human love, authen­ ticity, and non-dependence coupled with intense relatedness surface in Jerome McGann's succinct description of the sentimen­ tal ideal, which opens, significantly, with a quotation from Shelley's Defence of Poetry. With Charlotte Dacre's T h e Kiss' as his example, McGann writes, Sentimental poetry strives to be both emotionally intense and completely candid. Its purpose is to 'bring the whole soul of man [and woman] into activity,' an event which, in the context of such writing, means that it is to bring the whole person— mind and body as well. So the paradoxes in the poem swirl about the demand for an experience that is at once completely impassioned ('without control'), completely physical, and yet perfectly 'refin'd' as well. (McGann, 'M y Brain is Feminine', 31) How quickly these unacknowledged paradoxes turn perfect candor into what Lacan calls 'empty speech' becomes obvious in Viviani's letters to Shelley, and though his letters to her have not survived, her letters indicate that they are both using the same sentimental language. (For the sort of thing we can be quite sure Shelley was writing on his side we need only look at the letters written eight years before to a 'sister of the soul' long cast off, Elizabeth Hitchener.) Consider, for instance the arousal permitted through denial in the following passage, written by Viviani on 12 December:

i86

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi You say that m y liberation will perhaps divide us. O my friend! M y soul, m y heart, can never be parted from my brother and from my dear sisters. M y person, once delivered from this prison, will attempt all things in order to follow my heart, and Emilia will seek you everywhere, even were you at the utmost boundaries of the world. I do not love, nor shall I ever be able to love anything or person so much as your family... since in it are included all that can exist of beautiful, virtuous, amiable, sensible, and learned in the world. What will be my lot? I pray always to God to grant that I may live with you always. (White n, 473)

After paragraphs in which Viviani acknowledges what seem to have been Shelley's paeans to her exquisite truthfulness— 'Yes, m y soul is simple and sincere like the blue of the sky on a fine day of spring. I am happy that you know it, and I know that since you do, you will do me justice'— she then goes on to reply in appropri­ ate language to Shelley's encomium to friendship as that which promotes the good of all: 'Y o u say well; in friendship everything must be in common; few, indeed, very few, are the persons who know this sublime and sweet divinity; but we know it, and that is enough'. The end of the letter, however, implicitly excludes Mary from the 'w e' who understand sentimental friendship in its rela­ tion to the common good: TVlary does not write to me. It is possible that she loves me less than the others do? I should be very much pained by that. I wish to flatter myself that it is only her son and her occupations that cause this. Is not this the case?' (White n, 473-4). In a letter of 24 December to Mary herself, Viviani makes a similar comment on M ary's feelings toward her, twisting the knife by making it obvious that she and Shelley engage in outwardly charitable, actually condescending, and implicitly nasty conversa­ tion about her: 'You seem to me a little cold sometimes, and that causes me an uncomfortable feeling; but I know that your hus­ band said well when he said that your apparent coldness is only the ash which covers an affectionate heart' (White 11, 476; Viviani's emphasis). The meeting with Teresa Viviani led Shelley to abandon the romantic tale, 'Fiordispina', while keeping its verse form, and to write instead a Dantescan poem of courtly love, Epipsychidion (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts vi, 13). But Shelley adds a factitious contemporary and sentimental overlay to the courtly tradition; the fantasised sentimental relationships just described and even some echoes of this specifically sentimental language appear in poeticised form in the second of Epipsychidion's three sections. The

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first 189 lines, to which we shall return, are a lyric outpouring to 'Emilia V — ' in language whose exuberant jouissance borders at times on Crashaw's. The second, beginning with line 190, is an allegorised autobiography (thus roughly modelled in verse form on Dante's narrative of his relation to Beatrice in the Vita Nuova, a work specifically mentioned in the preliminary 'Advertisement'). The narrator describes first a 'Being' met in his 'youth's dawn' and experienced as feminine. That is, references engender this Being as 'She', while at the same time admitting her sun-dazzling invis­ ibility: 'She met me, robed in such exceeding glory, / That I beheld her not' (11.199-200). But then the sense of her interfusing pres­ ence fades, and an allusion to 'her' as 'this soul out of m y soul' shows the importance of this passage to a poem entitled Epipsychidion. A s Jerrold Hogle has noted, Shelley's coinage should be translated 'About' or Tow ard ' the 'Little Soul' and thereby 'refers, as "On Love" does, to the lover's miniatured creation of his own more perfect form' (280). That is to say, 'She' is a mirror of the 'whole soul' in the sentimental ideal as described by McGann, and her absence signifies a state of essential loss: I questioned every tongueless wind that flew Over my tower of mourning, if it knew Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul; And murmured names and spells which could have controul Over the sightless tyrants of our fate; But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate The night which closed on her; nor uncreate That world within this Chaos, mine and me, Of which she was the veiled Divinity, The world I say of thoughts that worshipped her. (11.236-45) I I pause on these lines not only because they state the central theme of the poem but because of the centrality also of the meta­ phors used. The poet uses the term 'world' to signify 'mine and me' in just the w ay that Shelley does in the opening sentence of 'On Life': 'Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel' ( s p p , 474). Reactivating the metaphor in 'world', however, he makes 'mine and me'— Lacan's moi— into the planet Earth; the sun-like Presence has become an Absence, associated with the night. Further, through ambiguity of reference— does 'of which' refer back to 'world' or to 'Chaos' or to both?— she becomes the 'veiled D ivinit/ of both 'world' and 'Chaos'. In the opening lines of the verse paragraph that follows, the character of the 'veiled Divinity' shifts yet again to become more

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dearly a lost, but presumably retrievable, part of a self delusively conceptualised as whole. The experience of 'absence' or 'gap' calls out for Hogle's 'miniaturized creation of his own more perfect form', or, in Lacan's terms, for an 'ideal ego' by which the subject can 'constitute himself in his imaginary reality' (Four Fundamental Concepts, 144): 'In many mortal forms I rashly sought / The shadow of the idol of my thought' (11. 267-8L4 The 'veiled Divinity' has become the 'idol' of an idealised self-image for which, in the essay 'On Love'— an obvious and oft-used gloss for Epipsychidion and particularly for this section of it—Shelley even uses the mirror metaphor: We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man [i.e. to mot]. Not only the portrait of our external being, but the assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed: a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness: a soul within our soul that describes a circle beyond its proper Paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap. (473-4) The language that introduces Mary Shelley, allegorised as the Moon, into this tale suggests that the narrator, wearied by the sufferings of his fruitless quest— the sufferings on the part of the discarded 'mortal forms' do not figure in this narrative— accepts her ministrations while realising that she is 'A s like the glorious shape which I had dreamed/ A s is the Moon, whose changes ever run/ Into themselves, to the eternal Sun' (11.27-80). The situation, then, somewhat resembles that moment in the plot of Endymion when Endymion, giving up the quest for his Goddess, resigns himself to union with the Indian maid (iv, 11.647-55). The denoue­ ment of the Shelley plot is different from that of Keats, however. In Endymion, the substituted ideal is revealed as the true ideal, the Goddess herself (iv, 11. 980-6). In Epipsychidion, the Moon substi­ tute, associated from the beginning with coldness and chastity (1. 281), while a beneficent presence at first, smiles cruelly in time over the poet's shattered world (11.314-20 ). Then, with an allusion to Dante's selva oscura (Inferno 1,2) that conflates a sentimentalised Dantescan Beatrice with the Sun of the present allegory and over­ lays both with linguistic traces of the Lucretian Venus, the narra­ tion describes the advent of Emilia, the true manifestation of 'the idol of m y thought':

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A t length, into the obscure Forest came The Vision I had sought through grief and shame. Athwart that wintry wilderness of thorns Flashed from her motion splendour like the Mom 's, And from her presence life was radiated Through the grey earth and branches bare and dead; So that her w ay was paved and roofed above With flowers as soft as thoughts of budding love, And music from her respiration spread Like light. (11.3 2 1-3 0 ) The synesthesia of the last lines alerts us, as I have discussed in Shelley's Goddess (255) to the fact that w e are in the presence of the Mother Goddess of Love, the agent of that constant 'transference', in Hogle's use of the term (23), that poetic language mirrors. I will not, then, discuss it here except to note that in this instance 'the glorious One' that breaks in upon a grieving world creates a stasis very different from the '"O ne" of never-ending change' that Hogle makes central to Shelley's thought (26). The verse para­ graph ends with one of more than sixty instances in this 604-line poem of rhymes with the name 'Emily7: T knew it was the Vision veiled from m e/ So many years— that it was Emily' (11. 3443-4). The chime between 'me' and 'E m il/ closes the circle around 'proper Paradise' ('On Love', 474)' the propre or property of a fulfilled 'mine and me'. Then, with a further opening of the fantasy that reflects a Creon-like desire to 'promote the good of all', the poet encircles this world with two further heavenly bodies. The rejected Moon is invited to return and share in the tasks of providing food, warmth, health and enlivenment to the recumbent world; Mary-Moon with Emilia-Sun become T w in Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth/ This world of love, this me; and into birth/ Awaken all its fruits and flowers' (11.346-7), and out of the blue, as it were, Claire Clairmont as a 'Comet beautiful and fierce', changed in rapid transference to the planet Venus, 'love's folding star7 (11. 368,374) joins as a third attendant.5 Had the poem ended at this point, and lines 383 to 387, with their distinct character and phrasing of an 'envoi'— that is, 'Lady mine, / Scorn not these flowers of thought'— suggest that such may indeed have been Shelley's original intention, the sentimen­ tality of the supposedly Dantescan allegory would have made it virtually an embarrassment. This fantasy of fulfilment posits desire as fulfillable and is thereby, in Lacanian terms, a justifiable source of guilt: it gives ground relative to the poet's desire. In

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addition, the actual demeaning in that fulfilment of the feminine presences purportedly worshipped betrays those misogynist as­ pects of courtly love that have made it deservedly suspect— sinful— to feminist consciousness.6 But the poem takes up again with a very different fantasy; the fact that rough drafts of this section, along with drafts of the 'Advertisement' appear in a different notebook, Bodleian m s d .i, has even led editors, beginning with Locock, to suggest that the last section was the first written and the rest tacked on later. However, through careful editorial sleuthing, Carlene Adamson has concluded that this was not the case (Bodleian Shelley M anu­ scripts vi, 16). The poem therefore records a process whereby Shelley created one fantasy about his 'world', himself found it wanting, and changed it for another. It serves, then, as an instance of that 'exemplary awareness' in Shelley described by the editors of this volume in a message to me that 'his own w ork... may fail to transcend its circumstances and may be itself contaminated by values he would not knowingly endorse'. Involved is a shift from use of the courtly love tradition for sentimental fantasy to partici­ pation in that tradition's central, potentially excoriating and certainly unsentimental mystery. The nature of the new fantasy, the dream of an erotic getaway with a beautiful young woman to a remote Greek island, where nonetheless tout confort is provided for living arrangements, does not explain the extraordinary power of the last section. The differ­ ence lies rather in a shift in the poetic persona's position away from one that can be glossed by Creon's concern with the acquisition and maintenance of certain goods to one that parallels Antigone's tragically beautiful stance 'in the zone between life and death', 'at the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man' (Lacan, Seminar VII, 280, 279). Or, re-phrased, the differ­ ence lies in Shelley's having achieved what Lacan would consider true artistic sublimation, for which the poetry of courtly love provides models, by raising an object 'to the dignity of the Thing' (Seminar VII, 112). Emily, yet another 'mortal form' idolised as conferring imagined wholeness in the central, autobiographical section of the poem, changes into the representative of the veiled, unrepresentable Thing made inaccessible through accession to language and the attendant loss of the primordial real. With a deliberate and humorous reductiveness Lacan defines the undefinable Thing at one point as 'the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and... there is no other good' (Seminar VII, 70).

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The reductiveness lies in the fact, as Lacan elsewhere makes clear, that the mother, while often representing the Thing, standing in for it. is for that very reason not the Thing. The (ultimately) unrepresentable Thing can best be understood through Its effects, particularly Its function with respect to language. Explaining this point, Lacan adapts Heidegger's vase as metaphor for Being: The potter... creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with the hole ... the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or hole in the real is identical. (Seminar VII, 120) Language, then, as vase contains and even defines— while re­ maining the opposite of—that Thing from which consciousness is separated and to which it desires return. That is, it contains, indeed manifests, the death drive in the very medium constituted by the erotic drive for individual existence. Language holds both in a suspension re-presented through the 'techniques of courtly love', which are 'techniques of holding back, of suspension, of amor interruptus' (152). Lacan takes note as well that the 'object or Domnei, as she is called— she is also frequently referred to with the masculine term, M i Dom, or m y Lord— ' is always characterised as inaccessible and that 'b y means of a form of sublimation specific to art, poetic creation consists in positing an object I can only describe as terrifying, an inhuman partner' (14 9 ,150).7 For the sake of a clear argument, I have established a 'turn' in Emily's status, an elevation from object of sentimental mirroring to das Ding, fairly late in the poem, but in fact tropes and allusions even in the first section herald that transformation. Thomas Pfau, whose approach to Epipsychidion, while linguistic and philosophi­ cal rather than psychoanalytic, addresses many of the themes under discussion, points out that 'any critical typology seeking to match up the poem's recurrent symbols of moon, comet, and sun with the authentic personae of Claire Clairmont, M ary Shelley, and Teresa respectively, encounters problems in that the vision­ ary figure is at different times approached through each of these figures' (109). Pfau goes on to give the following lines as an instance of one of the more extravagant 'metonymical wander­ ings' of the first section: Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou living Form Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm! Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror! Thou Harmony of Nature's art! Thou Mirror

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Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun, A ll shapes look glorious which thou gazest on! (11.2 7 -3 2 )

I would note as well, within the context of Lacan's commentary on the Thing, that these metonymies stress inaccessibility, including the ultimate inaccessibility of Death, and allude to a force produc­ tive of both beauty and terror. A s metaphors metonymically linked around heavenly bodies, these figures create images of spatial inaccessibility. The poem's opening lines also deliberately create in order to transgress inac­ cessibility through the ban upon incest. The speaker plainly avows the sexual nature of his feeling— 'Emily, / I love thee; though the world by no thin name / Will hide that love from its unvalued shame'— and complicates that already shamefully adul­ terous transgression of the marriage bond with an incestuous wish: 'Would we two had been twins of the same mother!' (11. 4 2 5). The language thus exacerbates inaccessibility and then through language (though only through language) overleaps the imagined bounds. This linguistic transgression, with more startling overtness than that achieved through Antigone's characterisation of her brother, manifests the twinned pulsions toward the erotic and toward death. On this transgressive or boundary line the speaker creates the beautiful through the last section of the poem. Also the language of the poem records a change in the poet's understanding of the nature of desire. Instead of desire as instiga­ tion behind a desperate quest for 'One' who will bring release from precisely the burden of desire to the world of 'mine and me', desire becomes the ultimately unassuageable condition of a neces­ sarily shared life; every instant of that life, since it bears fore­ knowledge of death, takes place in the Antigonean 'zone between life and death'; and language, woven into poetry around a cruelly desirable ever-present emptiness is the true and beautiful 'soul within the soul' given as some partial assuagement to life in the human 'tower of mourning' (1. 237). These insights, shortly to be set down in the culminating pages of A Defence of Poetry, now flower into metaphoric articulation. The verses just preceding the 'false' envoi of lines 383 to 387, in which, through transference, the Comet changes into the planet Venus, herald this turn or conversion: Be there love's folding-star at thy return; The living Sun will feed thee from its urn Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn In thy last smiles; adoring Even and M om

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Will worship thee with incense of calm breath And lights and shadows, as the star of Death And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild Called Hope and Fear— upon the heart are piled Their offerings— of this sacrifice divine A World shall be the altar. (11.374 -8 3) The metonymies circling through the first five and a half lines evoke a cosily pastoral nursery world. Under the mild gleam of the evening star a happy universe sups and snuggles down to rest. Then with only the warning of the word 'shadows', this Blakean Innocence changes to frightening Experience, and the poet's 'World' becomes helpless victim to the same Venus, now trans­ formed into 'the Star of Death and Birth'. This fearsome sense of the poet as victim quickly becomes modified yet again in the important lines that redefine the poet's situation as the last section opens: The day is come? and thou wilt fly with me. To whatso'er of dull mortality Is mine, remain a vestal sister still; To the intense, the deep, the imperishable, Not mine but me, henceforth be thou united Even as a bride, delighting and delighted. The hour is come— the destined Star has risen, Which shall descend upon a vacant prison. (11.388-95) The self-pity and fear of lines 379 to 383 disappear, are cleansed. Lacan's commentary on catharsis as signifying 'ritual purification' rather than the medicinal 'purgation' attached to it through eons of commentaries {Seminar VII, 244-5) is relevant to Shelley's clear­ eyed, tragic recognition that his evoked companion is sister/bride to the dying human subject who writes the poem. A striking change from the earlier 'mine and me' used to describe the 'world' of the speaker (1. 243) carries the further recognition that this essence of himself, the 'me' who uses language, is 'Not mine' (1. 392). Poetic language is 'the intense, the deep, the imperishable' part of himself, but, as a sentence in A Defence of Poetry explains, 'it reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients' (505). A few lines down, immediately after a startling rhyme between 'agony' and 'Emily7, Shelley begins the long descriptive passage, which is in fact an agon in its first sense of 'contest' or 'struggle.' His 'courtly' task as poet lies in giving full expression to erotic desire through language to the point where desire's 'invisible

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violence' which is 'like Heaven's free breath' but 'liker Death' (11. 399-401; my emphasis) reaches the 'annihilation' that is its ulti­ mate goal: One hope within two wills, one will beneath Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality, And one annihilation. Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the heights of love's rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire— I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (11.583-90) The repeated word 'one' signals the drive toward what Georges Bataille calls "continuity', the total connectedness that, as the opposite of necessarily separate consciousness, is necessarily death. Bataille grants that 'consciousness of continuity is no longer continuity... but sometimes on the borderline continuity and consciousness draw very close together.' And in terms that, applied to the conclusion of Epipsychidion, illumine the high seri­ ousness of Shelley's purpose, Bataille adds: Where would we be without language? It has made us what we are. It alone can show us the sovereign moment at the farthest point of being where it can no longer act as currency. In the end the articulate man confesses his own impotence. (276)® Shelley's creation of beauty demands maintaining a balance as long as possible on that borderline between continuity and con­ sciousness. The verses, circling and circling, express desire and hold it back, hold it in play, while they compel us 'to feel that which w e perceive, and to imagine that which we know', thereby creat­ ing linguistically what A Defence of Poetry calls 'a being within our being' (505) and Epipsychidion a 'soul within the soul' (1.455). To analyse this beauty in detail would take a further essay. Suffice it to say that Shelley draws upon all the craft he has perfected for such moments, all the special touches that are his signature: assonance, synesthesia, allusion, sliding metonymies that take the breath away, metaphors that startle or delight. Like the Lacanian potter he works 'starting with the hole' (Seminar VII, 121). This textual island, the poet avers, is 'Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise' (1.423). In A Defence of Poetry he will use the same phrase to describe the poetry of courtly love: 'a paradise was created out of the wrecks of Eden', with special mention of Petrarch, 'whose

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verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love' (497). In another observation that parallels Lacan's description of das Ding as 'the vacuole... at the center of the signifiers' (150), Shelley describes the poet's work as one which 'arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life' (505). His metaphor for that poetic space is not precisely Antigone's tomb as Lacan describes it but is closely related. '[N]oon-day nightingales' sing in this island (1.444), as they do in the grove sacred to the Mother-Goddess-asEumenides where Oedipus slides away into death. The oxymoron of the nightingales' song is sign that in this island w e are at the navel, the mysterious point of connection and disconnection, the hole or gap that makes us fully human. NOTES

1. Iam much indebted to Julia Saville, whose work on Gerard Manley Hopkins drew my attention to Lacan's seventh seminar. M y under­ standing of that book was then aided and enriched by discussion of it with members of a Stanford graduate seminar entitled 'Romanticism Psychoanalysed': Carly Berwick, Scott Boehnen, Helen Blythe, Jason Camlot, Jason Mayland, Anna Ranieri and Amit Rai. I am grateful as well to Timothy Clark, Albert Gelpi, and Jerrold Hogle, for their insightful suggestions while I was in the process of writing the essay. 2. Mieke Bal uses as epigraph to the 'Introduction' of Reading Rembrandt Freud's allusion to 'the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches the unknown' because she finds the metaphor of the navel more appropriate than either the Saussurean—and Lacanian—phal­ lus or the Denidean hymen. As sign the navel is 'both a trace of the mother, and a token of the autonomy of the subject, male and female alike; a center without meaning, it is yet a meaningful pointer that allows plurality and mobility' (22). 3. The story begins in the garden of 'the convent of St. S.— at Rome' where 'the walks were neglected, yet not overgrown, but strewed with broken earthen-ware, ashes, cabbage-stalks, orange-peel, bones, and all that marks the vicinity of a much frequented, but disorderly mansion.' Mary Shelley gives an even more telling de­ scription of the beautiful and sentimental Clorinda's arrangements in her own room which is 'neither clean nor orderly7: A pre-dieu was beside the little bed with a crucifix over it, to­ gether with two or three prints (like our penny children's prints) of saints, among which St. Giacomo appeared with the freshest and cleanest face; beside these was a glass (resembling a bird's drinking vessel) containing holy water, rather the worse for long standing; in a closet, with the door ajar, among tattered books and female apparel, hung a glasscase enclosing a waxen Gesu Bambino... a broken looking glass; a leaden ink stand— such was Clorinda's boudoir. {M ary Shelley Reader, 263,266) 4. Elizabeth Bronfen's description of this process serves as an excellent gloss for Shelley's 'mortal forms': The jubilation experienced in seeing oneself as coherent and whole in an exterior image ... is carried on into adult life. It

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi

5. 6.

7. 8.

remains as a trace in the chain of projections on to others that structures the libidinal economy of each individual subject, whereby the Other is cast into the role of an object of desire. The function of this imaginary other is to repeat and re-enact the sense of safety experienced by the subject in the first narcissistic mirror stage, when the reflected image brought about a sense of coherent unity. (26) M y scenario here is indebted to Kenneth Neill Cameron's 'The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion' (637-58). Indeed, Lacan, not himself noted for feminist consciousness, points out that the power women wield in the poetry of courtly love in no way resembles the actual position of even a noblewoman in feudal society: 'She is essentially identified with a social function that leaves no room for her person or her liberty' (147). He also quotes at length a violently misogynist poem by Arnaut Daniel and comments that 'this quite extraordinary document opens a strange perspective on the deep ambiguity of the sublimating imagination' (162). Lacan's seventh seminar offers, it can be seen, a critical conveyance for yet another visit to the site of Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. The tension Georges Bataille describes between 'the bursting plethora of being lost in continuity7 and 'the will to survive of the separate individual' (140) helps to explain the strong metonymic connection, mounting to identification, between the mother and das D ing. A s the opposite of separate individuality, continuity is death, but in Freudian theory the infant still emotionally fused with his or her caregiver and not yet possessed of self-consciousness experi­ ences a continuity that is lost at the moment of entry into language/ subjectivity. In societies where the caregiver is primarily the mother, the experience of something like continuity therefore becomes very closely associated with the maternal.

Shelley, Dante and The Triumph o f Life RALPH PITE

The idea that Shelley's last major poem seems to have been influ­ enced by Dante is scarcely controversial. T.S. Eliot in 1950 rated The Triumph of Life, 11.17 6 -2 0 5 as 'some of the greatest and most Dantesque lines in English' (Eliot, Criticize, 130).1 Leavis repeated the claim: T h is poem [...] is certainly related by more than terza rima to Dante. There is in it a profounder note of disenchantment than before, a new kind of desolation, and, in its questioning, a new and profoundly serious concern for reality' (Leavis, 215). This reading of Shelley's last poem and of Dante's influence on it became so established that, since Leavis, the connection between Dante and Shelley's style in The Triumph of Life has usually been mentioned and then set aside.2 Dante's influence on Shelley has been traced in the structure and arguments of Epipsychidicm, Adonais and The Defence of Poetry* while discussions of The Triumph of Life have tended to concentrate on either its overall orienta­ tion— for or against 'Life'— or they have considered its relation to other origins: Rousseau; or, from Shelley's biography, Jane Williams and Byron.4 Dante's presence in The Triumph of Life does more, however, than account for a supposedly obvious improvement in Shelley's style. Leavis's assessment obviously affiliates Dante to the Leavisite project, so that the Divine Comedy exemplifies the high seriousness that Shelley, in his final poem, imperfectly reveals. It is easier to dislodge Leavis's account of The Triumph of Life than the view of the Commedia it assumes. Consequently, re-readings of The Triumph of Life have tended briefly to acknowledge the fact of Dante's influence while arguing against the tendency he (suppos­ edly) represents. The critical tradition has, therefore, first appro­ priated to its own ends and then underestimated the importance of Dante to the poem. This is unfortunate because Shelley's many and particular allusions to the Commedia help explain his poem's project and so help to clarify the direction of his development in the final year.

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Despite its 'new and profoundly serious concern for reality7, Lea vis found the poem, 'bewildering and bewildered [...] Vision opens into vision, dream unfolds within dream, and the visionary perspectives [...] shift elusively and are lost' (Leavis, 216). These dreams within dreams and visions within visions are, in fact, the source of Shelley's concern with history (if not 'reality7) and with a person's relation to that history. The distinctive achievement of the poem's Dantean mode is that it enables Shelley to be more 'profoundly serious' about temporal existence without allowing himself or his readers to gloat over or rejoice in this climbdown from ethereal heights. The still influential reading of The Triumph of Life (which I have used Lea vis to epitomise) praises in the poem its acts of self-correction, its renunciation of lofty idealism in favour either of mature seriousness or a commitment 'to the world as men know it7.5 The perspective and tone Shelley achieves is less compromised than this by the world. It is through his encounter with the Commedia that he finds a language in which to endure the world, neither scorning it nor submitting to it.

Shelley knew Dante's works very well. He was one of the first English readers to appreciate both La Vita Nuova and the Paradiso. He also translated (probably in 1819-20) the first canzone of the Convivio and, as early as 18 15, the sonnet 'Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo e io' for the Alastor volume.6 C.S. Lewis claimed that the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound had all the 'fire and light' of the Paradiso. La Vita Nuova bears very forcefully on Epipsychidion (Lewis, 266). Following his disappointment with Emilia Viviani, however, Shelley's interest in Dante appears to have shifted from the ideal love and the ecstatic vision of La Vita Nuova and Paradiso towards the uncertainty and hope of Purgatorio. This last phase in his reading has been neglected in discussions of The Triumph of Life, although the similarities between the opening of Shelley's poem and Dante's Purgatorio are striking. Writing to Leigh Hunt in 1819, Shelley denied that Michel­ angelo was the Dante of painting because he had no gentleness: 'where shall we find [...] the Spirit coming over the sea in a boat like Mars rising from the vapours of the horizon, where Matilda is gathering flowers' (Letters 11, 112 ; ca. 20 August 1814).7 Mary Shelley thought that the passage in Purgatorio canto n, where the spirit comes over the sea was Shelley's 'most favorite passage' (Mary Shelley, Letters n, 283). Whether or not that was always or ever true, the opening of The Triumph of Life echoes at various

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points cantos 1 and 11 of Purgatorio. At the beginning of Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell, 'la pregione ettema', and see the night-sky of the southern hemisphere, something unknown to medieval Europe: Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro, che s'accoglieva nel sereno aspetto del mezzo, puro insino al primo giro alii occhi miei ricomincid diletto, tosto ch'io u s d fuor dell'aura morta che m'avea contristati li occhi e il petto.8 (The sweet colour of the oriental sapphire that gathered in the serene aspect of the air, as far as the first circle, gave pleasure back to my eyes as soon as I passed beyond the dead air that had afflicted my eyes and heart.)9 At the canto's end, Virgil takes Dante down to the sea-shore and washes his face in the dew. He wipes clean Dante's 'guance lacrimose? ('tear-stained cheeks', 1.1 2 7 ; Divina Commedia n, 12), at once to clear his vision and reveal his face. This is at Cato's command, who says it would not do if Dante could not see prop­ erly when he met even the first of heaven's angels.10 The bathing of his face 'alii occhi miei ricomincid diletto' gives back pleasure just as the sight of a sapphire sky had done. In both, clearsightedness seems to be made possible by release from suffering. Dante's restored eyesight shows him, however, first of all, not ministers of heaven but the passage of time. By the end of the canto, the dew is already 'fighting' the dawn.11 The lowest depths of Hell, in Inferno xxxn-xxxiv, are character­ ised by an utter rigidity that can be ruptured only by savagery or violence. The damned are submerged in the frozen Lake Cocytus: Dante kicks one of them and insults another; when Ugolino stops talking he immediately bites Ruggieri; all that can be seen of Judas is his legs, wriggling, while Satan chews the rest of his body.12 Protests, assault, recrimination all interrupt (or struggle to inter­ rupt) an emptiness. The ferocity of the damned stems from their frustration at being made powerless by imprisonment; they lash out in actions that are as convulsive as death-throes and as com­ pelling. In order to get through Hell, Dante has to will his escape. He must overcome gravity and resist being compelled either by the damned or by his instinctive responses to them, whether of disgust or fascination. But when he does escape, Hell's pinioned, immobile fury is replaced, naturally, by sequential movement. Within one canto:

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Ralph Pile Ualba vinceva Vora mattutina chefuggia innanzi, si che di lontano conobbi il tremolar della marina. (Dawn was conquering the last hour of night which fled before it, so that from a distance I could make out the trem­ bling of the sea.)13

The darkest hour before the dawn has turned to dawn itself, its sapphire blue retreating westward ahead of first light. Dante, after the murk of Hell, is moved to be able to see so far so clearly. Dante 'recognises' the trembling of the sea, he knows it again. Entering this new realm of the poem has some of the qualities of coming home and, at this moment, of beginning to believe that the new may have some resemblance to the old. Dante sees that he is on the brink of something different and that perception is itself the be­ ginning of the change. The horrors and fear of the ninth circle are exchanged for a kind of thrilled suspense, a delicate quivering in 'tremolar' that had been unthinkable at the end of the Inferno.1* Shelley in the Prologue to Hellas (1821) describes with wonder and affection T h e fairest of those wandering isles that gem / The sapphire sea of interstellar air7 (11.18 -1 9 ; o s a , 449).15 But 'sapphire' is one of his favourite words; only in the play itself does he suggest the importance to him of Purgatorio 1: 'Hesperus flies from awakening night' (1. 1038). Dante notices Hesperus at the begin­ ning of the canto: Lo bel pianeta che d'amar conforta faceva tutto rider Voriente, velando i Pesci, ch'erano in sua scorta. (The fair planet that provokes love made all the east smile, veiling [the stars of] Pisces, which were in her train.)16 While night lasted Shelley could not sleep: 'But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold / Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem / The cone of night, now they were laid asleep, / Stretched m y faint limbs beneath the hoary stem'.17 In Dante, the rising morning star veils in its light the fainter stars of Pisces and, as day dawns, Venus is herself forgotten;18 similarly, Shelley's stars are 'laid asleep' by the rising sun. The poet himself lies outstretched in 'a strange trance [...] Which w as not slumber' that enables him to see at the same time a vision and a reality— the 'shade' of his trance: Was so transparent that the scene came through A s clear as when a veil of light is drawn

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O'er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew That I had felt the freshness of that dawn Bathed in the same cold dew my brow & hair And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn Under the self same bough, & heard as there The birds, the fountain & the Ocean hold Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air. And then a Vision on my brain was rolled... (Triumph, 11.31-4 0 ) Shelley, who has imitated the stars by watching with them, is now, as it were, laid asleep in body to become a living soul. The world, 'Continent, / Isle, Ocean & all things' have 'in succession due' (Triumph 11. 15 -16 ) taken up the burden of day or, like the stars, fallen asleep. Shelley seems to be released from that se­ quence when he enters the trance between wakefulness and sleep.19 It looks as if he has escaped the rat-race, yet this release places him, finally, within a different but equally inevitable proc­ ess: 'And then a Vision on my brain was rolled....' There is, characteristically in The Triumph of Life, no explanation offered for this. Shelley's d£ja vu gives him, at first, an intimation of immortal­ ity, so that he seems to remain protected from a world that is no longer disguised. 'I knew / That I had felt the freshness of that dawn': it is not only that he has been here before but that he has experienced the present moment before. Each new particular is sensed through recognition. Yet the scene's exact correspondence with what he has known already means that he can vouch for it and for himself at the same time. He knows what he has felt and that he has, indisputably, felt it. He has been given back the memories that his pre-existing, Platonic soul lost at birth. Since, however, his knowledge is not of a distant past but of the present reduplicated, he has been restored to his own experiences. The doubling of his sensations (such that he knows everything already) creates security, since nothing can possibly surprise him, but a form of security that makes possible authentic personal experience. What is restored is, nonetheless, added to at once. Shelley's sudden sense that the world exactly corresponds to his experience of it seems to be the pre-condition of another 'Vision'. Just to know, in the passive and entire w ay that Shelley enjoys when he steps aside from the currents of life, enables (and, possibly, forces) him to receive a vision of what he had not known before. To

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become the morning star may be to reach a point of clear insight, or visionary perception, but that clarity appears to be, by its very nature, part of a unending movement towards enlightenment. Shelley's consciousness is, in some sense, enlightened (and, per­ haps, illuminating) before it is veiled in the light,of a 'Vision', yet his mind has, for some reason, to succumb to the greater light in the same w ay that Pisces is veiled by Venus and Venus, in its turn, by the sun.20 Shelley employs the same comparison later in The Triumph of Life when Rousseau meets the 'shape all light'. Her feet 'blot / The thoughts of him who gazed on them': A s Day upon the threshold of the east Treads out the lamps of night, until the breath Of darkness reillumines even the least Of heaven's living eyes— like day she came Making the night a dream (Triumph, 11.3 5 2 ,3 8 3 -4 ,3 8 9 -9 3 ) When Rousseau drinks from the cup she offers him, his mind is once again wiped clean as another 'Vision on his brain is rolled'. The woman herself disappears: [T]he fair shape waned in the coming light A s veil by veil the silent splendour drops From Lucifer, amid the chrysolite 'Of sunrise ere it strike the mountain tops — And as the presence of that fairest planet Although unseen is felt by one who hopes That his day's path may end as he began it In that star's smile [....] 'So knew I in that light's severe excess The presence of that shape which on the stream Moved, as I moved along the wilderness ... (Triumph 11.4 11-19 ,4 2 4 -6 ) The repetitions traverse a process: 'veil by veil' the splendour of Lucifer gradually disappears; 'thought by thought' CTriumph, 1. 387). Rousseau's mind had been overwhelmed like embers be­ neath the woman's feet. Stepwise advance gains inevitability, even relentlessness, from repeatedly denying that this veil or thought is the last that will be destroyed. Yet it concludes in another form of repetition— the accompanying presence of the shape that 'Moved, as I moved', keeping 'its obscure tenour [ ...] / Beside my path, as silent as a ghost' CTriumph, 11. 432-3). The

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woman 'glimmers' through the everyday, as the scene had done at the beginning of the poem; her obscure presence lends the world, that Rousseau wakes into, a trace of the heavenly reality that Shelley finds in his trance. Though more dimly than in that 'w ak­ ing dream', the objects in the world may still be images of heav­ enly light. The woman is now trodden out as she had trampled Rousseau's thoughts but both may survive, albeit 'as silent as a ghost', 'until the breath / Of darkness reillumines even the least / Of heaven's living eyes'. The next in a series of visions either erases what came before or makes it gradually fade. The new will 'burst [...] on my sight' like a wave on sand (Triumph, 11.4 0 5 -11), or 'veil by veil' diminish the brightness of the last. In either case, something survives: the shape can still be felt, the thoughts are hidden in the new light but not destroyed. A s much as a planet survives being hidden in light, the mind is swamped but not eradicated by the visions it experiences. The clarity of perception that seemed the pre-requisite of vision continues within the visions, whether latently or as a memory. When Rousseau returns, in the final section of his narrative, to a form of the doubled perception that preceded the first vision, it seems that the visionary woman makes such clarity possible, at least in a fragmentary form. Rousseau moves through the 'severe excess' of modern light with some reasssurance at least that hidden within this undeni­ able loss, the light of Heaven survives. In Hellas, similar political disappointments had been entirely resolved by future hope: when 'Hesperus flies from awakening night' it guides the semichorus of the play to 'Kingless continents sinless as Eden' and 'Paradise islands of glory'; to 'climes' they proclaim, 'where now veiled by the ardour of day / Thou art hidden'. In retreat from the forceful glare of Turkey and Russia, the Greeks' revolutionary hope fulfils itself in imaginary worlds so that, despite defeat, the Chorus can conclude the play with 'The world's great age begins anew' (Hellas 11.10 3 8 ,10 4 3 -4 ,10 4 7 ,10 5 2 ,10 6 0 ; p p , 438). In The Triumph of Life, Shelley places such revolutionary optimism amidst the forces that apparently overwhelm it— forces of opposition which revolu­ tion is bound to provoke. Rousseau's movement 'along the w il­ derness' persists in an involvement with the world which he cannot avoid and, simultaneously, searches within it for traces of the 'shape all light'. Though he had the 'Vision' once, he cannot find it again except, partially, within actual things: if, somehow, he could reach the point that Shelley is lucky enough to find at the beginning of the poem then he might once more find, in its fullness,

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the 'joy which waked like Heaven's glance / The sleepers in the oblivious valley' CTriumph, 11. 538-9). Until then he needs to con­ tinue along the wilderness without becoming oblivious to it.

This imperative distinguishes The Triumph of Life from Shelley's earlier work, and it finds a further corollary in Purgatorio 1. The southern hemisphere that Dante enters at the beginning of Purgatorio proves to be in some respects a looking-glass world: Dante is surprised by shadows falling on the wrong side, and by the sun moving up the northern part of the sky. The differences from what Dante had expected create a world of mirror-images, precisely accurate though reversed. Consequently, this new world is quite as substantial and actual as his own. Re-entering the familiar brings with it the possibility of more challenging surprise. The strange facts of Purgatorio cannot be dismissed as phantasms or distortions, as was possible in Inferno, since they are phenom­ ena of an equivalent world. Discovering truth had previously demanded of Dante contempt for the appearances of Hell; in Purgatory, he finds glimmers of the surprising truth within the ordinary things of the world. Not only is the visionary relocated in the everyday (as is so evidently the case at the beginning of The Triumph of Life) but the same process of education that Rousseau experiences is forced upon the protagonist of Dante's poem. These similarities in project are confirmed b y Dante adding the miraculous to the surprising: Q uivi mi cinse si com'altrui piacque: oh maraviglia! che qua! elli scelse Vumile pianta, cotal si rinacque subitamente la onde Yavelse. (Purgatorio 1 , 11.1 3 3 - 6 ; Divina Commedia n, 12) (There he clothed me in the w ay the other [Cato or God] wanted. Oh, how marvellous! because what the humble plant which he selected had been, exactly that sprouted again suddenly in the place where he had pulled it up.) This miracle is uncalled for: Dante is already fully prepared by 1. 13 3 which feels as formal and decisive as a closing line.21 What catches his attention stretches the canto into a further three lines of acclaim and surprise. The resolution and self-discipline demanded of him by Inferno, seem now to be marvellously less burdensome. Relief and excitement inspire the precision of Dante's lines, as he discovers that the virtues are, in fact, only a preliminary to the

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generosity and abundance of miracle. The plant, itself, has several possible allegorical significances but for Shelley, who paid few compliments to Dante's doctrine, it expresses principally the con­ tinual addition of vision to vision.22 Dante's contented resignation to what another wishes for him immediately produces insight into marvellous things; moreover, that proves one's own and its own participation in time.23 The temporality of visionary experience creates a tension in the Purgatorio between authority and surprise. Eternal truths appear within time and enter a consciousness that exists through time. To be unsurprised suggests foreknowledge and a place in heaven already. To be astonished to the point of bewilderment suggests complete unfamiliarity and, therefore, the absence of any continu­ ity between past and present. Paul de Man's reading of The Triumph of Life finds in the poem just this lack of connection between successive experiences or events in time. (See Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, 53). That denies it any surprises because a surprise, by definition, means finding the unexpected things that fits. Shelley's meeting with Rousseau is not an immediately coher­ ent or explicable event but neither does it feel random. It does not justify rejecting this world as misleading and false. Perhaps Shelley wanted to cast off earthly life, but he knew that he had learnt such weariness by listening to one of the shadows, Rousseau, whom he ought (theoretically) to despise. Meeting him is unexpected and at the same time positively unalarming. The poem has no terrors really; its horrors are calmly, not pruriently, shown. Purgatorio witnesses fewer calamities but is full of surprises. The tone of these influences Shelley's calm, stopping it from becoming disdain. In canto n, the gradual veiling of the morning star in the dawn, itself makes w ay for a greater, unbearable light: Noi eravam lunghesso mare ancora come gente che pensa a suo cammino che va col cuore e col copro dimora. Ed ecco qual, sorpreso dal mattino, per li grossi vapor Marte rosseggia giu nel ponente sovra'l suol marino cotal m’apparve, s'io ancor lo veggia, un lume per lo mar venir si ratio, che'l mover suo nessun volar pareggia. (Purgatorio n, 11.1 0 - 1 8 ; Divina Commedia n, 15) (We were still going along the seashore like people who are thinking about their route, who go forward with their heart

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Ralph Pite and delay with their body. And, there, just as, near morning, through the dull vapours, Mars glows, low down on the horizon, over the ocean floor, so appeared to me— that I might see it again!— a light coming over the sea so quickly that no wing could match its speed.)

Dante and Virgil are fully prepared to go on and, for some reason, held back. They are lingering, though whether culpably or help­ lessly Dante does not make clear. Instead, their pause is inter­ rupted and completed by the boat's appearance: 'Ed ecco’ draws the reader aw ay from the question of what Dante and Virgil think they are up to, in the same w ay that Dante's own attention shifts. His movement in imagination and desire, as he wonders about the dangers and possibilities of the path he has found, is replaced by a step forward in the narrative. The boat's appearance satisfies Dante's (possibility unconscious) need, though in surprising ways. What he is thinking about, begins to happen; the boat fulfills the thought that, for the moment, it prevents. A s in The Triumph of Life, the narrator's submission to the immediate vision appears to depend on his having regained his natural (but previously obscured) clearness of perception. The immediate, overwhelming vision turns out, also, to be one more in an indefinitely long series. More­ over, the simplicity and abruptness of 'ecco', like 'oh maraviglia', give the impression of a sudden actual discovery. Dante's Purga­ tory is, he claims, no enraptured vision (with the conventional authority that entails) but the real world of true miracles. In canto xxvrn, Dante is held up suddenly once again and is less delighted. The difference between the two cantos helps to define the emotional quality of The Triumph of Life. In the later passage Dante is entering the Earthly Paradise: 'non potea rivedere ond'io mi 'ntrassi; / ed ecco piu andar mi tolse un rio' (Purgatorio xxvm, 11.24-5; Divina Commedia n, 307: 'I could not see again the place where I had entered; and, look, a stream stopped me from going any further'). The stream baffles him, like the three beasts in Inferno 1, but is at once the beginning of his going-on: Coi pie ristretti e con li occhi passai di Id dal fiumicello, per mirare la gran variazion difreschi mai; e la m'apparve, si com'elli appare subitamente cosa che disvia per maraviglia tutto altro pensare, una donna soletta, che si gia cantando e scegliendo fior da fiore

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ond'era pinta tutta la sua via. (Purgatorio xxvin, 11.34 -4 2 ; Divina Commedia 11,307-8) (With m y feet I held back and with my eyes I crossed the stream from there, in order to gaze on the great variety of fresh M ay flowers, and there appeared to me, in the same w ay that a thing suddenly appears which drives aw ay with wonder every other thought, a solitary woman, who went singing and picking flowers from the flowers with which her whole path was painted) Canto 1 of Purgatorio ended in the excitement of 'oh marviglia!'; here Dante's wonder is set back into the subordinate clause ('si com'elli [...]'). His distance and self-awareness seem to possess the composure of a historian or psychologist even as he describes the loss of all other awareness in the surprise and joy of what sud­ denly appears. By delaying the subject of 'apparve' until after the end of the tercet, Dante gives 'urn donna soletta' the power over a spectator that he has just described. His attention, like his tercets, is suddenly taken up by the woman who appears, yet on this occasion such a conquest is familiar. Dante is less surprised by the feelings of wonder than he was earlier in the cantica. This makes him attend more completely to the woman herself while preserv­ ing a cool independence in the midst of his excitement. He seems at once devoted and composed. The unclouded gaze (that Cato had demanded in canto 1 and Virgil proclaimed for Dante at the end of canto xxvn) enables him to sustain himself despite his clear perception of overwhelming, mind-erasing visions. Indeed, true clarity and true selfhood seem to be interdependent. Dante's vision of a woman overturns his thoughts and fulfils his hopes as the angel-boat had done earlier. The 'cosa che disvia' sets him back on his 'via' as much as following its own. His collectedness while this is happening indicates, moreover, that his nature,'libero, dritto e sand (Purgatorio xxvn, 1.140; Divina Commedia 11, 303: 'free, right and clean') now participates in what overhelms him. N o w more perfectly similar to Venus, that seems to vanish but remains hidden in the light of day, Dante's mind is at ease with the new vision that commands his attention. His serenity is not so much passionless as the sign that his passions are in accord with what happens: he is both properly responsive to whatever he experiences and fully expects the unpredictable. The intense equanimity that characterises this moment in Purgatorio comes through very clearly in Shelley's translation:

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Ralph Pite I moved not with my feet, but amid the glooms I peirced [sic] with m y charmed sight contemplating The mightly multitude of fresh M ay blooms And then appeared to me— even like a thing Which suddenly for blank astonishment Dissolves all other thought, A solitary woman, & she went Singing and gathering flower after flower With which her w ay was painted and besprent.24

When Thomas Medwin published this translation, he corrected Shelley's loss of the rhyme-scheme (at 'Dissolves all other thought7) by putting in its place, 'Charms every sense, and makes all thought take wing' (see o s a 721,727). He removes the impres­ sion Shelley gives of thought being concentrated in what is seen. Shelley's phrase, 'Dissolves all other thought', combines, as Dante had, what is apparently opposed: the self-loss and rapture of 'dissolves all thought' is qualified by the sense of consideration and attentiveness that arises from 'all other thought', from the woman's becoming his only thought. This vision dominates Dante by drawing all his attention, not by charming and liberating it (as Medwin's version suggests), nor by destroying his mind.

The fusion of assurance and vulnerability in Purgatorio xxvm epito­ mises what Shelley admired in Dante. Because Dante's privileged knowledge did not prevent but made possible the intensity of his response to events, Shelley's admiration for him influences in The Triumph of Life his portrayal of vision and his presentation of feeling: vision flows into vision because vision does not provide a secure station apart from the flux of events; the insistence that even a privileged visionary remains engaged with the world pre­ vents visionary insight from justifying indifference. In the poem, Rousseau envies those, like Socrates and Christ, who have no truck with earthly things and regrets his own involvement in them. Shelley's narrator aspires to a comparable disdain only to be rebuked by his guide, Rousseau: and for despair I half disdained mine eye's desire to fill With the spent vision of the times that were And scarce have ceased to be ... 'Dost thou behold,' Said then my guide, 'those spoilers spoiled... (Triumph, 11.232-5)

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In the Inferno, Virgil frequently tells Dante to 'behold' the damned soul, monster or angel that disconcerts him or disrupts his train of thought (perhaps to complete it later).*5 A s in Purgatorio n, the privacy of Dante's thinking suggests a separation from his circum­ stances which events must be made able to overturn. Rousseau, similarly, disturbs the narrator's introspection by insisting that he confront a succession of upsetting appearances. To remain willing to look directly at the catastrophes that prompt disdain is appar­ ently what 'Life' asks of Shelley's narrator. Such directness demands that he does not withdraw dismissively or disdainfully but still be 'Struck to the heart by this sad pag­ eantry' (Triumph, 1. 176). In this line, self-observation continues amidst the most intense feeling; and such self-awareness is opposed to the self-love or self-protectiveness which would rather despair and 'Let them pass' (Triumph, 1. 243). Shelley's style is practising what Rousseau so passionately envies, coming between Rousseau's 'I / Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain!' and the equanimity Rousseau ascribes to 'the great bards of old who inly quelled / The passions which they sung, as by their strain / M ay well be known' (Triumph, 11. 278-9,274-6). Dante claims by writ­ ing the Commedia that, in some respects, he is able to surpass the writer he depends on, Virgil. Shelley's poem is indebted to Dante's in this regard as well, since it is neither hostile nor devoted to Rousseau: it neither embraces nor condemns figura­ tion or revolution. Rather, Shelley sees in Rousseau (as Dante sees in Virgil) a great predecessor he must attempt to improve on,*6 whose imaginative failings he must inhabit in order to transform. He needs to take himself and his reader through Rousseau's expe­ rience once again because otherwise he (and we) may repeat Rousseau's mistakes indefinitely.*7 Seeing him as a predecessor amounts to seeing the need to go beyond him. To remain satisfied with what Rousseau had already achieved would be, in Shelley's eyes, to forget that all vision is a vision of successiveness. It would be to adopt the indifferent disdain that Rousseau himself would disallow. Nonetheless, avoiding disdain is not the same as 'serious concern'. Shelley's style is Dantean not because it commits him to the world but because it continues to seek what Rousseau could not attain: a form of serenity based on hope and not on indifference; or, in other words, a resilience that is able T o love and bear' human circumstances and disappointments (Prometheus Unbound iv, 1- 573>-

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1. The link had been discussed earlier in Bradley, 441-56; and Stawell, 104-31. See also Eliot, Selected Essays, 274. 2. See, for example, Reiman, Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life', 89; Hogle, 3 9 4 / 335; Reach, Shelley's Style, 59. 3. See Baker, 2 1 6ff; Fogle, 1 1 -2 1 ; Frye, 119, 123; Schulze, 19 1-216 ; Weinberg, 12 2-34 ,17 3 -2 0 1. 4. See Bloom, Shelley's M ythmaking, 255-70; Allott, 'Bloom on The Triumph of Life', 222-8; and Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, For a reading based on Rousseau, see Duffy, 110-35. F ° r the importance of Jane Williams see Matthews, 'On Shelley's "The Triumph of Life'", 133. For Byron, see Robinson, 280-81. 5. McGann, 'Secrets of an Elder Day', 259. See also Miriam Allott, 240: 'after Hellas [...] a more urgent personal involvement with the pain­ ful realities of existence is shifting Shelley's poetic attention towards unflinching scrutiny of the "something that infects the world".' 6. The sonnet had been translated earlier, by William Hayley in his 'Notes' to An Essay on Epic Poetry (1782). Shelley's interest is probably independent. The Canzoniere, from which the sonnet comes, was first translated into English by Charles Lyell in 1835. On Shelley's transla­ tion of Dante's canzone and its date, see Webb, The Violet in the Crucible, 291-5; Palacio, 'Shelley and Dante', 105-12. 7. Compare Byron's indignant response to Friedrich Schlegel's accusa­ tion that T>ante's chief defect is a want, in a word, of gentle feelings' ('Ravenna Journal', 2 9 /1/18 2 1, Byron's Letters and Journals, vm, 39-40). 8. Dante, D ivina Commedia, n, 7 ,4 (Purgatorio 1, 11.4 1,13 -18 ) . References are to the Sapegno edition unless otherwise noted. 9. This and other translations (except when noted) are my own. 10. 'che non si converria, l'occhio sorpriso / d'alcuna nebbia, andar dinanzi al primo / ministro, ch'e di quei di paradiso' (Purgatorio 1 , 11. 97-9; D ivina Commedia n, 10: 'because it would be unsuitable, with your eyesight hindered by any clouding, to go before the first minister who is one of those from Paradise'). Cato's use of 'primo' echoes the one earlier ('insino al primo giro', 1.15 ) which is ambiguous, mean­ ing either the lowest or highest of the heavenly spheres, that of the Moon or the Primum Mobile (see 1. i5n, ibid., 4). Cato's 'primo ministro' may possibly be either the least or the highest. By making the first use of 'primo' in the Purgatorio ambiguous, Dante begins to suggest the presence of God in all his ministers (and among all the saved). In a certain sense, explained in Paradiso m, 11. 70-87 (Divina Commedia m, 38-9), the first sphere of the Moon is indistinguishable from the highest. All the spirits whom Dante meets in Heaven partake in God, the first of them is united with the 'First Cause'. This suggests a form of representation (in which the spirits are symbols of God) that is noticed, in an ambiguity, as soon as Dante escapes from Hell. 11. 'la rugiada / pugna col sole', Purgatorio n, 11.1 2 1 - 2 ; Divina Commedia n, 11. 12. Inferno xxxn, 1.78, xxxm, 11.76-8, xxxiv, 11.6 1-3 ; D ivina Commedia 1,356, 366,376. 13. Purgatorio 1, 11.1 1 5 - 1 7 ; D ivina Commedia, n, 11. Some editors take 'ora' to mean 'wind / breeze' ('aura') and John D. Sinclair translates the passage on that interpretation: "The dawn was overcoming the morning breeze' (Sinclair, The D ivine Comedy, n, 25). Cary gives: 'The dawn had chac'd the matin hour of prime' (Cary, The Vision, n, 4).

Shelley, Dante and The Triumph of Life Shelley used an edition edited by M.R.P. Venturi that glosses 'ora' temporally; see Dante, La Divina Commedia [...] Venturi, n, 10. 14. T.S. Eliot never mentions this canto but Dante raises in it central concerns of 'Little Gidding': 'the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time'; 'Between melting and freezing / The soul's sap quivers' (Eliot, Four Quartets, 48,41). 15. See also, 'Fragments of an Unfinished Drama' (1821-2): 'And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns / In the dark space of interstellar air7 (11.26-7, Shelley, osa, 483). 16. Purgatorio 1, 11.19 -2 1; Divina Commedia n, 4. 17. The Triumph of Life, 11. 21-4, Reiman, Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life', 136. All references to the poem are taken from this edition, using the abbreviation Triumph. 18. Canto n traces the approach of day as accurately as canto 1: see 11.7-9 and 55-7; D ivina Commedia n, 14 -15, 18. Dante does not say that Venus has disappeared, or been veiled in its turn as it had veiled Pisces, but the 'morning star' disappears as the day begins. 19. Shelley's opening, as Robinson has pointed out, echoes Goethe's Faust. The Dantean background to The Triumph of Life highlights, however, the contrast between the centrality and stasis which Goethe's hero enjoys and the circling successiveness of life in time which Shelley's narrator perceives. See Robinson, 222-3. 20. Shelley had always been interested in Venus/Hesperus (the morn­ ing and evening stars). See among other examples, The Revolt of Islam, 11. 262, 498-501, 543-5 (osa, 43, 49-50). The opening of Purgatorio emphasizes the veiling of one light by another that is so important to The Triumph of Life. See also Hartman, 267-71. 21. Each canto closes with an additional line, the last tercet being made a quatrain. More often than not, the last line is syntactically independ­ ent (see Inferno 1: 'Allor si mosse, e io li tenni dietro'; xxxiii: 'e quindi uscimme a riveder le stelle'). Where the last line is tied closely into the preceding tercet, it is relatively rare for that tercet's opening line to sound independent, as is the case here. Compare the endings of Purgatorio iv, v, and vn. The last canto of the Commedia closes in the same way as Purgatorio 1. (Divina Commedia 1,16,380; n, 45,56,79-80; m, 424-5). 22. See A Defence of Poetry, 498. 23. Compare Inferno xxv1 , 11. 1 4 1 - 2 and Purgatorio xxxm, 11.1 4 2 -5 (Divina Commedia 1,295; ii, 370-1). 24. Text from Palacio, Shelley 'Traducteur de Dante', 574. 25. See, for instance, the continuation of Virgil's speech in canto xx (11.3 1, 4off., especially) and the opening of canto xvn (Divina Commedia 1, 223-4,188-9). Canto ix, where Dante sees an angel for the first time and must avoid seeing the Gorgon, considers the ethics of looking most directly. The following canto's meeting with Farinata (who can see the future but not the present) confirms the importance of 'see­ ing' to the whole work. 26. Notice the similarity between Rousseau's claims for himself (in Triumph 11.199-207) and the Roman poet Statius' promotion of Virgil (in Purgatorio xxi, 11.9 1-6 ; D ivina Commedia n, 236). Rousseau's force­ fulness sounds like a rebuke to Statius' humility. The Triumph of Life aims to replace these opposites by an imitation of Dante's imitative transformation of Virgil. 27. Compare Kierkegaard, Repetition, 136-49.

2X1

Ill: Evaluating Shelley's Texts: The Past and Future Possibilities for Editors

C lose Y o u r E y e s and Think of Shelley: Versioning M a ry Sh elley's T riu m ph o f Life LISA VARGO

M y starting point is Jerome J. McGann's suggestion that 'elective affinities between love and textuality exist because love and text are two of our most fundamental social acts. We make love and we make texts, and we make both in a seemingly endless series of imaginative variations' (The Textual Condition, 3-4). If exceptions come to mind, this account of the 'network of symbolic exchanges' McGann calls 'the textual condition' seems relevant to Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, whose writings form a complex dia­ logue between two people who together created literary and human offspring. The Triumph of Life marks the place where this conversation breaks off. While in their earlier works the dialogue is largely assimilated, however problematically, here two textual monologues exist, each with its separate authority— Percy Shelley's unfinished draft and the text Mary Shelley created for the Posthumous Poems of 1824 and the Poetical Works of 1839. Like that of love, the course of textuality never did run smooth. The textual condition of The Triumph of Life poses a significant problem: when we read the poem our authority is not the poet's text, but Mary Shelley's Triumph of Life. It is impossible to use Percy Shelley's manuscript as a reading text despite the publica­ tion of Donald Reiman's Garland facsimile. That a poem is neces­ sarily represented by more than one version has been addressed by Reiman's definition of what he calls 'versioning', when a text has 'two or more radically differing versions that exhibit quite distinct ideologies, aesthetic perspectives or rhetorical strategies' (Romantic Texts and Contexts, 169). I wonder, though, whether versioning has been recognised as essential to evaluations of The Triumph of Life in spite of the poem's prominent place in Shelley's canon. A very complicated and largely unacknowledged relation­ ship may be seen to exist between the ideologies and strategies of

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different versions of the poem and critical evaluation of its incon­ clusiveness. I will begin by accounting for the affinities between love and textuality that brought Mary Shelley's Triumph of Life into being and raise some questions about the relationship be­ tween M ary Shelley's version and critical readings of the poem. I will then examine the textual conditions of a specific textual crux, where editors' love of their own making of texts has led to an unwitting acceptance of Mary Shelley's decision to edit out Jane Williams's role in the textual condition of the poem. I Despite the textual evidence that Shelley left off writing the poem and went on the expedition which ended with his accidental drowning, a great amount of energy has been expended by critics in finding other explanations for the poem's fragmentary charac­ ter.1 That critics are so reluctant to accept that 'The Triumph of Life' is a work in progress is a curious issue. Moreover, even though we know there are a few more lines in the manuscript, the poem seems to 'end' for readers where it does in Mary Shelley's version— with a question that isn't answered. A variety of expla­ nations, none sufficient in itself, exist to account for the nature of critical response to the poem. A t the risk of greatly simplifying matters, I must restrict myself to a single issue— the implications of m y suggestion that the textual condition of The Triumph of Life necessitates that we read M ary Shelley's version of the poem. It is clear that Mary Shelley's efforts to arrange her husband's scat­ tered and unfinished works did much to consolidate his literary after-life and initiate the idea of a Shelley canon. A s Neil Fraistat points out, Percy Shelley 'is a function of the textual representa­ tions of his work' ('Teaching', 152). The 'depoliticized, ethereal' Shelley represents 'a complex set of social relations' (155) in which many of his poems 'were subject to various forms of censorship, suppression, and dismemberment by M ary Shelley and others' (156). And this is 'no less true of our own contemporary editions' (156).2 Accordingly, I wonder to what degree are readings of the poem the offspring of Mary Shelley's Triumph of Life and its attendant perspectives and strategies? One response to this question exists in Bette London's illumi­ nating argument that Frankenstein's 'informing fiction' is a 'vision of authorship as self-contained and self-continuous' (260); 'the woman at the extremities can point to the fractures in the unified male image: the excesses and deficiencies that disturb the surface of masculinity. From such a position she can carve out a space for

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reading differently, opening to view the inevitable gap between image and ideal that structures male self-presentations../ (264). While as London contends, 'in producing Percy Shelley for the public... she simultaneously disturbs and enforces gender pro­ prieties' (258), I want to suggest that Mary Shelley's interrogation of the unified male image is an unavoidable consequence of the private and public motives for her version of Percy's texts.3 If I may elaborate on McGann's sexual/textual metaphor, Mary Shelley's The Triumph of Life has an intensely personal aspect that she does not intend to be of concern to the reader. Its sexual/ textual erotics represent an attempt to keep a collaborative model of textuality alive after her husband's death. Irving Massey sug­ gests that Mary Shelley 'drew an intimate pleasure from dealing with his notebooks' (7); editing Shelley's works is a means to perpetuate the pleasures of textual intercourse with her husband. 'Thus I would endeavour to consider my self a faint continuation of his being', she writes in her 'Journal of Sorrow' on 7 October 1822, '& as far as possible the revelation to the earth of what he was' (Journal 11,436). In her pursuit of textual pleasure as a method to combat grief and loneliness, Percy's authority is seemingly undermined; hence, the argument that Mary is fracturing the unified male image. Related to the challenge to authority is the position held by critics that Percy could not complete the poem. This fragmenta­ tion seems to be a result of what I will call the missionary position that Mary Shelley would have the reader adopt towards The Triumph of Life. Her editorial comments create a version of the poem in which the circumstances of its production are linked with the poet's death: 'much of the "Triumph of Life" was written as he sailed or weltered on that sea which was soon to engulf him' ('Notes on Poems of 1822', o s a , 677). Yet Reiman suggests that Percy likely wrote the work while sitting at a desk (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts 1, 341). In M ary's narrative the writing of the poem has fatal consequences. 'He had, as it now seems, almost antici­ pated his own destiny' ('Notes on Poems of 1822', o s a , 679) of martyrdom. 'The ungrateful world did not feel his loss, and the gap it made seemed to close as quickly over his memory as the murderous sea above his living frame. Hereafter men will lament that his transcendent powers of intellect were extinguished before they had bestowed on them their choicest treasures' ('Preface by Mrs. Shelley to Posthumous Poems', o s a , x x v ). It is Mary's intention that the martyred poet gain converts, the audience he was denied while alive.

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Accordingly, Mary Shelley represents her 'most sacred duty' ('Preface by Mrs. Shelley to the Second Collected Edition, 1839', o s a , xxiii) as creating a monument to the dead poet: 'Rome re­ ceived his ashes; they are deposited beneath its weed-grown wall, and "the world's sole monument" is enriched by his remains' ('Preface by Mrs. Shelley to Posthumous Poems', o s a , xxxvi). The same sort of enrichment will be provided by the corpus as by the corpse. The publication of the poet's fragments is 'actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape me' ('Preface by Mrs. Shelley to Posthumous Poems', o s a , xxvii). The Preface to the Second Collected Edition of 1839 expresses her 'hope, in this publication, to lay the first stone of a monument due to Shelley's genius, his sufferings, and his virtue ...' ( o s a , xxiv). The Triumph of Life is a textual broken column marking the martyrdom of a poet which the reader is asked to contemplate. Mary Shelley's mission­ ary fervour asks us to close our eyes and think of Shelley. To transform the manuscript of The Triumph of Life into the 'first stone of a monument' is a significant act of reconstruction and idealisation— it is certainly versioning. The rough-draft manu­ script of forty sheets of paper (Bodleian Manuscript Shelley adds, c. 4) embodies the flux and the delicate instability of an unfinished work. Within the draft, forty-eight lines in a fair copy, three lyrics ('To Jane: "The Keen Stars Were Twinkling'", 'Lines written in the Bay of Lerici' and 'The Hours are Flying'), a draft of a letter, and the doodles and calculations characteristic of Shelley's notebooks punctuate its text. The manuscript, then, illustrates the process of composition captured on a page. It represents the interplay of conflicting forces: the fluidity of a work in process and yet the fixity of words written on a page. But this is not the case of most printed works seen through to publication by an author, who if not having absolute authority over copyists, editors and printers, at least has some complicity in the process. This interplay between the finished and the unfinished reaches some sort of truce as the work finds its w ay into print. M ary Shelley's version of The Triumph of Life metamorphoses the flux of a work in progress into the fixity of words printed on a page. A t the same time, the aesthetic perspective of the text is altered from the process of a draft to the indeterminacy of the unfinished. That the indeterminacy is authorised by Mary Shelley in her efforts to continue her private poetic dialogue with Percy and to commemorate the poet's martyrdom is what too often has gone unacknowledged. Subsequent editions, which are descend­ ants of her version, need to be read with this in mind. Otherwise

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we risk becoming unwitting converts to her textual position. Therefore, I wonder to what degree Mary Shelley's undermin­ ing of male authority argued for by London and Percy's embrace of indeterminacy located by other critics come from reading a typographical text whose representation of the poet's work is the product of Mary Shelley's refusal to close off her husband's career. For example, it is ironic that in 'Shelley Disfigured' Paul de Man calls editions of the poem by G.M. Matthews and Donald Reiman 'authoritative' (69). Given the subject of de Man's essay, this com­ ment made in a footnote seems to betray a blindness about the poem's textual condition. To what degree is Mary Shelley's narra­ tive of Shelley's martyrdom at sea rewritten by twentieth-century critics as a heroic sacrifice to spiritual exhaustion, to disfigurative nought, to inconclusiveness? To what degree are these readings variations on Mary Shelley's missionary position? II I wish to turn to a specific example of versioning where indeter­ minacy is educed as an issue— the textual crux at lines 2 8 1-2 of the poem where Rousseau is distinguishing himself from 'the great bards of old'. Here Mary Shelley's Triumph of Life has been put aside by critics to make w ay for other kinds of missionary fervour. In an extended meditation on this passage in The Supplement of Reading, Tilottama Rajan brings a consideration of the textual condition of the poem to bear on her theoretical perspective of the indetermi­ nate character of the manuscript, which 'forces any reading we might construct to confront those places where the poem refuses to become identical with itself' (344). This discussion seems to me to be an example of how the excellence of the analysis would be better served by closer attention to the details of bibliography. I wonder whether some further thought about the versions of this passage might allow for a clearer perspective on the relationship between textual conditions of 'a seemingly endless series of imaginative variations' and the indeterminate in the poem. I will begin with Thomas Hutchinson's version in the Oxford Poetical Works, for many years the standard edition of Shelley's poetry: Of those who are infected with it— I Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain! And so my words have seeds of misery— 'Even as the deeds of others not as theirs'. And then he pointed to a com pany,...

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This reading seems to be a product of the politics of Shelley's heirs during the late nineteenth century, and while it has much to tell us about that, I think that it represents a textual corruption. Ironi­ cally, Hutchinson's intention is to correct M ary Shelley's edition. We know that Hutchinson did not see the manuscript, that his version incorporates readings introduced by Richard Garnett in his role as 'confidant and literary adviser to Sir Percy Florence Shelley and Lady Shelley' (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts i, 118). Garnett looked at the manuscript of The Triumph of Life while he was preparing his Relics of Shelley (1862). He relayed the variants from Mary Shelley's edition to Matilde Blind, who then published these cor­ rections in a review of William Michael Rossetti's 1870 edition (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts 1,118). Garnett 'recovered' (Hutchin­ son's word) the lines 'Even as the deeds of others, not as theirs. / And then'; they appear for the first time in Forman's 1876-7 edition and are also incorporated into Rossetti's second edition of 1878.4 Unfortunately, Garnett seems to garble two different states of the manuscript into one line. In the manuscript the original, 'Even as the deeds of others, even as theirs / And then he pointed to a company,' is revised by Shelley to involve the Poet/Narrator: 'Even as the deeds of others— not as theirs / I said' (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts 1, The Triumph of Life' f. 37V). Garnett's version doesn't make sense. This version, however, has been accepted for a number of years. Rajan (who wrongly identifies these lines as Mary Shelley's version) privileges it as an example of how the poem 'makes the positive a trace within the negative' (Supplement, 334). But if I am right, this particular indeterminacy is easily accounted for— Garnett cobbles together the two different ver­ sions in the manuscript. If it's a version that we could probably do without, the number of years it has prevailed suggests that it is a testament to the sort of power that Shelley's survivors still wield when we read Hutchinson's text and those based on it.5 But as Rajan points out, Shelley's revision 'not as theirs / I said pointed to a company7 (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts 1, The Triumph of Life' f. 37V; Supplement, 344-5) doesn't make sense either. It creates an indeterminacy of another sort in later editions. The two 'authoritative' editions by G.M. Matthews and Donald Reiman are both products of a careful examination of the manuscript; they seem to choose Shelley's revision as the closest we can come to the poet's last word ( Shelley's ' The Triumph of Life', 175; sp p , 463). Yet they don't agree here (or elsewhere) about what they see.6 Matthews believes Shelley has crossed out 'And then he'; his version adds an 'and' for clarity: 'I said and pointed to a company'

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(' "The Triumph of Life": A N ew Text', 294). Reiman sees the 'And then' as being deleted; hence, his '"Not as theirs," / I said— he pointed to a company'. Here, then, is an example of versioning; the unfinished manu­ script seems to bear out either version as a possibility. While Rajan locates an aporia here, I think the manuscript presents a gap that comes of its being a draft in progress and not from its reaching an impasse. Rajan comments, 'At issue is whether "Shelley" repudiates or rehabilitates Rousseau, and the problem cannot be resolved because he seems to do both' (335). I don't see w h y this should be a problem, as much of life (or, for that matter, Rousseau's autobio­ graphical writings) has to do with repudiating and accepting things at once. M y argument is borne out by an examination of how Shelley arrived at these lines, which didn't come easily. The manuscript seems to convey an example of how words (probably rather than actual deeds) can create seeds of misery. Between false starts for lines 280 and 281 Shelley leaves off writing the poem for eight pages and pursues some other matters. Part of 'To Jane: 'T h e keen stars were twinkling'", the continuation of the passage after line 227, another fragmentary lyric to Jane Williams, 'Lines Writ­ ten in the Bay of Lerici', some financial calculations and fragments of lyrics ('The hours are flying') interrupt the text.7 That Shelley drafts some love lyrics just as Rousseau is elabo­ rating on how he was betrayed by his own heart seems relevant to the tentative explorations of a draft still in process. Amidst the textual conversation between Rousseau and the Poet, Percy Shelley is thinking on the page, making connections between the concerns of his poem and his preoccupations with Jane Williams. A s William Keach notes, 'Shelley's stylistic choices and perform­ ances are inextricably enmeshed in the choices and performances of living' (Shelley's Style, 202). The drafts of verses to Jane Williams which interrupt the text are certainly about the complicated na­ ture of life's choices and performances; he addresses a woman who against his better judgement has become in some sense the object of his desires. Shelley's descriptions of Jane's singing and powers of touch echo Rousseau's encounter with the 'Shape all light'. Does the textual aside illuminate Shelley's simultaneous acceptance and condemnation of Rousseau, which he connects with his own experience in the lyrics to Jane Williams? Significantly, it is Mary Shelley's version of this section of the poem that tells us the most about the manuscript's indeterminacy. Unlike later editors, she makes it clear within the text itself that she is leaving something out:

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222 And so my words have seeds of misery!'—

[There is a chasm here in the m s . which it is impossible to fill up. It appears from the context, that other shapes pass, and that Rousseau still stood beside the dreamer, as] --------- he pointed to a company, (Posthumous Poems) Subsequent editors have tried to fill the chasm rather than exca­ vate it. For Hutchinson, who didn't see the manuscript, the 'chasm' would seem merely to represent the very tangled lines Garnett 'recovered' inaccurately. Yet it is odd that editors who have seen the manuscript choose for the most part to overlook or underemphasise the gap. If ignoring this break in the manuscript bespeaks an editor's love of clarity, a significant part of the poem's textual condition is lost. But this is to play right into Mary Shelley's hands. She is presented with an example of the affinities between love and textuality which disrupts the version of Shelley as man and as poet she wants to represent. A reluctance to decipher these par­ ticular 'sacred remains' may have something to do with their context.8 The lyrics to Jane Williams present a disruption to her textual pleasure. Rather than represent an aporia or challenge the unified image of poet, M ary Shelley wants to consolidate poem and poet into a clear narrative of sacrifice. Versions by Garnett, by Hutchinson and by subsequent editors further divert attention aw ay from the disruption in the manuscript. Richard Garnett attempts to bridge the chasm by relaying his version of the pas­ sage to other well-meaning editors who have no access to the manuscript. More recent texts allow us to gloss over this crux by producing a clear reading text. If all of this adds up to indetermi­ nacy, at least some of it can be sorted out. Doing so begins by understanding how filling in the chasm perpetuates Mary's wish that readers adopt a missionary position towards her husband's texts rather than to explore the implications that the lyric to Jane Williams offers to a reading of The Triumph of Life. To forget the poem's textual complexities in the name of our love of our own critical positions is to ignore what it has to teach us. Ill It remains to suggest however briefly what some of these larger implications of versioning might be. The complex making of love and texts that forms Mary Shelley's and subsequent versions of The Triumph of Life reminds us of the fiction of the single author. The poem's textual condition teaches us that we must open our

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eyes to the different positions— missionary or whatever—assumed by different states and readings of texts. A s Rajan observes, T h e appearance of the Garland facsimile leads us to reflect on the ways in which different reading communities establish the identity of a text so as to legitimize their own philosophical or ideological positions, and on the strategies of transference that underlie our use of literature to reinvent ourselves' (Supplement, 345). To do so is to read with a new awareness, which begins with a recognition that if The Triumph of Life provides an extreme case, it is not for its inconclusiveness but for its embodiment of the many social acts that form its versions. A t the same time it may be possible to mediate between these 'seemingly endless series of imaginative variations'. I differ with Rajan's contention that T h e manuscript, the reading texts, and the publication of the facsimile are all part of the poem's history, and it is not a question of choosing between them but rather of explor­ ing their intertextual impact on each other' (344). I can't help but feel that in spite of the fact that there will never be a single 'authoritative' text of The Triumph of Life, that it is indeed possible to maintain that some versions are more valuable than others. If the single author is dead it need not follow that all must fall into an intertextual flux of many voices. But what has been offered here is only a very tentative model for a method of reading. Given the place of prominence in Shelley's canon that the poem will likely continue to possess, further consideration of the complexities of the textual condition of The Triumph of Life can only enrich our evaluation of Shelley's poetry and perhaps our understanding of reading in general. NOTES

1. These statements about Shelley's inability to complete the work will be familiar. They encompass a variety of ideological positions: Shelley 'had worn himself out, and was ready to depart' (Bloom, Oxford Anthology , 400; quoted by Keach, Shelley's Style, 202); 'The Triumph of Life can be said to reduce all of Shelley's previous work to nought' (de Man, 66); 'A poem which christens itself The Triumph of Life and ends with the question 'Then what is life?' must be taken as inaugurating a new era in inconclusiveness' (B. Rajan, 185). How we are to read the relationship between the death and the unfinished poem is for Donald Reiman a matter resolved by 'actual textual authorities'. An examination of the watermarks of the manuscript pages has led Reiman to reconstruct its probable history of composi­ tion. By documenting the writing paper used in the Shelley house­ hold, Reiman concludes that the poem was begun in late May 1822. Shelley was still working on The Triumph of Life' when Leigh Hunt's arrival at Leghorn took him away from the manuscript on 1

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

July 1822. Reiman points to a crucial issue that readers continue to do their best to ignore: 'No other explanation is needed for the poem's unfinished state. Dead men write no poems, though editors and critics occasionally try to rewrite the poems and fragments that they leave behind' (See Bodleian Shelley M anuscripts 1,116-17). See also Taylor, Early Collected Editions of Shelley's Poems. Essays on Mary Shelley's editions of Percy's poetry by Mary Favret and by Susan J. Wolfson included in A. Fisch et al. (eds), The Other M ary Shelley appeared too recently for me to take into account here. Garnett's transcription of the 'final lines' of the poem didn't appear until 19 11. For example, David Perkins's anthology English Romantic Writers (1967) is still used as a text in North American universities. Perkins suggests he is using Hutchinson, but his text 'ends' with Locock's "'Happy those for whom the gold / O f...'". I am referring not only to their editions of the poem but to the articles Matthews and Reiman wrote in the early 1960s. See Matthews, '"The Triumph of Life": A New Text' and 'Shelley and Jane Williams', and Reiman, 'Shelley's "The Triumph of Life": The Biographical Problem'. For the order and dating of these poems see Reiman's comments in Bodleian Shelley M anuscripts 1, 337-43. How these lyrics came to be placed where they are in the manuscript is a matter of conjecture. Reiman concludes that it is 'impossible to determine' when he wrote 'Lines Written in the Bay of Lerid', while T o Jane: The keen stars were twinkling' must 'have preceded Shelley's attempts to fill the chasm after 280' (340). Mary Shelley's choice of the word 'chasm' resonates with Asia's descent to the cave of Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound , but how far this link can be made is merely a matter of speculation. Although she did publish T o Jane: The Invitation' and 'The Recollection' as a single poem in Posthumous Poems, the other poems to Jane were initially published by Medwin in 1832 and included in the Collected Poems; lin e s written in the Bay of Lerid' was published by Garnett. Unlike Asia's descent to the cave of Demogorgon where 'the deep truth is imageless', delving into the depths of this section of the manuscript is a journey that she seems to demur from undertaking. The truth here is perhaps neither deep nor imageless, love does not escape transfiguration. It is tempting to suggest that the 'chasm' enables her to maintain her missionary position.I

I am grateful to the Sodal Sdences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a grant to fund research for this essay.

'Poetry in a M ore Restricted Sense': The Canon of Sh elley's Poem s and the C an o n of his Poetry DONALD H . REIMAN

I In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge defines 'a poem' by differentiat­ ing it from two other broad classes of composition: a poem differs from 'works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleas­ ure, not truth; and from all other species' [of discourse, we might say] 'b y proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part' (n, 1 3 - 1 5 ) . That is, a poem is writing that is created as an object of 'intrinsic perceptual appeal'; it gives readers pleasure not from what it can teach them or do for them, but because the words and the w ay in which they are put together hold the readers' attention and interest, apart from all extrinsic and instrumental considera­ tions (see Gotshalk, 29).1 When Coleridge goes on to define 'poetry', however, he hesitates over the fact that many pleasurable writings, by such authors as Plato and Jeremy Taylor, were created for purposes quite apart from their aesthetic appeal; Coleridge therefore notes that 'poetry' can be found outside of poems and admits as well that 'whatever specific import w e attach to the word, poetry, there will be found involved in it [that is, the mean­ ing of the word 'poetry'] ... that a poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry.' In other words, poetry (that is, intrinsically interesting combinations of language) can be found outside of poems (that is, constructs of language that are meant to give intrinsic pleasure through the artistry of the interactions among their various elements), while many poems, though created as a whole to give pleasure rather than to convey information or attitudes, contain passages that are not intrinsically interesting in themselves (and, thus, are not poetry). In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley—building on Coleridge's thought— distinguishes between poetry in a general sense, which he defines as 'the expression of the Imagination', and 'poetry in a more restricted sense': 'those arrangements of language, and especially metrical lan­ guage, which are created by that imperial faculty' [that is, the

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Imagination] ( s p p , 480, 483). Five paragraphs later, he declares: T h e parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composi­ tion as a whole being a poem' ( s p p , 485). When Neil Fraistat and I began to think through the requisites of an edition of Shelley's poetry that might be considered stand­ ard for our time, we— surely influenced by these thinkers— arrived at similar distinctions between poems and poetry. Fraistat7s first two books explore the nature of poetic volumes and se­ quences of poems arranged by their authors as 'contextural' units that prove to be greater than the sum of the individual poems that composed them (Fraistat, The Poem; Poems in their Place).2 He was, therefore, convinced that an edition of Shelley's poems ought to maintain the groupings and order in which Shelley himself had arranged his own published volumes, in order to give the modem reader some sense of the whole volume as the poet had conceived and arranged it, however dim or imperfect this impression might be when Shelley's poetic volume was embedded in a larger collec­ tive edition. While we were planning our edition, I was also revising the 1989 Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, which explore the differences among public, confidential and private manu­ scripts and delineate distinctions in their authority and usefulness for editors and critics. Those lectures, later published as The Study of M odem Manuscripts (Reiman, 1993), point out the difference in authority between a poetic manuscript that an author has 'released' (either through publication or in a copy made for the perusal of a smaller audience as a private or confidential communication) and one that the poet instead rejected, chose not to finish, or else lacked an opportunity to complete. The first is a poem that the author by releasing it as such has designated a communication intended as an aesthetic presence— an object of intrinsic percep­ tion. (A poem may also fulfil additional functions that the author may have intended— for instance, to commemorate an event or another person, or attempt to inform, persuade or win personal sympathy from the reader.) But drafts left as unfinished as, for example, Shelley's 'Charles the First' and 'The Triumph of Life' are not, in my view, poems— though they may contain much poetry. A s a result of our discussions, Neil Fraistat and I determined to group Shelley's poems as he had arranged them in the volumes that he intended to publish, and we agreed to accord special status to the versions of Shelley's poems that he released to an audi­ ence— either through a printer or publisher, or in fair copy to the friend or group to whom the particular poem was addressed. Both these principles recognise the authority of the writer (rather than

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editors or readers) to determine the text of the poet's creation. To recognise authorial intention in these matters is, I believe, merely to recognise the nature of poems as shaped constructs rather than found objects.3 II Throughout his career, Shelley was preoccupied with the effects that his various publications were to have on their respective audiences (see Behrendt). He expressed this abiding concern not only through the studied rhetoric of his Prefaces and notes and even the letters in which he mentioned his prospective publica­ tions, but also in such matters as the typography and materials to be used to produce his books. In determining the publication of Queen Mab in March 18 13, Shelley told Thomas Hookham to have 250 copies printed, specifying that it should be 'A small neat Quarto, on fine paper & so as to catch the aristocrats: They will not read it, but their sons and daughters may7 (Letters 1,361).4In March 1820, Shelley wrote to Charles Ollier, '"Prometheus Unbound" ... is m y favourite poem; I charge you, therefore, specially to pet him and feed him with fine ink and good paper7 (n, 174). It should be no surprise, then, that each of Shelley's collective volumes over which he exercised direct control exhibits careful selection and arrangement of harmonious poems into a thematically coherent order. Besides his positive instructions to his publishers about poems that should be published together, we have this very spe­ cific injunction against publishing Julian and Maddalo with Prometheus Unbound: 'If I had even intended to publish Julian & Maddalo with m y name, yet I would not print it with Pro­ metheus— it would not harmonize. It is an attempt in a different style in which I am not yet sure of myself— a sermo pedestris w ay of treating human nature quite opposed to the idealisms of that drama— 7 (sc vm, 1021). Most editors of Shelley have agreed that the poet's intention ought to be one primary criterion in establishing the best texts of his individual works. We should also remember that authors do not, for the most part, arrange and publish their poems in the pure chronological order of their composition, according to the acci­ dents of the surrounding impressions that occasioned them, but rather group them according to such intellectual and aesthetic considerations as theme, magnitude, genre and tone. Some works were meant to represent Shelley's most heartfelt public state­ ments of his ideals and were printed with his name— including the volumes containing Queen Mab, Alastor, Laon and Cythna,

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Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Adonais and Hellas. Other works— including some of his occasional political pamphlets and such poems as Julian and Maddalo, Peter Bell the Third and CEdipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant— first appeared (or were sup­ posed to be published) without his name, either because he con­ sidered them too partial and occasional to represent the full scope of his ideas and feelings, or because their satirical thrusts were likely to damage his cause if he were known to be the author. Still other poems were sent only for the private perusal of individual friends— some, including lyrics that Shelley sent to Sophia Stacey, because they were too slight to bear his imprimatur, and others— including lyrics addressed to Mary Shelley or Edward or Jane Williams—because they were too intimate in their expression of emotion. In Epipsychidion, Shelley expressed some of his deepest personal feelings and reflections on human relations in a personal poem addressed to Teresa ('Emilia') Viviani. A s I have shown in the Garland edition of Shelley's Last Notebook (89-95), Shelley's fragmentary attempts at writing a poem to her in Italian terza rima in Bodleian ms Shelley adds. e. 20 may support Trelawny's later contention to William Michael Rossetti that Shelley first at­ tempted to write in Italian the poem that became Epipsychidion. But he completed that poem in English rather than in Viviani's native language, and after his disillusionment with her, he pub­ lished it anonymously as the work of an imaginary part of himself already dead; later, according to Ollier, he tried to suppress it. Still, his comments on Epipsychidion in letters to Charles Ollier and John Gisborne, as well as M ary Shelley's silence on it in the notes to her editions of Shelley's poems (though she later wrote a sar­ donic sketch of Viviani as T h e Bride of M odem Italy'; see M ary Shelley: Collected Tales, 32-42), show that it occupied a borderland between the private and the public poetry of the day. Though Epipsychidion as a carefully-shaped work of art certainly belongs among Shelley's public poems, it (like some of Byron's poems or Hazlitt's Liber Amoris) looks forward to the 'confessional' mode of more recent literature, in which the lines between the public and the private have become increasingly blurred. Thus, the complete canon of Shelley's poetry consists of three classes of writings: first, all of the poems that he published or released to friends during his lifetime— including some personal poems that he circulated in manuscript because he did not think that they should be made public, lest they cause scandal or hurt M ary Shelley, and some political poems that he knew could not be published in the repressive atmosphere of post-Waterloo England,

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but which he gave or sent to like-minded friends; second, such poems as Julian and Maddalo, 'Athanase: A Fragment', The Mask of Anarchy, and Peter Bell the Third that Shelley tried to release to the public, but that were either suppressed after publication, or that he was unable to publish during his lifetime— many of these being issued by Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt and other friends after his death; finally, drafts that he did not complete, failed to polish, or never attempted to release to any public— including alternative versions and false starts for passages of poems in the first two classes and abandoned poetic fragments. The circumstances of Shelley's sudden early death render it impossible to tell whether he might have rescinded his instruc­ tions to publish some of the poems in the second category, or which of the poems in the third category he might have completed and authorised for publication. We do know that he began to rewrite and reshape Queen Mab even before he published the Alastor volume, and that after reaching Italy he expressed a desire to revise The Revolt of Islam. Had he lived longer and found a willing publisher, he might have joined Wordsworth, Coleridge and other poets in turning some of his early work into new forms with new messages. But once Shelley died, there was no longer an author to change his mind— either to add to or subtract from his written words that survived in the world like sparks and embers of an unextinguished hearth. If Mary Shelley, or Richard Garnett, or some other person later changed, added or omitted words or phrases from that total, they were creating not new works by Percy Bysshe Shelley but hybrid works that cannot be said to embody either his personal sensibility or the particular voice of the Spirit of the Age that he projected during his lifetime. And the further removed from his time and place such changes or addi­ tions and subtractions are imposed, the less relevance they have to the poet's own writings. A s editors of Shelley's collected poetry, Neil Fraistat and I shall try to bear these distinctions in mind. Those poems that he pre­ pared for the press must, under the circumstances, be treated with the works that he released, just as though they had been published at the time he wished them to be. The poems published during his lifetime can be accepted as fully socialised texts, and in our edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley we shall normally retain changes made between Shelley's surviving manuscript ver­ sions and the published texts unless there is evidence that he did not accept these changes. But one case where he clearly protested and resisted changes demanded by his publisher is the censored

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revision of Laon and Cythna into The Revolt of Islam (see Reiman, The Study, 127-30 ), and we shall present this poem as he intended that it should appear in 1817. We shall also publish both his delayed and his unreleased poems without changes made after Shelley's death by his well-intentioned improvers, even if that means returning a number of his lyrics and fragments to their original unpolished or incomplete state. Ill The Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley will first provide critically-edited texts of afl the poems that Shelley 'released' to their intended audiences, whether such an audience consisted of a single friend, an uncooperative publisher, or the reading public at large. These critical texts will be supple­ mented (either directly following the relevant texts, or in Appen­ dices at the ends of their respective volumes) by important fragments, cancelled passages or suppressed versions of these public poems. These poems will appear in the chronological order in which Shelley transmitted them to their intended audiences, based on the date that Shelley either sent a poem to press for publication or (for some poems containing sentiments reserved for his intimate circle) prepared a finished copy for perusal by the person(s) addressed. That date, when Shelley considered the poem ready to meet its intended audience, we term its 'date of release'. Groups of poems that Shelley released or published together will appear in the sequence in which Shelley arranged them. Following this chronological arrangement of critically edited poems, there will appear diplomatic texts of Shelley's poetry that remained incomplete or unpolished at his death. To divide the poetic writings into two classes and edit them upon different principles, as well as to limit the main chronology to the released poems, arranged in the order which Shelley chose, alters the practice in recent editions of Shelley's poetry. Mary Shelley's editions of 1839, and those later editions up through the Julian Edition that derived from her work, segregated Shelley's major works from the shorter pieces, thus breaking up such collec­ tions as the Alastor and Prometheus Unbound volumes. Many of the earlier editors also separated Shelley's early poems up through Queen Mab from his other released poems, exiling them to the end of the edition as juvenilia. More recent editions have sometimes attempted a totally chronological arrangement, mixing major works with rejected fragments. This practice, like the modernisa­ tion of orthography and punctuation found in some editions,

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takes the modem reader further aw ay from the distinctive charac­ teristics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as from the practices of his historical era, when it was not the norm (as it is among some schools of twentieth-century poets) to publish everything that happens to get jotted down on a piece of paper. In The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, we shall try to reverse such ahistorical editorial practices. Another problem brought about by the accumulation of know­ ledge is the temptation to add more and more elaborate annotation until it all but buries Shelley's text. The earlier editors of Shelley's poetry whose principles of editing and arranging his poems we have found to be the most congenial to our conceptions are Harry Buxton Forman and George Edward Woodberry, though we shall naturally annotate more fully than they did, because of the infor­ mation accumulated during a century of additional research on Shelley's life and poetry. In the main body of the book, we shall give each poem or volume of poems a simple introductory headnote and then refer the reader to the back of the book, where additional full annotation will be found. This will help centre the reader's attention on Shelley's poetry rather than on his editors' impedimenta. Since poems in The Esdaile Notebook, for example, will be grouped together under their common date of release, we need not fix an exact date when each one was composed in order to rearrange them in a hypothetical chronological order. We can thus summarise the surviving evidence, while avoiding specula­ tive arguments on the dating of poems for which evidence is scanty or non-existent. Questions about the dating of most of Shelley's poems have already generated a rich literature that is available to biographers and others for whom such questions are especially important.5 Scholars interested in reactions to Shelley's published poems by earlier readers and critics need to maintain their historical perspective by seeing in the collected edition the order in which Shelley's poems were presented to the public— which poems appeared together, and in what order. They particularly need to know which texts were available to his contemporary readers, as well as to have texts based on good authorities that have come to light more recently. Part of this historical perspective will be supplied by having substantive variants from all primary authorities, iden­ tified by their dates, at the bottoms of the pages containing the reading text. The poems that Shelley 'released', either by publishing them or by giving polished copies to such friends as T.J. Hogg, Elizabeth

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Hitchener, Sophia Stacey, and Jane and Edward Williams, will probably occupy most of the first three of our edition's projected four volumes. Those poems that Shelley prepared for, or sent to the press— whether or not they actually appeared in print during his lifetime— will appear together with the prose prefaces, dedica­ tions and notes that he included (or planned to include) with these poems. While editing Shelley's poetic volumes that contain two or more works, we will try to give the full effect of each collection. Thus, where Shelley first prepared a text of a poem for one volume that was not published (for instance, The Esdaile Notebook), and subsequently issued a revised text of the poem in another public volume (Queen Mab), each of the authorised versions will appear in its authorially-arranged context. In other cases, where there are alternative authorised texts of short lyrics, both versions may also be published and cross-referenced.6 In editing these public poems critically, to represent, as accu­ rately as the surviving evidence permits, the texts that Shelley intended his reader(s) to see when he released them, we shall attempt to correct errata in Shelley's manuscripts and first edi­ tions, whether or not these were later noted by Shelley; we shall also try to extirpate errors of the press and editorial emendations that reflect the judgement of later times and other sensibilities; we may also include Shelley's own later revisions of words and phrases in poems that he released but later emended, but we will not normally conflate two distinct versions of a poem. Rather, we shall analyse most texts and attempt to correct them to what some editorial theorists call 'the ideal state' of a single version that Shelley chose to release to a particular public at a specific time and place. Modem readers will thus have before them texts that reflect Shelley's thorough, creative thinking about a poetic whole as he released it to an historically identifiable audience, rather than a conflation of his judgements at different times— perhaps with different audiences in mind. A few situations present special problems. For example, we will (as the Longman editors do) include the fair copies of 'Mont Blanc' and 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' by Shelley and M ary Shelley that have recently come to light in the Scrope Davies cache, while basing our critical texts on the versions that Shelley reconstructed from the rough drafts and published after he had lost the original fair-copy notebook—using evidence from the Scrope Davies versions to help correct anoma­ lies in those texts. Though foot-of-the-page collations will include some cancelled readings from the manuscripts that clarify or modify Shelley's final choices of diction, such larger rejected

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passages as the 'Prologue in Heaven' originally drafted for Shelley's Hellas will appear in appendices following the poems to which they relate. While most poems in the first three volumes of The Complete Poetry will thus be edited critically, at least Volume iv (and possi­ bly the end of Volume in) will contain the unreleased poetry— fragments or parts of works that Shelley rejected, left incomplete, or chose not to present to an audience. Shelley published or sent to press a few texts that he himself called fragments (for example, 'A Vision of the Sea' and 'Athanase: A Fragment'). But most of his unfinished drafts were gleaned from his chaotic notebooks by dedicated editors, beginning with Mary Shelley in her edition of Shelley's Posthumous Poems (1824) and continuing to the present. Some fragments are beautiful in themselves as images; others embody Shelley's thought or feelings at particular stages in his life, or illuminate his public poems. He often reworked such poetic images and ideas for use in later released poems. But such drafts should not appear in the same chronological sequence with works that enjoyed his final moulding and shaping. A few— notably T h e Triumph of Life' and 'Charles the First'— are unfin­ ished portions of major works that Shelley might well have com­ pleted and released, had he lived. But to mix even these major torsos of problematic works with his carefully-structured and highly-finished released poems, even such shorter ones as 'Ode to the West Wind', is to mislead unwary readers— including many literary critics and theorists. We shall, therefore, treat unreleased poetry archivally and present it either diplomatically or by extracting from diplomatic transcriptions of heavily-cancelled drafts the words and phrases with which Shelley was still working at the time he abandoned the whole incipient poem or passage. Rather than placing these frag­ ments in a 'chronological order' that may be factitious, since many of them cannot be dated relative to one another or to Shelley's public poetry, those poetic pieces that were published up through the Julian Edition of 1926-30 (the last completed collective edi­ tion) may be grouped historically according to the major critical editions in which they first appeared. Poems published more recently— and pieces hitherto unpublished as distinct entities— may be grouped with other poetry from the holograph manu­ scripts or notebooks in which they survive. Thus the more fin­ ished poems found with the drafts of Hellas in Bodleian m s Shelley adds. e. 7 that are not extant in more finished authorial copies may appear with other poems where they were first published, in

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Shelley's Posthumous Poems or Garnett's Relics of Shelley. The basetext, however, will be the latest extant version that seems to have had Shelley's approval, as distinguished from versions tran­ scribed and polished by M ary Shelley, Hunt, Medwin or Garnett after Percy Bysshe Shelley's death. On the other hand, smaller fragments and unpolished pieces in that Notebook that Michael J. Neth and I edited for the first time from their drafts in The Hellas Notebook might be grouped together in the sequence in which, according to our bibliographical analysis, they were drafted there. Such posthumously-garnered fragments of poetry will be edited on different principles from the authorially-sanctioned poems. Very unfinished pieces will be presented literally, just as w e shall edit rejected passages from completed poems. For some short, undeveloped fragments, we may present all cancellations with the uncancelled text; such long, developed fragments as T h e Triumph of Life', or the series of passages or scenes for 'Charles the First7 and 'Scenes for an Unfinished Drama', may include not only the substantive uncancelled text but also pertinent cancella­ tions within the main text and rejected passages in the collations. Our editorial choices will be based on the evidence of the surviv­ ing manuscripts, which indicate, in most cases, which works Shelley intended to complete (and were thus moving towards the status of public poems) and which were probably rejected drafts for other poems, or false starts of poems that he had quickly and totally abandoned. By linking doubtful items with similar fragments found in the same draft notebook (some of which may be datable), we can keep to a minimum the notes on the dating and order of minor frag­ ments, relying instead on the recent textual and critical commen­ tary on Shelley's manuscripts by citing and summarising briefly the evidence to be found in Shelley and his Circle, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, prior editions (including the Longman Shelley), and specialised books, articles and notes. W e shall rethink all scholarly questions, includ­ ing dating; but, since our arrangement does not depend on the exact fixing of precise dates of composition, w e need argue a case in detail only where previous scholars have, in our opinion, neglected or misread relevant evidence. Though the plan which I have outlined may sound clear and sensible enough, those who have grappled with Shelley's rough drafts or the textual history of his poems are aware that editing Shelley can never be so simple: Theories fall apart, the centre cannot hold'. I shall use m y remaining space to explore one

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unpublished section of The Hellas Notebook that illustrates some of the problems faced by editors and critics alike in treating the unreleased poetry. IV A s G.M. Matthews pointed out in his ground-breaking essay 'Shelley's Lyrics', many of the lyrics and fragments that Mary Shelley, Richard Garnett and later editors extracted from Shelley's draft notebooks— pieces that critics have read as registering Shelley's private and personal emotions—were originally intended to be parts of larger public works, such as Prometheus Unbound or Hellas, but were either left unfinished or were discarded from those poems. Such fragments and unreleased poems cannot be explicated or discussed in the same w ay as can a poem that Shelley published within a public context. Let me illustrate this point by turning to a lyric passage in Shelley's Hellas notebook that Matthews does not discuss. The rough drafts in Bodleian m s Shelley adds. e. 7, pages 90-5,7 reveal that Shelley was attempting to write a dialogue for Hellas that would give voice to contrasting opinions within the harem of the Sultan Mahmud on the nature of love. On one side of this debate are, apparently, a group of captive Greek or other Chris­ tian women in the Sultan's seraglio, labelled as 'Maidens' in the manuscript; on the other side is Tatima', a Moslem wife or concu­ bine of the Sultan from India— perhaps from Shelley's favourite vale of Kashmir. The chief difficulty of the passage is the lack of clear headings in the draft to designate which lines are spoken by whom. And the complexity of the argument in this rejected pas­ sage— combined with the complexity of ideas which Shelley stated elsewhere in his published poems, prefaces and essays— makes it difficult to say in every case which speaker is taking which side of the argument, or which side of the issue Shelley favoured. The debate seems to proceed something like this: Fatima, who really loves the Sultan, feels sorry for him as he contends with the political turmoil of the empire and wishes that she and Mahmud could slip off and live a simple life. A s the dialogue begins to develop, she says: [e.7, p. 90] I would not be a King, enough Of woe it is to love one[;] The path to Power is steep & rough And tempests reign above one[.]

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[e.7, p. 91] I would not climb ... the imperial throne I[s] built on ice, [which] Fortune[']s sun Thaws in its height of noon.— Then farewel King! yet were I one Care could not come so soon! Would he and I were far away, Keeping flocks on Himalay.— Although Mary Shelley first published these lines in her second edition of Shelley's Poetical Works (1839) as a pure, disembodied love lyric,8 in their compositional context, they appear as Fatima's sentiments of love for the Sultan, and they are answered by the 'Maidens', who in their earliest lines— perhaps later abandoned by Shelley— allude to the story of Judith and Holofemes from the Biblical Apocrypha— a story so often represented in paintings that Shelley saw in Italy that he could scarcely have failed to think of it when writing a scene set in a seraglio filled with slave girls. The maidens begin: [e.7, p. 92] Judith loved not her enslaver M y virgin heart beats high to [sorrow] After some false starts, signalled by indistinct words and halfcancelled lines, Shelley drops the idea of linking the ideals of his Chorus to Judith's killing of the Assyrian general. The poet's moral code would have judged this act as a treacherous murder, just as in Byron's Corsair, Conrad is revolted by Gulnare's similar act, even when it saves his life. So Shelley attempts another approach, first writing: Such bridal joys as this were never, Soft Indian, [known] to such as thee (addressing Fatima), only to revert to the main thought of the opening lines— expressed antiphonally (I believe) by two Semichoruses of the Christian maidens— but without the morally ambiguous mention of Judith: [Shall] the slave love the master? oh no May the w eak love the mighty; aye when The lion lies down with the doe And the babe in the basilisk's den[.] Yet love him not, no love can be Holy between him & thee Loves live only with the free..

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A new stanza that begins at the bottom of page 92 and continues on page 93 may be read either as the protest of the entire Chorus of Christian maidens against inequality in the love relationship, or as an appeal by one half of that chorus to traditional definitions of love and rules for marriage: Those whom equal loves unite [e.7, p. 93] In their common country[']s sight Of equal years & rank & mind To equal duties yoke & bind If laws, religion, friends approve And Heaven forbid not— they may love. The next group of lines may be read as equally ambivalent— that is, they can be imagined as expressing the sentiments either of a Semichorus urging the freedom of love, or of Fatima, replying that the Chorus's conception of love is too narrow and 'politically correct': © wrong net love, o bind not love, Like aught but Godf'ls own light above One for the bound & free[,] good or ill Love is not love, that shines not still When, however, Shelley tried to continue this thought on page 94, he was either unable to focus his conception, or he could not find the proper words. The first seventeen lines or line-fragments on the page contain not a single uncancelled word, and the entire page contains only four lines left substantially intact. Strange to say, of the lines that he did complete and left virtually uncancelled— presumably to be spoken by Fatima, while justify­ ing her love for the Sultan— two were later revised and published, not in Hellas, but as the final couplet of the sonnet to Byron, beginning, 'If I esteemed thee less': [e.7, p. 94]

like me, the worm beneath the sod M ay hope & mingle with its god.

The sequence of the cancelled lines at the top of this page leaves no doubt that this image developed as a progression from the debate on the nature of love in this uncompleted, rejected antiphonal lyric that began with the rejected line, 'Judith loved not her en­ slaver'; they were probably intended as part of Fatima's argument that the inequality of lovers presents no problem to the univer­ sally free, unconstrained nature of love.

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The draft for this lyric passage continues, in fact, for one more page, but the added lines do not mitigate the difficulties. The first uncancelled line drafted on page 95 reads: 'Shall the swallow hate summer? oh never'. This line parallels 'Shall the slave love the master? oh no'— the first uncancelled line, on page 92, after Shelley had abandoned his attempt to begin the dialogue with the loaded words Judith' and 'enslaver'. But whereas the line with 'slave' and 'master' presents a negative image— its answer pre­ sumably being 'no'— the image of the swallow loving summer is more morally ambiguous in Shelley's thought. A s I pointed out in an early essay on 'Lines written among the Euganean Hills' (Reiman, 'Structure'), Shelley in his maturity rejected as amoral and ultimately destructive of humane values the workings of natural Necessity: Men must reap the things they sow, Force from force must ever flow— Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe That love or reason cannot change The despot's rage, the slave's revenge. (11.2 3 1 -5 ) A t the end of the next verse-paragraph of 'Euganean Hills', treat­ ing the historical crimes and punishment of the city of Padua, where 'Son and Mother, Death and Sin, Played at dice for Ezzelin', the swallow appears as a symbol of the same kind of destructive Necessity as T h e despot's rage, the slave's revenge': Sin smiled so as Sin only can, And since that time, aye long before, Both have ruled from shore to shore,— That incestuous pair, who follow Tyrants as the sun the swallow, A s Repentance follows Crime, And as changes follow Time. (11.249 -55) Thus the parallelism of the lines 'Shall the swallow hate summer? oh never' and 'Shall the slave love the master? oh no' simply adds to the confusion of who is speaking and what the significance of the earlier lines might be. Perhaps Fatima is here given a speech that parallels and answers the opening declaration of the Greek Maidens, who oppose all coercion in the love relationship. A cancelled line farther down the page suggests that the Greek Maidens renew their side of the argument in these words: 'Sing, gentle sisters, that wild strain' and then 'Shall we sing', and finally:

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[e.7, p. 95] Wake that [?fierce] and mighty strain Whose mystic words are like a [?stain] Of shadows— dance that measure old9 Which [motions] speak of things untold If, however, the Greek Maidens speak all the words on page 95, their wisdom must be seen as relative rather than absolute; if they trust Necessity to overcome the tyranny of the Turkish empire, they are not yet aware that the turning cycle of offence and res­ ponse, violation and retribution, leads only—as they discover in the final Chorus— to a return of Hate and Death. When Helene Dworzan Reiman and I first began to transcribe these pages, our only guidance came from Tatsuo Tokoo's pio­ neering T h e Contents of Shelley's Notebooks in the Bodleian Library', where he had identified four distinct 'Verse fragments' on these pages.10 Though we recognised the difficulties in extract­ ing a clear poetic fragment from the tortured drafts, w e thought that w e had discovered a new text to add to the canon— an extended fragment that might take its place beside other poems and fragments extracted from this notebook by M ary Shelley and Richard Garnett. In 'Shelley's Lyrics', however, Geoffrey Matthews argues that the poem known as 'Mutability', beginning The flower that smiles today / Tomorrow dies' was written for the opening section of Hellas, where the Chorus of Greek Women of the Seraglio (not termed 'Maidens') sing antiphonally with a female Indian slave', in love with the sleeping Sultan Mahmud ( sp p , 690). That lyric which, according to Matthews, the Indian slave girl was to sing to Mahmud before he awakens, appears in two separate places in the Hellas notebook, with rough drafts appearing on the front pastedown and pages 1 and 2, while a fair copy with additional revisions appears on page 154 — perhaps a page left blank earlier between drafts for the poem entitled T h e Indian Serenade' or T h e Indian Girl's Song', and the fragment (partly) published by Richard Garnett under the title 'Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear' (see Reiman and Neth, The Hellas Notebook, xxiiixxv and liv-lv). Not until I began to write the talk from which this paper derives did it become clear how complex the issues become even after the fragmentary text is extracted from pages 90-5. Consider­ ing these pages of fragments amid cancellations and abandoned lines now, I deem it unlikely that this passage was ever an inde­ pendent poem; yet neither does it have a place in the structure of Hellas, as Shelley finally developed that work. The closest parallel

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passage is the very first one in the drama, an understated dialogue between the Chorus of Greek Women and the Indian slave girl— the first of the four choral sections, chiefly by the Greek women, that enclose three long sections of blank verse involving Mahmud, Hassan, Ahasuerus and a series of messengers from the battle­ fields of the W ar for Greek Independence. Yet the fragments on pages 90-5 do not relate directly to that opening choral dialogue, which was drafted elsewhere in adds. e. 7 and probably later, when Shelley rounded off and structured his symmetrical lyrical drama in a lost fair copy based on the drafts in this notebook. The last words that are drafted in ink at the top of page 89, just before the beginning of Fatima's lyric on page 90, became lines 19 5-6 of Hellas— the final lines of the first blank-verse section: Kings are like stars;1

-at they rise & set, they have The worship of the world, but no repose.— 11 There then follows the cancelled half-line 'But the Jew wait[s]' and the uncancelled stage direction, 'Exit Mahmud & Hassan'. This lead-in for the lyric dialogue hints that Shelley may have origi­ nally intended this chorus to respond to the image that compares kings and stars as enjoying no repose— a passage that appears at lines 195-6 in Hellas as Shelley finally shaped and published it.12 In developing the idea that kings find no repose, Fatima's initial lyric indicates that the debate between her and the Greek maidens was originally planned as the second (rather than the first) main choral section of the lyrical drama; this is where Shelley ultimately in­ serted the great metaphysical Chorus that begins 'Worlds on worlds are rolling ever / From creation to decay' (lines 197-238), which he had drafted as the opening of the Faustian 'Prologue in Heaven' before that structure was ultimately discarded. On the other hand, the cancelled phrase 'But the Jew wait[s]'— followed by the stage direction 'Exit Mahmud & Hassan'—points to a location in the published drama about lines 639-47, just before the third section of choral lyrics, which begins 'Would I were a winged cloud' and ends with one Semichorus singing, Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind, The foul cubs like their parents are, Their den is in the guilty mind And conscience feeds them with despair.— To which the other Semichorus adds:

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In sacred Athens, near the fane Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood. Serve not the unknown God in vain, But pay that broken shrine again, Love for hate and tears for blood! (11. 729-37) Thus Shelley changed his intention: he discarded the dramatic dialogue between Fatima and the Greek slaves that we have been analysing and replaced it with two other choruses that fulfil quite different ideological and artistic functions. Instead of extending the arguments on the nature of love that he had pursued in Epipsychidion, he chose to maintain his focus on the political struggle for Greek independence and its moral and historical implications. Had he retained the debate on unconstrained love between a personalised Indian Moslem named Fatima and a group of Christian Greek women, about to be sacrificed to the lust of the all-powerful tyrant, Shelley might have contributed to a philosophical dialogue on the nature of love— perhaps a piece of the discussion he had promised to write in his 'own Symposium', but it would have reduced the emphases on epistemology, meta­ physics and the philosophy of history that emerge from Hellas as he finally decided to frame and complete his last major published poem. The lyric passages beginning 'I would not be a king', devel­ oping into 'Shall the slave love her master? oh no', and continuing through 'Shall the swallow hate summer? oh never', may have suggested some ideas embodied in the lyric dialogue that now opens Hellas and in the warnings against revenge that I have just quoted, but there was no place for any version of the cancelled passages in the final text of Shelley's drama. Nor, having been conceived in a specific dramatic context that remains unclear and problematical, can the scattered completed lines which we have wrested from the chaotic drafts stand on their own as independ­ ent lyric fragments. No part of the text on pages 90-5 of m s Shelley adds. e. 7 constitutes a poem, although I hope you will agree that the pages yield several tantalising bits of poetry. V Another problem raised by the rejected lines involves the tetram­ eter couplet that Shelley revised to a pentameter couplet and recycled as the conclusion of his 'Sonnet to Byron'. This sonnet, partially drafted without title in Bodleian m s Shelley adds. e. 17, exists in a holograph fair copy at the British Library headed simply 'Jan[uary] 22. Lines to------ ' (The 'Charles the First' Draft

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Notebook, lv-lvi, 132); our knowledge that it was addressed to Byron comes from Thomas Medwin, who first published the opening seven lines of it in The Shelley Papers (37). To remind you of the problem raised by the origin of these lines, let me quote that sonnet, which begins, in its draft form but not in the fair copy, with an unusual bracketed, introductory disclaimer as a fifteenth line. The text of the other fourteen lines is quoted from the fair copy, which has recently surfaced at the British Library: [I am afraid these verses will not please you, but] If I esteemed you less, Envy would kill Pleasure, & leave to Wonder & Despair The ministration of the thoughts that fill M y mind, which, like a worm whose life may share A portion of the Unapproachable, Marks your creations rise as fast & fair A s perfect worlds at the creator's will, An d bows itself before the godhead there.

a b a b c b c b

But such is m y regard, that, nor your fame Cast on the present by the coming hour, N or your well-won prosperity & power Move one regret for his unhonoured name Who dares these words.— The worm beneath the sod M ay lift itself in worship to the God.

d e e d f f

Shelley's heading on the fair copy fixes this sonnet as having been inspired and probably drafted, if not finished, on 22 January 1822 (that is, two and a half months after Hellas had been completed and sent to England for publication). Clearly, therefore, the lines on pages 90-5 of m s Shelley adds. e. 7 cannot be treated as a separate poem or poems. Not only had the author discarded them, but he had employed the substance of the idea that concludes the 'Sonnet to Byron' in a new context that forbade any later use in the context that had inspired their composition. If the editors of a collective edition of Shelley's poetry were to include, among variants to the Sonnet, the couplet from page 94 of adds. e. 7, 'Like me, the worm beneath the sod / May hope & mingle with its god', with its context relating to Fatima's submissive sexual love for the Sultan Mahmud, they would add associations to the lines that have no resting place either in Hellas or in the 'Sonnet to Byron'. Shelley did not mean to associate either Byron with the Turkish tyrant or himself with Fatima's submissive sexual adoration. His decision to recycle the couplet was an artistic, literary one. He first discarded the image

‘Poetry in a More Restricted Sense'

243

as having no place in the final structure of Hellas, but liked it well enough as 'poetry7 to reuse the metaphor, some of the words, and the rhyme in a different poem that produced its own distinct literary context and associations, which may hark back to Julian and Maddalo (see sc vi, 857-65, and Reiman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 52-5). VI The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley will undoubtedly in­ clude some version of the lines from pages 90-5 of Bodleian m s Shelley adds. e. 7. But Neil Fraistat and I shall treat the salvageable lines there not as a 'poem', but as fragments of 'poetry7— a failed or rejected attempt towards a passage in Hellas that neither has an equivalent in that poem nor deserves status as a separate lyric effort. The text will be included, along with the so-called T ro logue in Heaven' and many shorter rejected passages drafted for Hellas. It will also be cited as fully available in its primary context in the photo-facsimile and diplomatic transcriptions in volume xvi of The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts. One service that our edition will provide is to tell students and critics where they can find such full transcriptions and analyses. The two lines among these drafts that later appeared in Shelley's 'Sonnet to Byron', as I have shown, are not really vari­ ants of that poem, for which they were not drafted. But a note on the text in our edition will point to their existence within the different context of the rejected drafts for Hellas. The responsibil­ ity of editors, after all, is not to increase the number of items in a poet's canon, either to aggrandise their editions or to provide work for future explicators, but to determine— as well as the evidence allows— what the author actually produced and what his or her likely intentions were for that production. Seeing those services as our principal tasks, w e intend to maintain the canoni­ cal distinction between Shelley's poems and his poetry. NOTES

1. The quoted definition is part of Gotshalk's larger 'relational' system of aesthetics, the most comprehensive and balanced view of the subject that I have encountered. 2. In this paper, I am indebted to Neil Fraistat's thinking and to our frequent discussions of these matters. Both of us have also profited from several of the editorial, textual and literary theories currently rampant. But if Neil were writing this paper, he would do so with slightly different ideas and emphases. I shall, therefore, for simplic­ ity of reference, proceed as though the argument were by one person, rather than being the product of a complex and ongoing dialogic process within a historical context.

244

Donald H. Reiman 3. To someone who might attempt to complicate the issue by pointing to 'found art' and 'random music' in either primitive or Post-Mod­ ernist art, I would simply point out that the poet whose works we are editing and the readers and theorists of his era had no such concep­ tion of poetry. Shelley demonstrably believed in creating, recasting, revising and polishing his verses until he had created a work of a recognisable genre, with particular metrical features and structural shape, before releasing it to any audience, however small. 4. The format of Queen M ab, as I have noted elsewhere, was to support the ruse of the title, for Queen Mab was a character as much associ­ ated with collections of eighteenth-century children's literature as Mother Goose is now. 5. The primary authorities for dating the Shelley's poems in The Esdaile Notebook are the editions of those poems by Cameron (1964), Rogers (1966) and Reiman (1985), Shelley and his Circle, ii- iv, and the first volumes in the collective editions of Shelley's poetry by Rogers (Oxford English Texts) and Matthews and Everest (Longman). 6. One question requires more thought: should lyrics that Shelley sent sequentially to periodicals or to particular friends appear simply according to their earliest probable date of release, or should we group together poems addressed to the same individual or pub­ lished in the same periodical, on the assumption that poems with like histories of transmission assumed a unified audience analogous to those published together in a single poetic volume? 7. See The Hellas Notebook, ed. Reiman and Neth, pp. 96-101. Bodleian ms Shelley adds. e. 7 (which is cited by its Bodleian pagination) is quoted from the facsimile and transcriptions in The Hellas Notebook, with the permission of Michael J. Neth and the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. The text as published here has been extracted from the complete transcriptions of pages 89-95 (the joint work of Helene Dworzan Reiman and me). Words in brackets are probable but not certain readings; words scored through are cancelled in the manuscript, but are necessary to the context or the versification. 8. In The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. [Mary W.] Shelley [one vol.], p. 321, this is number 'xx' among the undated 'Fragments' that follow 'Poems Written in 1822'. 9. This 'measure old' may be the 'Phrygian' dance revived as part of the Republican festivals during the early stages of the French Revolu­ tion. 10. Tokoo, listing the general contents of each notebook page by page and identifying wherever possible what pages contained parts of Shelley's published poetry, lists these largely unpublished pages as 'I would not be king' on pp. 90-1; 'Judith loved not her enslaver' on pp. 92-3; an unlabelled, mostly cancelled passage on p. 94; and 'Shall the swallow hate the summer, oh never' on p. 95 ('Contents', 12). 11. These lines echo the final paragraph of (all versions) of Francis Bacon's essay 'Of Empire', which in the expanded version of 1625 reads: 'Princes are like to Heavenly Bodies, which cause good or evil times; and which have much Veneration, but no Rest'. 12. The care with which Shelley reshaped the chaotic drafts in Bodleian ms Shelley adds. e. 7 can be seen by comparing his drafts in The Hellas Notebook with Edward Williams's press copy of Hellas in Hellas: A Lyrical Drama (The M anuscripts of the Younger Romantics), or with the modem critical text in spp, 406-40.

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Notes on Contributors

Marilyn Butler is Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, and formerly King Edward vii Professor of English Literature at Cambridge. Her books include Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975), Peacock Displayed (London, 1979) and Romantics , Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background , 1760-1830 (Oxford, 1981). She has edited numerous Romantic texts and has held visiting academic posts in the usa and Australia. Timothy Clark is Lecturer in English at the University of Durham. He is the author of Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford, 1989) and Derrida , H eidegger , Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge, 1992). He is Co-Editor of the Oxford Literary Review. Nora Crook is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts and Letters at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge. She has written Shelley's Venomed Melody (with Derek Guiton, 1986), Kipling's M yths of Love and Death (1990) and The 'Charles the First' Notebook (1991), and has published articles in the Keats-Shelley Review. She has edited Frankenstein and Valperga for The Novels and Selected Works of M ary Shelley (8 vols, 1996), of which she is the General Editor. She is currently transcribing and editing (with Timothy Webb) one of Percy Shelley's last notebooks. Stuart Curran is Andrea Mitchell Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on Shelley and has recently co-edited (with Betty T. Bennett) the collection Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore, 1995). His forthcoming work includes editions of Mary Shelley's Valperga (Oxford) and Frankenstein: The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition, a cd - rom publication from University of Pennsylvania Press. Jack Donovan is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York. He is currently editing Shelley's Laon and Cythna for the second volume of the Longman Annotated Poets edition of The Poems of Shelley. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi is Professor of English at Stanford Univer­ sity. She is the author of Shelley's Goddess: Maternity , Language , Subjectivity (Oxford, 1992), and is currently working on a booklength study entitled Victorian Medievalism: The Resurrection of the Gothic Body'.

26o

Notes on Contributors

Jerrold E. Hogle is Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona. He is also the current presi­ dent of the International Gothic Association. A Guggenheim and Mellon Fellow, he has published widely on Romantic poetry and prose, literary theory and Gothic. He is best known in Shelley studies for Shelley's Process: Radical Transference and the Development of his M ajor Works (Oxford, 1988). William Reach is Professor of English at Brown University. His edition of Coleridge's poems for the Penguin English Poets series appears September 1996 . He is currently completing a book about language and politics in British Romanticism. Michael O'Neill is Professor of English at the University of Durham. He has recently completed (with Donald H. Reiman) Fair-Copy M anuscripts of Shelley's Poems in European and American Libraries, a volume in Garland's Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics series. Ralph Pite lectures in English at the University of Liverpool. He wrote The Circle of O ur Vision: Dante's Presence in English Romantic Poetry

(Oxford, 1994), and is currently researching ideas of regionalism and identity in late nineteenth-century literature. Donald H. Reiman is Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Delaware and has been labouring in the Shelley vineyard since 1958. Since 1965 he has been editor of Shelley and his Circle (Cambridge m a ), the catalogue edition of that collection at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library (now the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle at the New York Public Library). In 1983 he also became the General Editor of The Bodleian Shelley M anuscripts and The M anuscripts of the Younger Romantics (New York and London). As his essay mentions, he is currently engaged in editing The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Baltimore) with Neil Fraistat, and the two of them are also updating the Norton Critical Edition of Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Charles J. Rzepka is Professor of English at Boston University. His publications include The Self as M ind (1986) and, most recently, Sacramental Commodities (1995), as well as numerous articles on Romantic poetry and writers. He is currently working on a socio­ economic history of the Sublime. Lisa Vargo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She has published essays on Shelley, Graham Greene and Mary Robinson. Her current project is an edition of Mary Shelley's Lodore.

Index

Aarslef, Hans, 54 Adams, Hazard, 20,26n Adamson, Carlene, 190 Aiken, Susan, 26n Albertus Magnus, 32 Altieri, Charles, 20 anachronism, 9 1,94,98-9,10 0-6 Archimedes, 32,39 authorship, author (concept of)/ 2 -3 ('joint authorship'), 4 2-7 Aveling, Edward, 90

Bronte, Emily, 24,25 Brown, Nathaniel, 6 Bruns, Gerald L., 26n Burke, Edmund, 3 1 Bush, George, 87,89 Butler, Marilyn, 3 , 1 1 , 1 3 , 4 2 - 7 Byron, Lord, 1 2 ,2 4 ,1 9 7 ,2ion, 228,237,

242 The Corsair, By, 235-6

The Destruction of Sennacherib',

155

'The Devil's Drive' [Byron], 172 Bacon, Francis, 'Of Empire', 244n Bal, Mieke, i95n Bastille, 88 Bataille, Georges, 194, i96n Baudrillard, Jean, 56,58,68,69 Behrendt, Stephen, 12,8 5,79 -80 ,227 Bell, Dr, i62n Bennett, Betty, i62n Bentham, Jeremy, 26n, 3 1,5 4 ,6 2 ,7 2 Bible, Biblical Apocrypha, 236 Book of Job, 135 Book of Revelation, 13 8 ,1 4 4 ,15 m Biblical, 1 2 1 ,1 3 5 Biblical canon, 1 8 ,26n biographical reading, 6,8,159-60 Blackwood's, 132 Blake, William, 2 1,2 5 ,3 8 The Book of Thel, 118 Vision of the Daughters of Albion, 81, 118 ,19 3 Blanchot, Maurice, 93 Blank, Kim, 25,166 Blind, Matilde, 220 Bloom, Harold, 7 ,7 0 ,1 1 9 ,1 2 9 ,223n Boccaccio, Giovanni, Teseide, 183 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11 Brewer, John, 64 Bridges, Robert, 116 Bronfen, Elizabeth, i95n Bronte, Charlotte, 24

Don Juan, 16 2 a

Calderon, Pedro, 127 Caldwell, Richard, 1 1 6 ,1 1 8 ,1 2 4 ,1 3 1 Cameron, Kenneth Neill, 74,79 ,8 1,8 4 , i 96n

canon, canon-formation, etc., 1 ,2 ,3 ,7 , 11 -2 7 ,4 2 ,11 1 ,1 6 4 -7 9 ,2 2 5 ,2 3 9 Catherine the Great, 39 Cato Street Conspiracy, 123 Chandler, Raymond, 24 Chartist, 78 Chateaubriand, he Genie du Christianisme, 142,150 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 12, 'Knight's Tale',

183

Christ, 150,208 Christensen, Jerome, 43,69 Christian doctrines, 23 Christian virtues, 173 Christianity, 1 3 ,1 4 ,2 6 ,1 5 0 ,15 8 ,17 3 Clairmont, Claire, 30 ,60 ,157, i62n, i63n, 18 3 ,18 4 ,18 9 ,19 1 Clairmont, Mrs, 184 Clark, Timothy, 4 ,9 1-10 7 class, 5 9 -6 6 ,7 1,7 7 ,8 5,8 9 Cobbett, William, 59 ,6 1,6 2 Paper against Gold, 74 Political Register, 74 Coleridge, J.T., 132

262 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42-3,54,88, 169 ,172,225 Biographia Literaria, 225 (with Southey) The Devil's Thoughts', 172 'Kubla Khan', 153 comparative literature, 3 Condillac, Etienne, 3 1,5 4 Condorcet, Marquis de, 31 Cottle, Joseph, 43 courtly love, 18 1,18 6 ,19 0 ,19 3 ,19 4 Cowper, William, The Poet, The Oyster, and Sensitive Plant', 124 Cronin, Richard, 10 2 ,133 Crook, Nora, 5-6 ,15 2 -6 3 Cruikshank, George, 175 cultural materialist, 12 Curran, Stuart, 3,2 8 -4 1 curriculum, 2 1,2 2 ,2 4 ,2 8 ,3 0 national curriculum, 1 1 Dacre, Charlotte, The Kiss', 185 Daniel, Amaut, i96n Dante, Alighieri, 12 ,13 ,39 ,9 2 ,9 9 ,10 0 , 112 ,13 9 ,18 6 -9 ,19 6 -2 11 The Canzoniere, 2ion D ivine Comedy, 7 ,1 3 9 ,1 9 7 - 2 11 Inferno, 188,199,200, 204,206,209, 2ion, 2 1m La Vita Nuova, 187,198 Paradiso, 198 Purgatorio, 7,139,198-200,204-9, 2ion, 2 1m Darwin, Erasmus, 1 17 Davie, Donald, 1 1 3 -1 4 Davies, Scrope, 232 Davy, Humphry, 43 Dawson, Paul, 76,85,89, i07n, 133 de Man, Paul, 5 1,7 2 , i07n, 205,219 deconstruction, deconstructive etc., 2, 4 ,2 5 ,5 1 ,9 1 -2 ,9 3 ,9 7 ,1 0 2 ,1 1 4 Democratic Socialists of America, 76 De Quincey, Thomas, 26n Derrida, Jacques, i95n d'Holbach, Systhne de la Nature, 31 Dibdin, Thomas, 40 differend, 99-100,104,106 Donovan, John, 5 ,13 2 -4 5 Duff, David, 133 Esch, Deborah, i07n Edinburgh Review, 173 editing (theory of), 2 ,7 ,2 1 ,2 15 - 4 4 education, 3,2 0 ,28 -4 1,4 9

Index Eilenberg, Susan, 42-3 Eliot, T.S., 19 7 ,21m , 'Gerontion', 152 Engels, Friedrich, 80 Essick, Robert, 54 evaluation, evaluate, 1 -8 ,1 5 ,1 6 ,2 5 , 26n, 4 8 -50 ,61,67,72,9 9 ,10 0 , 1 1 1 , 1 1 2 ,1 1 5 , 1 3 2 - 3 , 1 5 2 ,2 1 6 Everest, Kelvin, 75 The Examiner, 132 ,14 2 Favret, Mary, 224n Feldman, Paula, 29,183 feminism, 6 ,7 ,12 ,7 6 ,8 7 ,8 8 Ferguson, Frances, 16 5,17 7 Fetter, Frank, 64 Foot, Paul, 7 5-8 ,8 2,8 3,8 4 ,8 6 ,8 8 Foote, G.W., 79,80 Forman, Harry Buxton, 12 8 ,22 0 ,231 Foucault, Michel, 57,68-9 Fowler, Ailistair, 13 ,1 4 Fraistat, Neil, 7 ,15 3 , i62n, 216,226, 229 ,2 4 3,243n French Revolution, 10 1 ,1 3 3 ,1 3 4 ,1 3 8 , 14 0 ,1 4 1 ,1 4 2 ,1 4 3 ,1 4 8 ,1 7 9 Freud, Sigmund, i96n Fruman, Norman, 42 The Fudger Fudged, 170 ,173 Garnett, Richard, 220, 222, 224n, 229, 234,239 Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, 6,180-96 George III, 165-6 Gericault, Theodore, The Raft of the Medusa, 154 German Romanticism, 92-4 Gisborne, John, 30 ,10 1,228 Gisborne, Maria, 3 0 ,10 1,15 5 , i62n Godwin, William, 3,30 -2 ,34 ,38 ,4 0 , 4 4 -6 ,54 ,6 2 ,14 1 Political Justice, 32 St. Leon, 3,4 4-6 Goethe, J.W., Faust, 21m , 240 'Gretchen am Spinnrade', 152 Gotshalk, D.W., 243 Gower, David, 113 Gramsci, Antonio, 77 Guillory, John, 1 8 ,2 3 ,2 6 ,27n Hall, Jean, 16 9 ,1 7 2 ,1 7 3 ,1 7 5 ,1 7 9 Harris, Wendell, 13, 20,21 Havens, Raymond Dexter, 29 Hazlitt, William, 105, loyn, 152, i63n Liber Amoris, 228 The Round Table, 105 Heidegger, Martin, 100,191

263

Index Hellenistic poets, 13 Helvetius, Claude-Adrien, 31 Hemans, Felicia, 25 Hendrix, Richard, 78 Hesiod, 136 Theogony, 136 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 18 ,19 Hitchener, Elizabeth, 18 5 ,2 3 1-2 Hoagwood, Terence Allen, 15 ,2 4 ,17 9 Hogg, T.J., 2 9 ,3 1,2 3 1 Hogle, Jerrold E., 4 ,4 8-74 ,86 ,9 1,9 2, 9 5 -8 ,18 5 ,18 7 ,18 8 ,18 9 Holmes, Richard, 29 Homer, 1 3 ,2 4 ,1 5 1 Homeric hymns, 103 Hone, William, The Political House that Jack Built , 17 5 ,17 7 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, i95n Hume, David, 3 1 ,3 2 ,5 1 ,5 3 ,5 9 'Of Money', 74 'Of Public Credit', 74 Hunt, Leigh, 30 ,6 2 ,10 0 ,14 2 ,15 m , 184, 19 8 ,223n, 229,234 Hutchinson, Thomas, 219,222 Illuminati, 35 International Socialist Organization, 75 intertextuality, 42,66 Jesus, 12 ,2 5 Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas, 172 Jones, Frederick L., 29 Jones, Stephen E., 172 judgement, 113 Kant, Immanuel, 39 Keach, William 4 -5 ,5 3 ,7 5 -9 0 ,12 0 ,2 2 1 Keats, John, 96,184,188 Endymion, 183 Lamia, 184 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems, 184

'On a Grecian Urn', i96n Kermode, Frank, 1 7 ,2 2 ,26n, 1 1 1 , 1 1 4 , 13 1 Kierkegaard, Soren, Repetition, 2 1m King-Hele, Desmond, 116 Kipling, Rudyard, Rewards and Fairies, 161 Kucich, Greg, 178 Kurzweil, Edith, 18 ,19 ,2 4 Lacan, Jacques, 6 ,18 0 -2 ,18 5,18 7 -9 6 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 188

Seminar VII, 18 0 -2,19 0 -1,19 3,19 4 ,

195

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 92 Lamb, Charles, 3 1,4 3 Langhome, John, 29 Leavis, F.R., 3 , 1 1 1 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 3 , 1 1 7 , 1 9 7 - 8 Leighton, Angela, io7n Leverenz, David, 17 0 ,17 7 Lewis, M.G. ('Monk Lewis'), 12 The Literary Gazette, 173 Lloyd, Charles, 43 Locke, John, 3 1 ,3 2 ,5 3 ,5 5 ,5 8 Lockhart, John, 132 Locock, C.D., 153,19 0 London, Bette, 216 Lovell, Robert, 43 Lucretius, 32,140 ,188 Luxemburg, Rosa, 76 Lyotard, Jean-Fran^ois, 99 Magnuson, Paul, 99 Malthusian, 81 Marx, Eleanor, 90 Marx, Karl, 64,80 Marxist, 75 Massey, Irving, 217 Matthews, G.M., 152 ,219 ,2 20 ,2 35, 239 Mayer, Elsie, 153-4 McGann, Jerome, io6n, 18 5 ,18 7 ,2 15 , 2 17 McKendrick, Neil, 64 Medwin, Thomas, 80,208,224^ 234, 242 Mellor, Ann K., 6 Michelangelo, 112 Mileur, Jean-Pierre, io6n Milton, John, 12 ,13 ,39 ,9 2 ,9 4 ,9 5,9 6 , 10 0 ,12 0 ,12 1,14 4 Comus, 151 Lycidas, 96 'Of Education', 41 Paradise Lost, 9 4,120 ,14 4 Paradise Regained, 94 Second Defence of the English People,

41

Monboddo, Lord, 54 money (nature of), 59-71 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, The Lover7, 155 Montesquieu, Baron de, 31 Moore, Thomas, 6 ,1 7 3 - 5 ,1 7 7 The Fudge Family in Paris, 166-7, 16 9 ,17 3,17 5 Lalla Rookh, 174

264

Index

Moorman, Mary, 29 Morgan, Lady, The M issionary, 45 Moses, Wilson, 24 Mountcashell, Lady, 30 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 92 Nellist, Brian, 1 7 1 ,1 7 3 Neth, Michael 234 new criticism, 1,9 9 Old Testament, 1 2 ,1 3 5 Ollier, Charles, i62n, 227,228 O'Neill, Michael, 5, io6n, 1 1 1 - 3 1 , 1 7 4 Orwell, George, 85 Ottoman Empire, 140 Pacchiani, Professor, 183 Paine, Thomas, 3 1 ,6 2 ,1 4 1 Rights of M an, 141 pantisocracy, 43 Paracelsus, 32,45 Partisan Review, 18 Pausanias, Description of Greece, 139 Peacock, Thomas Love, 26n, 44,100,

156/171

G ryll Grange, 44

Rajan, Tilottama, 4 8,50 -1,55,56 ,6 8 , 9 1-2 ,9 7 -8 ,2 19 ,2 2 0 ,2 2 1,2 2 3 reader response, 1 Reading (Shelley's reading), 28-31 Reagan, Ronald, 89 Reid, Thomas, 32 Reiman, Donald H., 7 ,8 9 ,1 1 2 ,1 1 3 , 2 1 5 ,2 1 7 ,2 19 ,2 2 0 ,223n, 224n, 225-44 Reiman, Helene Dworzan, 2 39 ,244n Renaissance drama, 30 revolutionary left, 75-90 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 6 ,164 ,16 6-9 'Benjamin the Waggoner ...',16 8 'Peter Bell7, 166,168 Ricardo, David, 59,61, The price of Gold', 74 Robinson, Charles E., 131, i62n 'Romantic Ideology7, 92 'Romantic irony, 9 3-5,9 7 -9 ,10 1,10 3 , 105 Rossetti, William Michael, 220,228 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 31,39 ,54 ,9 8 , 197,202,203,205,208,209,221 Rule, John, 64 Rzepka, Charles, 3 ,6 ,1 1 - 2 7

The Four Ages of Poetry7, 20 ,26n Headlong Hall, 3,44 Nightmare Abbey, 166,174

Perkin, Harold, 64 Peterfreund, Stuart, 73 Peterloo Massacre, 8 4 ,8 6 ,16 5 ,17 7 Petrarch, 194 Pfau, Thomas, 191 Pite, Ralph, 7 ,1 9 7 -2 1 1 Plato, Platonic, 12 ,5 1,10 0 ,2 0 1,2 2 5 Symposium, 37 ,13 0 ,2 4 1 Plumb, J.H., 64 'poem' (as distinct from 'poetry7), 2 25 6 ,2 2 7,2 2 8 ,2 30 ,2 3 1,2 3 2 ,2 3 3, 234 ,24 1,24 3 'poetry7 (as distinct from 'poem'), 2 256,230,234, 241,243 Pope, Alexander, Essay on Criticism,

173

Post-Modernist art, 244n postmodern, postmodernism, 48,99 poststructuralism, poststructuralist, 1, 4

Pound, Ezra, 1 1 2 ,1 1 6 psychoanalysis, 2 ,18 0 -1 Q uarterly Review, 1 1 7 ,1 3 2 ,1 5 4 ,1 5 8

Quinn, Mary, 153

Saddam Hussein, 87 satire, 7 ,1 6 5 ,1 7 2 ,1 7 8 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 4,54, i95n Saville, Julia, 180 scepticism, 15 ,5 2 ,7 0 ,7 7 ,13 0 Schlegel, Friedrich, 9 2 -4 ,9 7-8 ,2ion Scott-Kilvert, Diana, 29,183 Scrivener, Michael, 76,78, i07n, 166 Searle, J.R., 72 'Sentimental'poetry, 185-6,190 Setzen, Sharon M., 92,94-5,96,98 Shakespeare, William, 1 , 6 , 1 2 , 1 1 5 Hamlet, 177 The Tempest, i62n Troilus and Cressida, 115 Shaw, Bernard, 79 Shelley, Elizabeth, 184 Victor and Cazire poems, 155 Shelley, Lady, 220 Shelley, Mary, 7 ,12 ,2 4 ,3 0 ,4 2 ,4 6 ,7 7 , 8 5 ,8 7 ,12 2 ,15 3 ,15 4 -6 3 ,18 3 ,18 4 , 18 6 ,18 8 -9 ,19 1,19 8 ,2 15 -2 4 ,2 2 8 , 2 29 ,232,234 ,235,236 ,239 'The Bride of Modem Italy', 182, i95n, 228 Frankenstein, 12 ,2 5 ,4 2 ,2 16 Journals (MS), 29,30 The Last M an, 163

265

Index M atilda, 16311 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (works) 'A Vision of the Sea', 4 - 5 ,1 1 6 ,1 5 2 -

63,233

Adonais, 8 ,3 8 ,9 5-7 ,19 7 ,2 2 8 Alastor volume, 198,229-30 Alastor, 33 -4 ,4 3 -7 ,5 2 ,9 7 ,2 2 7

'Athanase: A Fragment', 229,233 The Cenci, 116 ,15 4 ,15 9 ,2 2 8 'Charles the First', 226,233,234, 241 'The Cloud', 116 ,16 0 The Coliseum, 5 ,10 2 -7 A Defence of Poetry, 3 ,1 2 ,1 4 ,1 5 ,2 0 , 2 3 ,26n, 3 4 ,36 ,38 -4 1,4 9 ,54 -5, 60, 9 1-2, 98, 100-1, 112, 114 -15 , 164, 174, 185, I92-4, I97, 225 The Devil's Walk', 172 'Difficulty of Analysing the Human Mind', io7n 'Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks', 37-8 'England', 80,82 Epipsychidion, 6 ,159 ,180 -9 6 ,19 7, 228,241 The Esdaile Notebook, 232,244 'Fiordispina', 184,186 'Fragments of an Unfinished Drama', 2 1m Hellas, 10 1,20 0 ,20 3,228,233,235,

237, 239-43

'The Hours are Flying', 2 18 ,22 1 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty', 34, 232 'The Indian Girl's Song', 152,239 'The Indian Serenade', 152,239 Julian and Maddalo, 16 ,7 7 ,16 1,2 2 7 , 228,229,243 Laon and Cythna (see also The Revolt of Islam), 4 ,5 2 ,5 3 ,10 1, io7n, 13 2 -5 1,2 2 7 Letter to M aria Gisborne, 156, i62n,

174

'Lines Written among the Euganean Hills', 38,162, 238 'Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration', 80 'Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici', 218, 2 2 1 ,224n 'Love, Hope, Desire and Fear', 239 'Marianne's Dream', 155, i63n The M ask of Anarchy, 1 1 ,1 5 ,8 1 - 6 , 17 2,17 4 ,2 2 9 'Mont Blanc', 13 ,5 2 ,16 5 ,2 3 2 'Mutability', 239

'O World, O Life, O Time', 1 1 1 'Ode to Heaven', 159 'Ode to Liberty', 159 'Ode to the West Wind', 90 CEdipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, i62n, 228

'On Life', 4 8 ,4 9 ,5 0 ,5 1,5 2 ,5 3 ,5 4 , 5 6 ,6 0 -1,6 9 ,7 2 ,10 0 ,18 7 'On Love', 3 7 ,6 7 ,7 0 -1,18 7 -8 'On the Devil, and Devils', 126 'Ozymandias', 91 Peter Bell the Third, 6,164-79,228, 229 A Philosophical View of Reform, 38, 4 8 ,50 ,59 -62,67,70 -2,77,9 0 Poetical Works (1839), 2 15 ,2 18 Posthumous Poems (1824), 2 1 5 ,2 1 7 1 8 ,224n, 230 ,233,234 Prometheus Unbound volume, 5,152 , 154,159 ,16 0 ,230 Prometheus Unbound, 2 5,36 ,38 ,52 , 8 4 -5 ,9 1,9 7 ,12 7 -8 ,13 0 ,17 3 ,17 4 , 209,224n, 227-8,235 Queen M ab, 3 1 ,3 2 ,3 4 ,3 9 ,2 2 7 ,2 2 9 30 ,2 3 2 ,244n 'Recollection', 224n The Revolt of Islam (see also Laon and Cythna), 5 ,34 -5 ,3 6 -7,8 4 , 8 6 -8,21m , 229 'Satire on Satire', 6 ,17 2 'Scenes for an Unfinished Drama', 234 The Sensitive-Plant, 113 -3 1,15 9 -6 0 'Similes for two Political Charac­ ters of 1819', 163 The Skylark', 160 'Song to the Men of England', 7880,86 'Sonnet to Byron', 241,242 veculations on Metaphysics, 127 T o Jane: The Invitation', 224n T o Jane: The Keen Stars Were Twinkling', 2 1 8 ,2 2 1 ,224n Tower of Famine', 154 The Triumph of Life, 7 ,31,38 ,39 ,4 0 , 5 1 ,7 2 ,9 8 ,1 5 2 ,1 9 7 -2 11 ,2 1 5 -2 4 , 226,233,234 The Witch of Atlas, 38, i62n, 174, 1 7 5 / 179 Shelley, Sir Percy Florence, 220 Shelley, William, 154-8 Shelley's Revolutionary Year, 78,82-4 Shklovsky, Viktor, 26n sign, (concept of), 49-71 Simonides, 17 1

266

Index

Simpson, David, 94,105 Siskin, Clifford, 64,57 Sismondi, J.C.L.S. de, 39 Smith, Adam, 68 The Wealth of Nations, 61 Smith, Charlotte, 25 Smith, James, 167-8 socialist, 4 ,76 ,78,8 8 Socialist Workers Party, 75 Socrates, 12,25,20 8 Sophocles, 130 Antigone, 18 1-2 ,19 0 ,19 2 ,19 5 The Women ofTrachis, 130 Southey, Robert, 4 3 ,4 6 -7 ,16 9 ,17 2 (with Coleridge) The Devil's Thoughts', 172 Joan of A rc, 87-8 Thalaba, 45-7 Spenser, Edmund, 8 7 ,12 6 ,95n The Faerie Queene, 126 Ruines of Rome, V irgils ' Gnat, Muiupotmos, Complaints, 1 6 m

St Clair, William, 31 Stacey, Sophia, 228,232 Steiner, George, 1 1 1 Stillinger, Jack, 42 sublime, 47,10 5 Sunstein, Emily, 184 Swift, Jonathan, 25 Taylor, Jeremy, 225 Taylor, William, of Norwich, 43 Tetrault, Ronald, io6n Thatcher, Margaret, 89 Theocritus, 95 Thomas, Brook, 26n Thompson, E.P., 64 Tokoo, Tatsuo, 2 39 ,244n Tompkins, Jane, 1 8 -1 9 ,26n Tooke, Home, 54 transference, 48,95-6,98 Trelawny, Edward, 154, i62n Ulmer, William, 50, io6n utility, 26n, 27n, 72,100 value, values, 1 , 3 - 4 , 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 3 , 1 7 , 1 8 , 19 ,2 1,2 2 ,4 8 ,6 8 ,6 9 ,10 0 ,111

Vargo, Lisa, 7 ,2 15 -2 4 versioning, 7 ,2 15 -2 4 Virgil, 1 3 ,9 5 ,1 3 8 ,21m , 206,207,209 Aeneid, 13 7 ,13 9 Viviani, Teresa, 18 3 ,18 4 ,18 5 ,18 6 ,19 1, 198 Voltaire, F.M.A. de, 2 5 ,3 1 ,3 2 Walcott, Derek, 24 Walker, Rev. W.S., 11 7 -1 8 Warton, Thomas, History of English Poetry, 40 Wasserman, Earl, 1 1 5 ,1 1 6 ,1 2 2 ,1 2 3 , 12 4 ,12 7 Webb, Timothy, 37 Welbume, Andrew ]., 172 White, Newman Ivey, 28 Whitman, Walt, 25 Williams, Edward, 2 28 ,232 ,244n Williams, Jane, 19 7 ,2 16 ,2 2 2,2 2 8 ,2 32 Williams, John, 6,164-79 Winters, Yvor, 1 1 1 Wolfson, Susan ]., 224a. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 25,184 Historical and M oral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, 14 1,15 0 Letters Written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 45

Woodberry, George Edward, 231 Woodman, Ross G., 91, io6n, 179 Wordsworth, William, 1 ,6 ,1 9 ,2 0 ,26n, 2 9 ,4 2 ,4 3 ,9 2 ,9 4 ,9 5,10 4 ,12 1,

152,164-71,175-9 Benjamin the Waggoner, 168 The Excursion, 4 4 ,9 4 -5,9 7 ,17 3 The Idiot Boy, 12 1,16 6 Lyrical Ballads, 2 0 , 42,168 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 166 Resolution and Independence, 170 The R iver Duddon, 164

'The Thorn', 166 'Tintem Abbey', 104 'We are Seven', 166 Yeats, W.B., 129