Shelley's theory of poetry: A reappraisal 9783111400280, 9783111037424

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STUDIES

IN ENGLISH Volume XIII

LITERATURE

SHELLEY'S THEORY OF POETRY A REAPPRAISAL

by

EARL J. SCHULZE Ann Arbor, Mich.

1966

M O U T O N & CO. THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1966 by Mouton & Co., Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague

FOR JOSEPHINE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express thanks to my teachers in the Department of English of Northwestern University for encouraging and criticizing the dissertation that was the initial form of this book: to Professor Frederic E. Faverty and Professor Arthur Nethercot who read the entire manuscript, and to Professor Edward B. Hungerford who read and criticized an early draft. To Professor Glenn O'Malley, for his insight into Shelley and his great personal help to me, I owe special thanks. My greatest debt is to Professor Zera S. Fink who supervised with patience and scholarly acumen all phases of my work on the dissertation. This book is dedicated to my wife because through a sustaining sympathy with my efforts and considerable sacrifice she in fact made it possible. I acknowledge also her aid in the copy reading and preparation of the manuscript. I wish also to thank Professor Warner G. Rice, Chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature of The University of Michigan for his support and counsel in matters of publication. Part of the costs of the publication of this book have been defrayed by a grant from the Publication Fund of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, The University of Michigan, for which I am very grateful. Ann Arbor, Michigan. October 1, 1965.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

7

Introduction

11

I. Poeta

41

II. Poesis

102

III. Poema

171

Conclusion

218

Index

233

INTRODUCTION

I

Distinguishing among the "kinds" of criticism, or "approaches" to literature, their assumptions and the kinds of problem they deal with best, has been an enthusiasm of literary scholars for nearly a generation. We have learned to distinguish between "formal" critics, who are concerned with the principles of construction within particular works, and "technical" critics who examine particular literary devices; between "scholarly" critics who explore the environment in which works were produced, and "poetic" critics who seek certain qualities that all works have in common.1 We have been shown how we might assess the relevance of other disciplines for literary study, and we have been warned of the dangers of "syncretism". We have, above all, been made aware of the difference (if only, at last, a difference in the way argument "feels") between literal-mindedness and symbol-hunting, between the recognition of complexity and the application of reductive schemes of explanation. While all of this has undoubtedly helped us to understand the aims and procedures of contemporary criticism, it has, in part, made the understanding of past criticism more difficult. I say "in part" because awareness of the need to differentiate has not only led to better defined studies of past literature which must inevitably 1

My terms and descriptions are drawn from Richard McKeon, 'The Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism", first printed in Modern Philology, February, 1944, and re-printed in Critics and Criticism, abr. edition, ed. by Ronald Crane (Chicago, 1952), pp. 268 ff.

12

INTRODUCTION

throw light on the standards of the past, but has also encouraged the systematic examination of those standards. The difficulty comes in our attempt to make use of this awareness to understand a past criticism which, in its full play of meaning, evades our categories of analysis, and requires us to see less a series of propositions about literary problems as such than a total valuation of human experience in which literature has central importance. Shelley's theory of poetry is a past criticism of precisely this kind. As a justification of his own poems, or as an attempt to deal critically with the literary opinions of his time, his theory still remains an argument about values in which esthetic, ethical, and metaphysical concerns are freely blended, and in which even casual insights are modified by their connection with fundamental beliefs about human experience. It is also an argument that is distinctly "of the past"; not because few present uses have been found for it, but because the values it reflects themselves reflect specific human experiences and are bound up with the specific conditions of his time. And because it is both bound up with its context and an elaboration of fundamental beliefs, it stands apart from the pluralistic structure of criticism today. We have, of course, within our pluralistic structure, those who either deny or demur from the assumptions of a plurality of criticisms, but the fact remains that their context is pluralistic. Shelley simply was not aware of what Professor Wellek calls "obvious today", that "poetry loses its identity completely in a loose synthesis of philosophy, morality, and art", and that "what can be ascribed to all three together or to any of the other two will not be seriously credited to poetry alone".2 In this instance, to take Professor Wellek seriously is to be disabled from crediting Shelley. We ought, however, to take Shelley seriously. His confusion of philosophy, morality, and art is the outgrowth, as it were, of his tendency to value as much of his experience as he could, and to try to make some account for what he could not completely * René Wellek, The History II, p. 125.

of Modern

Criticism

(New Haven, 1955),

INTRODUCTION

13

understand. He had, moreover, the habit of analogy. He found harmonies between various kinds of sense-experience, and a harmony, more important perhaps, between sensuous and spiritual phenomena. Reality was a body of "integral thoughts", and the perception of those thoughts "either separately or as a whole" was the work of the imagination. Ultimately, such work was to yield "axioms common to all knowledge". His analogies, in other words, lead ultimately to equations where no strict separation exists between the process of experience and the process of discovering values. His attitude to life is religious, and we should, indeed, be less surprised to find him synthesizing philosophy, morality, and art (a synthesis which in his work is not particularly loose) than to discover that he makes poetry central to his values. Why Shelley exalts poetry, and what implications result from this are the basic problems of this study. I can give only preliminary responses to them here. He exalts poetry because he wants to emphasize the primacy of human values and human acts. He is conscious of divinity in the texture of fully human acts of discernment, and he works hard throughout his maturer poetry and prose to sharpen his sense of the coordination and balance between the faculties of perception and their physico-spiritual object. Because poetry affirms most strongly attention and consciousness, as distinct, for instance, from conceptualization and decision, it seemed the most natural medium for the coordination of sense and spirit. Moreover, unlike the philosophy and morality of his day, poetry had no authoritative relation with religion, or foundation in Divine Will or Natural Law. Poetry seemed to everyone, in other words, uncompromisingly human in origin, nature, and effect. The implications of this elevation of poetry are far-reaching and complex. Though often overlooked, one of the most immediate is that it provides his deliberations, however soaring, with a this-worldly bias. The realities opened up by poetry are inconceivable without the participation of poets and readers: they are realities here and now and have reference to a human, if not always personal, identity. One of the consequences of this is belief in the autonomy of art. Poetry is not so much

14

INTRODUCTION

"better than" philosophy and morality as it is more inclusive. The poet harmonizes knowledge and example with pleasure, discovers in his imitation of life an internal, self-contained or permanent order. Another implication is that knowledge is limited by human, natural experience, by the results of perception and apperception. Shelley n o doubt desired and was persuaded to believe that the overpowering reality of his experience indicated the presence of pervasive unity of spirit, but his desire and persuasion were rarely satisfied by conceptual argument. Repeatedly, he sought to confront reality, to know spirit directly; and, repeatedly, his success was ambivalent. The will to confront and the apprehension of meaning seemed insolubly linked, and it is one of the most remarkable qualities of his thought that his intuitions are never "pure", that h e so rarely confuses his desire to believe with knowledge. 3 The religious valuing of life he finds best expressed in poetry implies for him an agnosticism towards the claims of religion. 3

D. G. James, an acute critic of the philosophy of the Romantic period, has strenuously objected to the final lines of Act III of Prometheus Unbound precisely because it seems there that Shelley confuses desire with knowledge. James wants to know how it is possible that man is not "exempt from chance, and death, and mutability", and yet rules them "like slaves", that man is subject to the inevitabilities of natural life and at the same time controls those inevitabilities with his will. See The Romantic Comedy (London, 1948), pp. 65-66. I see no way of neatly disposing of the problem, but I would suggest that the flaw in the lines is one of communication rather than logic. The point of the lines is that an increase in knowledge and power, especially as realized in a community of spirit or love, can revolutionize the nature of living. It cannot, however, eliminate essential characteristics of natural life: internal passions and doubts, and external changes and death. James wants to know how the will can be sovereign over death, but it is clear that Shelley means that the rule of the will is over "permitted ill", and it is the fear of death, or the nature of living in the face of death, not death itself, that can be controlled. One of Prometheus' traditional gifts to men was the power to forget the inevitability of death. Shelley interprets this gift not as an escape into dream but as a power of psychological self-control. Furthermore, he persistently reminds us in the poem of the darkness that ultimately surrounds the knowledge and power of man, beyond "the loftiest star of unascended heaven, / Pinnacled dim in the intense inane". All quotations of Shelley's poetry are taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London, Oxford University Press, 1905); hereafter cited as Poetry.

15

INTRODUCTION

Taking poetry as his model meant unmistakably for Shelley an acceptance of ambivalence as a fundamental feature of the discovery of value. He seemed especially convinced that the "vivid apprehension of life" was not a product of a self-transcendent analysis of the mind, but closely connected with states of imagination, like dream and revery. The result for his thought was the presence of tensions: between the self and others, spirit and form, process and product. Though conceptual oppositions, these ideas were rather mutually supporting than contradictory; and it is the drive to hold them together without dissolving their opposition that perhaps best summarizes Shelley's intention as a literary theorist. Indeed, his elevation of poetry may be seen simply as a means of communicating his faith in a universal order implicit in human experience that, for some inexplicable reason (perhaps some defect in human nature), can never be made explicit without loss. Poetry, which "turns all things to loveliness", is the imperfect agent of communicating this implicit order.

n The last extended treatment of Shelley's theory of poetry was published nearly forty years ago. Under headings like, "The Poet as Teacher", "Evil and the Poet", and "Nature and the Ideal World of the Poet", Melvin Solve summarized what has been accepted until quite recently as the main features of the poet's philosophy and poetic intention.4 Philosophically, Shelley was held to be a Platonist whose "idealism was . . . largely subjective, based on feeling and scepticism", who saw "no distinction between subjective and objective realities", who believed that "thought compells... formulates the dim chaos of things", and, yet, who believed with Plato that "man's part in creation is limited to getting into contact with the good and the beautiful - the true world of archetypal ideas . . ,".5 In nature poetry "Shelley avoided a too close observance of particulars, believing, 4 5

Melvin Solve, Shelley: His Theory Solve, p. 41, pp. 92-94, p. 163.

of Poetry

(Chicago, 1927).

16

INTRODUCTION

as did the eighteenth century classicists, that the close attention to detail robbed the work of art of the necessary universality".6 Moreover, "Shelley by 'imitation' did not mean reproduction as nearly as possible of external forms, but imitation of the ideal." 7 Similar statements run throughout Solve's book. The imagination "was moral because the creative faculty of the poet - the imagination - was able to penetrate the veil of appearances and to represent with some approximation to exactness the truth which lies behind the vain shows of this world".8 However, "this does not limit the subject-matter of the poet, whose abilities at harmonizing actions and sensations of evil and pain by use of meter and imagery brings a portion of the eternal even to evil subjects. Any knowledge of life and the human heart is desirable." 9 What is especially impressive about Solve's work is that he reads Shelley with sympathy, and in some cases insight, without concealing the many logical difficulties he encounters in the theory. For instance, he sees correctly that Shelley places no limitations on subject-matter, that "any knowledge . . . is desirable" to the poet, despite the fact that Plato criticizes poets for inaccurate knowledge and vicious subject-matter in The Republic. What Solve's book lacks is a clear examination of the way Shelley seeks to bring his ideas together, to harmonize a Platonic dedication to values with his awareness of the limitations of knowledge, and his emphasis on passion and personality. Part of the legacy we have inherited from Solve and his forerunner, A. C. Bradley, is the conception that Shelley's thought is essentially explicable in terms of Platonic metaphysics, or some variety of idealism that is closely related to Plato's.10 For example, «

Solve, p. 71. Solve, p. 73. 8 Solve, p. 23. 9 Solve, pp. 46-47. 10 See A. C. Bradley, "Shelley's View of Poetry", in Oxford Lectures on English Poetry (London, 1909). The Defence of Poetry "seems to owe very little to Wordsworth or Coleridge, something to Sidney, but it shows deep influence from Plato" (p. 152). That Shelley owes a good deal to both Wordsworth and Coleridge no longer, it seems to me, needs exposition. See, e.g., B. R. McElderry Jr., "Common Elements in Wordsworth's Preface and Shelley's Defence of Poetry", MLQ, V (1944), pp. 175-81. 7

INTRODUCTION

17

his philosophy has been described as an adaptation of Neo-Platonism to modern science, as a combination of Platonism and Wordsworthianism, as an ethical idealism that is Radical and Platonic, and as a philosophical idealism that has affinities with both Berkeley and Neo-Platonism.11 R. H. Fogle, in his important study of Shelley's imagery, has suggested that the intellectual tendency of the poet's images reflects a Platonic dualism of mind and matter.12 And Carlos Baker, who puts Platonic sources to illuminating uses, especially in tracing the poet's development of symbolism, observes in the poetry "a kind of religious imagination" which employs a Platonic-Christian gospel of love for the purposes of redemption and salvation.13 All of these critics consider the theory of poetry essentially related to Shelley's general religious and moral philosophy, and tend to characterize the basis of the theory in terms of the imagination as an intuitive power. The emphasis on intuitive power I will take up presently. First, we must discover in what way precisely we are to view Shelley's Platonism. It is fair to say that Solve's amalgam of subjective and emotional idealism with the objective idealism of Plato is no longer critically adequate. At the same time, there seems to me less reason for accepting the argument of James Notopoulos and Neville Rogers that Shelley is a Platonist in every sense of the word, except that he is "incapable of rational system", and that where Plato expounds the orderly progress of reason, Shelley makes "an imaginative leap with little distinction between emotion and idea".14 Such a view minimizes the problems of his 11

I refer in order to Carl Grabo, The Magic Plant (Durham, 1936), especially Chapters Five and Eleven; Meyer Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), pp. 126 ff.; Milton Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry (New York, 1958); and E. R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore, 1959). 12 R. H. Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley: A Comparative Study (Chapel Hill, 1949). See Chapter Four, "Concrete and Abstract", especially. 13 Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry, The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton, 1948), p. 17. One of the earliest writers to point out the importance of Shelley's symbolism was W. B. Yeats, "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry", in Ideas of Good and Evil (London, 1903). 14 James Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley (Durham, 1949), and

18

INTRODUCTION

scepticism and radicalism, but at the cost of finding his thought confused at its roots. The positions of Baker, Wilson, and Wasserman, while by no means identical in particulars, appear more valuable on the subject of the poet's Platonism. In Shelley's later thought, according to Wilson, "an empirical dualism of subject and object has become a transcendental dualism of time and eternity". We are not to suppose, however, that the earlier empiricism or radicalism has dropped away in this shift. "Now there are two enemies: (1) the unregenerate will, and (2) human limitations." 15 Baker, in tracing the shift that Newman Ivey White had also stressed, from a belief in Necessity to a belief in Love, from a political to a religious imagination, laid the foundation for Wilson's remarks.16 The "two sides" of the philosophy are intrinsically related. However unsystematic it is, Shelley's is not an irrational Platonism, crudely substituting emotion for idea. What Baker especially has opened up is the possibility of viewing Platonism as symbolic system of great significance that was attractive to Shelley because it confirmed his awareness of the reality of spirit. Since it is by all accounts the myth-maker rather than the "sophist" in Plato that appealed to the poet, the emphasis on symbolism, on Platonism as means of communicating subtle relationships of sense and spirit, the One and the Many, seems quite reasonable.17 Furthermore, the emphasis on symbolism can lead to a re-examination of what it means to explicate Shelley's thought in terms of Platonic metaphysics. Baker and Wilson, and the latter despite a professed interest in "the prophetic imagination", are not essentially concerned with this reexamination of implications, focusing their attention instead on evidence of philosophical and stylistic development. It can be said with some confidence, however, that the relation between Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work (London, 1956). The quotations are from Rogers, p. 42. 15 Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry, p. 170. 16 See Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry, pp. 51-55 especially, and Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 vols. (New York, 1940); see, e.g., II, p. 432. 17 See, for example, Rogers, Shelley at Work, pp. 22 ff., and Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, pp. 233 ff.

INTRODUCTION

19

the symbol and the idea is never uncompromised or simple. What Baker calls "psyche-epipsyche strategy", for example, is not simply an illustration of belief in abstract, timeless entities. At the very least we must limit our translation to something like "the soul in love seeks union with the divine One", a description nearly as concrete as the one introduced in Epipsychidion by the lines: "I never thought before my death to see / Youth's vision thus made perfect" (11. 41-42). Reflected in both descriptions, and, of course, especially in Shelley's, is less an assertion about Being or the concept of perfection than an awareness of spiritual relationship. In Epipsychidion the awareness as well as the relationship is many-faceted, embodied in a number of patterns, although the psyche-epipsyche strategy appears to be architectonic. In writing of Shelley's symbolic management of synesthetic imagery, Glenn O'Malley suggests that such patterns were "an especially vivid earnest, not simply a sign, of harmonious development of the whole human personality".18 And that seems to me to suggest that the meaning of Platonic concepts was not so much indicated as subsumed and modified by Shelley's symbolic designs. His blending, as Baker has argued, of philosophical and technical aims suggests an attempt to fuse sense and spirit, to compound ideas and sensations in a unified act of imagination. It is precisely this act of unified consciousness that E. R. Wasserman has focused on in The Subtler Language. Whatever the particular shortcomings of his analysis, he has clearly pointed out that the poetic imagination in Shelley has a this-worldly bias, and that the reality grasped by means of it is "neither a thing nor a place, but an act".19 Imaginative vision does not illustrate non-experienced philosophical principles, but is itself an informing principle of perception, an embodiment of the activity of consciousness. Shelley's use of Platonic symbols to manage and fortify his own vision, then, is not a sign of his dependence on or belief in the whole scheme of Plato's philosophy. It is rather a symptom of the richness of connections those symbols have with 18 1B

Glenn O'Malley, Shelley and Synesthesia (Evanston, 111., 1964), p. 176. Wasserman, The Subtler Language, p. 221.

20

INTRODUCTION

poets, who, like Shelley, labor to communicate their awareness of an overpowering spiritual reality. Wasserman's description of the poetic imagination in Shelley has something in common with the description of I-Thou relationship given by Harold Bloom in his study, Shelley's Mythmaking.20 For both, the poet's imaginative vision is an act of unified consciousness in which the imagination and reality, poet and spirit, blend in mutual dependency. The process of the vision, according to Bloom, is deliberate confrontation; neither the identity of the poet nor the identity of the spirit subsumes the other. For example, he interprets the "Ode to the West Wind" as a dialectic of hope and despair, of affirmation of a direct relation to a power in or behind the Wind, and submission to the indifferent processes of nature. He sees in the last stanza "no mystical merging into a larger Identity but mutual confrontation of two realities".21 This interpretation would seem to confirm Wasserman's opinion that the poetic imagination presents reality as an act, rather than as an idea or thing. Yet, Bloom and Wasserman are quite different in their applications of this insight. For Wasserman, its primary application is metaphysical. The state of unified consciousness yields intuitions of Being; it is an ontological principle in its own right.22 In connection with this, he conceives of the technique of all modern poetry including Shelley's, as the forging of a "cosmic syntax". Poetry no longer reflects the order of Nature, as it did in Pope, by means of "concordia discors", an imitative structure in which language is a substitute for the things and principles of an external world. Rather, it must create the world it is to reflect, discover reality in the very act of providing the world with a structure. Through such "discordia concors" poetry becomes a means of intuition, of direct knowledge of the super-sensory, because the poet's "cosmic syntax" transcends the limiting dualism of subject and object that characterizes ordinary discourse and ordinary 20

Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven, Conn., 1959). For a succinct description of mythmaking, see "Introduction", pp. 3-10. 21 Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, p. 84, p. 87. 22 Wasserman, The Subtler Language, pp. 233-36.

INTRODUCTION

21

23

knowledge. Bloom, on the other hand, tries to avoid ontology, and so avoids the circularity of Wasserman's argument. Still, he approximates the idea that the poet must speak in order that he may listen. His application is to ethics. Like Wasserman, he interprets the visionary act as intuitional and as having special connection with formulations of language. The difference between poetic and ordinary vision is expressed in the opposition of I-Thou with I-It. These "primary words" are fundamentally expressive of the ethical process of human relationships: of the awakening of a man to the presence of another person, a Thou, and of the passing of this presence into the merely natural, the It of our sensory experience, the Selfhood of our introspection. The subsiding of I-Thou into I-It, of innocent mutuality into the contradictions of experience, is inevitable, for, in the words of Martin Buber, whom Bloom quotes, "every response binds up the Thou in the world of It". 24 This is in fact Bloom's interpretation of Shelley's famous passage on inspiration ("the mind in creation is as a fading c o a l . . .") in the Defence of Poetry. The moment of I-Thou is the "transitory brightness" of inspiration, and the response which "binds up the Thou in the world of It" is the poem, "probably only a feeble shadow of the poet's original conceptions". The fact is significant that the I-Thou relationship can be applied successfully to Shelley's description of inspiration, and that "cosmic syntax" is, in part at least, a reminder of Shelley's description of poetry as "the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth". 25 It suggests that an essential portion of the interpretations Bloom and Wasserman give of Shelley's poems is vitally connected with his own theory of poetry. At the same time, both writers seem to me confused 23

See Wasserman, The Subtler Language, Chapter Four, "Metaphors for Poetry", passim. Edward Bostetter opens his book, The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle, 1964), with a discussion of "cosmic syntax" and its relation to the "personal" universe of Romantic poetry. 24 Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 89-90. 25 Defence of Poetry, quoted from Shelley's Prose: the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David L. Clark (Albuquerque, 1954), p. 281; hereafter cited as Prose.

22

INTRODUCTION

on the point of this connection. Wasserman's difficulty is the result of reaching for too much. He wants to see in his version of the idea of "permanent analogy" much more than a description of the way values (like permanence and truth) are discovered in acts of participation. He would see it also as a definition of those values, an intuition of their essential natures. The long-standing observation that Shelley is tentative in such matters is made over too simply into the irony (of an indifferent nature, hostile audience, modern science) that surrounds the efforts of all modern poets. Bloom's confusion is at once that of oversimplification, and over-determination. He, too, makes over the matter of tentativeness into irony, the irony of Blake's State of Experience where the lapsed soul can never escape Selfhood.26 But it is his contention that the processes of I-Thou relationship are sufficient in themselves to account for Shelley's poetic that is especially oversimplified.27 It construes all aspects of his thinking about poetry, his ideas, for instance, on language, on historical development and influence, on the means of dramatic effectiveness, on a multi-layered style of communication, as fundamentally reducible to the doctrine of inspiration. The poet himself had a more balanced perspective. He once said to Thomas Medwin, "the source of poetry is native and involuntary but requires severe labour in its development".28 We are unjust to Shelley's criticism 28

See Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 91-116 passim. For example, this comment on the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", the subject of which is "the writing of poetry" (p. 89): "In the 'Hymn', poetry is seen to depend on the ability of the poet to sustain an I-Thou relationship with the evanescent Spirit of Beauty . . . which visits the poet, and then abandons him again. When he is visited by the Spirit, the poet is no longer an object of the Spirit's experience, but the Spirit and he confront one another in mutual relation. When the Spirit departs the poem departs also, and the poet is left desolate." Here, Bloom confuses paraphrase with critical definition, a confusion apparently inherent in thinking of I-Thou as a definition of mythmaking as well as a transcription of the actual words used by poets. The problem is consistency. T o say the "Hymn" is about poetry is to define one application of its theme. But then it is inconsistent t o say "the p o e m departs", for what we mean by "the poem" is a matter of definition, not paraphrase. Furthermore, it is simply a distortion of the conclusion of the "Hymn" to say "the poet is left desolate". 27

28 Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy H. B. Forman (London, 1913), p. 347.

Bysshe

Shelley,

revised, ed. by

INTRODUCTION

23

if we ignore his awareness of labor in composition, of formal qualities in poems, and of the contemporary relevance of the meaning of poetic themes. Examination of the claims of Platonism and Intuitionism in Shelley's philosophy has been necessary because they have had great bearing on the scholarly opinion of his theory of poetry. Both claims, doubtlessly, have relevance to important matters in his theory, but they must be qualified before they become satisfactory devices for dealing with the poet's critical presuppositions and themes. The claim that Shelley views the imagination as a form of metaphysical or ethical intuition must be qualified by the recognition that his own claims for the knowledge of spirit are "fiercely tentative". Although his poems often reflect patterns of mystical apprehension or intuition (the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" being a prominent example), there is nothing in them quite equivalent to Wordworth's sense of being "lost . . . in such strength / Of usurpation, when the light of sense / Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed / The invisible world . ..". Bloom himself has asserted about Prometheus Unbound that Shelley "gives us not a myth but only a fully conscious exemplification of the experiment of mythmaking".30 Such consciousness of experiment ought to suggest a crucial distinction between mythopoeia and "discordia concors" on the one hand and religious experience on the other, however complex and sophisticated that experience may be. Similar qualifications must be made of the claims of Platonism. Indeed, Plato's excellence, in Shelley's opinion, "consists especially in intuition", and Plato is attractive to him because he "exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logic with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry".31 It is probably not Plato's doctrines so much as his example that Shelley follows, appropriating certain of the master's images and symbolic schemes for his own uses in elucidating the subtle interrelationships between various strands and "levels" of human experience, interrelationships often best described as those between the One and the Many. The "rare union" of close 30 31

Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 123-24. "On the Banquet of Plato", Prose, p. 336.

24

INTRODUCTION

and subtle logic with oracular purpose or religious "feeling" is what Shelley stresses in Plato; and we should probably stress that not only his appropriation of Platonic schemes, but his own "system" of thought is a "rare union". To understand it at all, we must pay close attention to the poet's own presuppositions and methods. This is the lesson the soundest Shelley scholars have been teaching for forty years, and I hope to show how fundamental it is to our judgment of his poetic theory. m The question of Shelley's critical method has never received sufficient attention. Yet, like other critics, his method and (what McKeon has styled) methodological assumptions govern the meaning of his statements about poetry.32 Part of the reason for this lack of attention is probably that he has never been considered philosophically acute, as acute, for instance, as Coleridge, whose technical competence in philosophy he surely does not have. Another, obviously, is that critical method itself has not been a "question" for very long, and when it has been recognized as such, it has been dealt with either in broad theoretical terms, or in terms of practical distinctions among the various kinds of criticism in use today. But whether or not Shelley is philosophically acute, or whether or not his theory of poetry can contribute to contemporary standards of theory and practice, study of his method is both interesting and illuminating. It throws light on the meaning of his claims for poetry, and makes more intelligible the relation between his ideas and his poetic practice, a relation to be expected in a poet who blends "philosophical and technical aims". The study of his method can even lead, perhaps, to a better idea than we now have of what happens to criticism when it is written by a poet. The account of the Defence of Poetry given by Meyer Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp is a good point of departure for a description of Shelley's method. Its special virtues are Abrams' 3a

See McKeon's informative discussion in "The Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism", Critics and Criticism, pp. 194-204.

INTRODUCTION

25

own acuteness in seeing that there are at least two points of view expressed in the essay, and his reminder that the essay had a rhetorical as well as a philosophical purpose. Let us look first at what these two points of view are, and then examine, a little more closely than Abrams does, the rhetorical context of the essay and the implications of its method. Professor Abrams points out the intellectual traditions behind Shelley's work, and says, "These various traditions remain imperfectly assimilated, so that one can discriminate two planes of thought in Shelley's aesthetics - one Platonistic and mimetic, the other psychological and expressive - applied alternately, as it were, to each of the major topics under discussion." 33 The perception of alternating planes of thought is a fine one. It suggests not only our awareness of a certain complexity in Shelley that is often missed, but suggests also what some scholars have described as his shifting allegiance to the One and the Many.34 Reading Professor Abrams in this way, however, tends to distort his own intentions. I am saying that what he finds "imperfectly assimilated" is really quite well assimilated, and complex rather than essentially ambiguous. I interpret "planes of thought" literally: they are analogous arguments which support and help define one another, keeping clear, as a rule, of contradiction. Shelley deploys mirror and lamp imagery and their surrogates as if they were not mutually exclusive but potentially harmonious, introducing, no doubt, a perversity in literary history. Let me illustrate by citing a short passage that Abrams has used to support his own thesis that the ideas of the Defence of Poetry are "imperfectly assimilated" and lack critical rigor. "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." 85 The subject of this passage is the effects of poetry, the source of these effects being found in two opposed processes. If we needed to find categories for these 33

Meyer Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 126-27. See R. H. Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, pp. 135-38, and Glenn O'Malley, Shelley and Synsthesia, pp. 12-13 and 175-77. 35 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 130, and Prose, p. 295. 34

26

INTRODUCTION

processes, we might call the first "the fairy way of writing" (after Addison), and the second the classical way (after A. W. Schlegel). But such names badly identify them. For, in the first place, both "spreads" and "withdraws" are descriptions of action that suggest not only the "involvement" of the poet in his subject-matter, but express the same kind of involvement. His actions are set over against some aspect of familiar life in both cases, whether that life is seen dully or deludedly, and his object is to create a "being" whatever action he takes. Secondly, the description of things, the "figured curtain", the "dark veil", has more than curious relationship. The curtain is presumably the poem and the veil presumably the distortion that poetry removes; yet, physically, they are alike. It seems we must suppose that the veil of error and the figured curtain of imagination have a mutuality that is ambivalent: sometimes ironic, sometimes liberating. Finally, it is the submerged metaphor of the theater that organizes Shelley's description. Poetry presents a curtain and a scene, what is on either side of the central action of the stage. That central action, Shelley implies, has a twin set of references: externally to the opposition of the familiar world and the great whole of existence, and internally to the opposition of "the being within our being" and the chaos of our personal selves.36 Poetry opens up, "creates", an awareness of both sets of distinctions. For while it takes its mode from one or the other, either withdrawing "life's dark veil" or spreading a "figured curtain", and while each mode logically offers distinct possibilities for the invention and arrangement of both external and internal life, the effects of poetry are the same. The activity of the poet, whether as mirror or lamp, dramatist or magician, leads to the same thing: the "mist of familiarity" is removed from common things, the remote is made familiar. We respond to the creative action that makes a being out of illusion, that illuminates universal existence in the chaos of private or familiar worlds. And, 36

It might be argued that the "scene of things" is the action of the play, and not "behind" the central action as "scenery". This is plausible, but it does not alter the "mediated" character of the reality presented, a created "being" or expressive form known only through its relationships.

INTRODUCTION

27

we might add, the illusion and the chaos are not discarded (as, perhaps, Plato would have liked) but seized on as the materials from which the form of poetry emerges. In Shelley's discussion there is not so much a conflicting set of traditions as there is a pattern of mutually supporting images. And his fault is not "imperfect assimilation" of ideas but occasional rhetorical obscurity (though the general emphasis of his vehicle is plain); his "hard" matter requires more amplification, more contextual explanation, than he gives. We might speculate that Shelley himself recognized this when he promised two additional parts to his Defence (the "first part" was not published until 1839, although it was sent off to Charles Oilier, his publisher, in March, 1821).37 But if we cannot praise his rhetoric wholeheartedly, we can at least see its principles, try out his images in their proper contexts, and assess them according to their function in his argument as a whole. Before examining further the nature of this function, let us consider briefly the rhetorical context of the Defence of Poetry. Again, it is Professor Abrams who provides a useful text. It was the Scythrop of Nightmare Abbey who sprang to the defense of poetry against Peacock's essay ["The Four Ages of Poetry" 1820]; although as Shelley goodhumoredly wrote to Peacock, his was championship by the 'knight of the shield of shadow and the lance of gossamere'. But Shelley left his sense of humor behind when he launched into his Defence of Poetry in 1821, and though he opposes the arguments of the 'Four Ages' more systematically and in detail than a cursory reading would indicate, he never quite escapes the disadvantage of one who responds to raillery with a solemn appeal to the eternal verities." 38

This is a learned and witty description, the sort of thing Peacock himself, in his calmer, more scholarly moments, might have written. It is worthwhile, however, to try to reconstruct the context a little more carefully in order to see why Shelley chose to make a "solemn appeal". That he had a good sense of humor, especially for parody, 37 38

Prose, p. 297. Meyer Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 126.

28

INTRODUCTION

that he had a love of intellectual battle, and that he pretended to despise but really feared and respected criticism, are facts told and re-told in the records of his life.39 What contribution did they make to his reaction to Peacock's "Four Ages?" From Shelley's first attempt at a "defence" (an unfinished draft of a letter to the editor of The Literary Miscellany, Charles Oilier, dated, early March, 1821) it seems that all three elements are operating, and in a mixed fashion. He seems unable to fix his "sacred rage", his will to battle. He begins in irony. Peacock is an "ingenious Author", who "has directed the light of a mind replete with taste and learning . . .". The repletion marks Peacock as himself the carrier of critical qualities he felt, in the "Four Ages", to exist only in an enervated state in "modern criticism". But then Shelley stumbles on the phrase, "a paradox so dark as of itself to absorb whatever rays of truth might fall upon it", in describing Peacock's thesis. He deletes the phrase here, but it recurs six paragraphs later after he has summarized, sometimes scornfully, sometimes mechanically, the major topics of Peacock's essay. And when it recurs, it is clear that the paradox has become a matter of serious irony: Shelley has found his theme. Peacock "would extinguish Imagination which is the Sun of life, & grope his way by the cold & and uncertain & borrowed light . . . of the Moon which he calls Reason". After this Shelley makes two more stabs at humor, suggesting that Peacock "rides this hobby of a paradox . . . " . But it is clear that his real subject is the complex distinction of imagination and reason, and that a letter to the editor is not an adequate vehicle. In the second and third drafts of this letter he already refers to the "following remarks" that subsequently became his famous essay.40 39

Shelley wrote two parodies: Peter Bell III (1819) and Oedipus Tyrannus: or Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820), and pokes extensive fun, if mild, at himself in the "Letter to Maria Gisborne" (1820), especially in lines 15110. His love of intellectual battle is recorded as early as his "love letters" to the "brown demon", Elizabeth Hitchener (1811). For his real and pretended attitudes to criticism, and the general state of literary reviewing during his lifetime, see N e w m a n Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth Durham, 1938), especially pp. 24-28. 40 For the text of this draft see The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Frederick L. Jones (London, 1964), II, pp. 272-74. Shelley's initial

INTRODUCTION

29

Even this brief account of Shelley's first attempt at polemic indicates that he did not ignore the humor of Peacock's raillery, but tried to carry it with him, cutting it loose only when he saw that it encumbered his real subject. In finding in the "Four Ages" the suggestion of a "dark paradox" that was profoundly close to the themes of his own poetry, he found also that he could not treat it ironically.41 Evidently, it called for a "high-seriousness", capable of handling philosophical complexities. What importance, then, can we attach to the fact that his Defence "opposes the arguments of the 'Four Ages' . . . systematically and in detail?" When he discarded the model of Peacock's irony, why did he not also discard Peacock's topics? The clearest answer is that the topics were almost perfectly suited to his own particular assumptions and feelings about poetry and literary criticism. Peacock defines poetry by tracing it to its source in the character and office of the poet. Not only are subject-matter and technique derived from these sources, but the social effects of poetry, which he chiefly describes as propaganda, depend upon the superior power of the poet to dupe others and to deceive himself. Furthermore, the historical scheme of the four ages of poetry is both cyclical and progressive, the same complex pattern suggested in the plot and in the lyrics of Prometheus response to "The Four Ages" is in a letter to Peacock, Feb. 15, 1821 (Letters, II, p. 261). There he notes his agreement with Peacock's "denunciations" of bad poetry: "the world is pale with the sickness of such stuff'. But he notes also that the attack on poetry itself excited him "to a sacred rage . . . of vindicating the insulted Muses. I had the greatest possible desire to break a lance with you, within the lists of a magazine, in honour of my mistress Urania; but God willed that I should be too lazy, and wrested the victory from your hope; since first having unhorsed poetry, and the universal sense of the wisest of all ages, an easy conquest should have remained to you in m e . . . . " Urbane irony colors Shelley's first response to Peacock's serio-comic attack. For evidence that Peacock was, in his own way, as serious as Shelley about the claim that poetry must be accommodated to contemporary taste, see his letters to Shelley, Dec. 4, 1820, and Feb. 28, 1822, quoted in The Letters of . . . Shelley, II, pp. 59293 and 677. 41

The vision of a dark, paradoxical eclipse, and the comparison of imagination with sunlight occur in Epipsychidion (see 11. 277-309, and 163-69), the poem Shelley sent off to the publishers on Feb. 16, 1821, the day after first writing to Peacock about the "Four Ages of Poetry".

30

INTRODUCTION 2

Unbound.* A n d , finally, Peacock is intellectualistic; he attributes the decline of poetry to the growth of knowledge, the progress first of the "empire of fact" and then of the "empire of thought" into systematic science. 43 These are most promising materials for reinterpretation by a subtle yet rigorous conception of imagination. But if Shelley adopts Peacock's topical scheme, he rejects the reductive device that gives the irony of the "Four Ages" so sharp an edge. H e rejects the "dark paradox" Peacock had handled so lightly, of reducing poetry to its social function. Or, rather, he does not so much reject it as simply trim off its necessarian implications and accommodate it to his conception of the imagination. Shelley's reply reshapes Pecock's ironic reductio into a principle of the vital intertexture of life and poetry. The mechanical utility of enlightened self-interest will become in the 42

See especially Prometheus Unbound, IV, pp. 61-158, and Asia's account of history in II, iv, pp. 32-109. 43 Shelley's reference in his letters and in his first drafts of the Defence to hobby-horses and to doing battle in the lists suggests that he knew quite well the literary ancestry of Peacock's style - the fatherhood of Sterne and Swift. It is interesting that The Battle of the Books, from which Peacock borrowed his final image of "the modern Parnassus", advances an argument on behalf of "the universal sense of the wisest of all ages" (Shelley's phrase) that directly contradicts the "Four Ages" and its principle of utility. Shelley's dilemma is that he is with Swift in believing in a "universal sense", but with Peacock in believing in the progress of science, and the improvement of society. As to this latter, it is quite possibly a further element in Shelley's dilemma that he had to address his message of hope to Peacock who shared most of his philosophical and political beliefs. Shelley was, politically, more a Radical than a Benthamite - his allegiance, in other words, was stronger to the popular movement for reform than to the "social science" that rationalized it. According to a recent study of Radicalism in England by Edward Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class, London, 1963), utilitarianism had both middle-class and working-class adherents, and was used to justify political conservatism as well as political reform. There is no evidence that Shelley thought Peacock more "middle-class" and conservative than he ought to be. But it cannot be doubted that he distinguishes in the Defence between popular radicalism and the "mechanist" who "abridges labor", "makes space and gives time". Indeed, the final call to spirit is simply a repetition of a passage in his "A Philosophical View of Reform" (1819). For Peacock, I have used the edition of Shelley's Defence of Poetry, which includes "The Four Ages of Poetry", ed. by A. S. Cook (New York, 1890). For Radicalism, see E. P. Thompson, pp. 139 ff., 611-14, 693-96, 768-81.

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31

Defence the antithesis of a higher, universal utility, whose spirit is constant, but whose form is historically determined.44 Shelley unhorses his friend's irony not by superficially repeating it, but by penetrating its world weary doubt, its secret sorrow at the money-changers in the temple of poetry.45 And it is critical penetration, rather than enthusiasm, that is the basic antidote to doubt in the essay. It was not the Scythrop of Nightmare Abbey (although that figure is charming) but an intelligent and engaged man who worked out a defence against a utilitarian attack on poetry. The Defence of Poetry deserves to be considered, then, an attempt to liberate us from a profound but self-defeating ironic awareness. It challenges the latent despair of Peacock's position, the despair of faith in an "uncertain" reason, not the obvious, comic despair of Peacock's distaste for modern poetry. Shelley wishes to expose the disabling irony of confusing the meaning of poetic value with the popularity of Barry Cornwall, who, as a further irony, was a professed admirer of Shelley's poetry, and a bad imitator of some of it.46 And the fact that Shelley lacked the popularity of his imitator must be included as part of the rhetorical context of the Defence, a context which generally shows "a world . . . pale with the sickness of such stuff", and in need of the genuine values of poetry. It is perhaps this consciousness, deepened by his awareness of the importance of his philosophical problem, that makes his appeal to the "eternal verities" so solemn. The Defence is thus a critique of error in the Baconian tradition as much as a Platonic testament of faith.47 Its context 44

Prose, p. 291. Shelley saw the fine skill of the "Four Ages" as itself a refutation of Peacock's thesis: "the wit, the learning & the spirit of this essay . . . are caught in the very fact of suicide". This indeed is Peacock's dark paradox. Letters, II, p. 274. 49 One of the motifs of the Defence of Poetry is the distinction between genuine and faked poetry. "I can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel with certain versifiers; I, like them, confess myself unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day." Prose, p. 297. 47 In a letter to Oilier, Feb. 22, 1821 (Letters, II, p. 269), Shelley writes: 45

32

INTRODUCTION

shows it to be at once a worthy and personally relevant reply to a friend, a corrective of contemporary literary and social taste, and a piece of philosophical criticism. Intelligent and passionate engagement are made very plain in the "sublime vehicle" of the essay. How does this rhetoric function to bring out his philosophical argument? The problem is that Shelley's words shift in meaning; it is nearly impossible to pin them down. First of all, he thinks consistently in images. Even when he appears to be abstract, as, for instance, at the opening of the essay, he hints at figures that do not so much illustrate or define as radiate his meaning. 48 Secondly, his ancestry as a critic goes back to Plato rather than Aristotle. He does not "treat of poetry in itself", but rather defines it in both a "restricted" and a "universal" sense. And, as in Plato, the universal sense of poetry requires the development of universal standards of judgment, so that questions of truth and goodness have as much place in the discussion as questions of beauty. Poetry in Shelley, like philosophy in Plato, is "the center and circumference of knowledge". For either, the basic meaning of his subject is found in its likeness to, or interrelationships with, other subjects. This "dialectical" or metaphorical method of criticism governs the Defence of Poetry.™ There, even abstractions like "poetry" and "poet" are used metaphorically. Poetry, for example, is distinguished from ethical science; but, "a man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively". 50 Thus, "You may expect to hear from me within a week, with the answer to Peacock. I shall endeavor to treat the subject in its elements, and unveil the inmost idol of the error." (My italics.) 48 For example, imagination is "mind acting upon . . . thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts...." Prose, p. 276. "Acting upon", "colour", "composing", are all figures that personify imagination. When Shelley describes the imagination he thinks of the attributes of a Creator God. 48 Richard McKeon, to whom my debt is very large, supplies a thorough and illuminating summary of the distinction between the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in criticism, and of the special features of metaphorical methods of discussing art. See "Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism", pp. 218-45 and 250 ff. 50 See Prose, pp. 282-83.

INTRODUCTION

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what ethical science recommends is much the same as the fundamental process of poetry. Shelley distinguishes poetry from habit, our subjection to "the accident of surrounding impressions", and finds poetry capable of purging "from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being".51 Yet, poetry is itself a special kind of habit, and poets may "neglect to observe the circumstances under which . . . objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments".52 What is constant here is the imagery: the film of familiarity parallels circumstances of disguise; inward sight matches neglect of observation. What the poet "realizes" in one set of conditions he "dreams" in another. In another passage the source of poetry is traced to the conscious seeking of pleasure, and poets are distinguished from other men by "the manner in which they express the influence of nature and society upon their own minds".53 But the source of poetry is also traced to unconscious inspiration, and poetry "arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life".54 Here is imagery of opposition: poetry expresses and arrests; it is "objective" (nature and society) and "subjective" (apparitions), light and dark, healthy and sick. A poet is "a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds"; yet, poets in the past were called legislators and prophets and a "a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters".55 Both descriptions, interestingly enough, are of the Orphic poet, a figure fascinating to Shelley; but from that common center the definitions face in opposite directions.66 Finally, when Shelley defines poetry as a moral agent, he gives a supreme instance of the metaphorical method: "Poetry and the 51

Prose, p. 295. Prose, p. 296. 53 Prose, p. 278. 54 Prose, p. 294. 55 Prose, p. 282, p. 279. 56 Some new light on Shelley's early knowledge of Orphic lore and the role of that lore in Prometheus Unbound is shed by Ross Woodman, The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Toronto, 1964). Shelley wrote a poem (fragment) called "Orpheus" (1820); see O'Malley's discussion, Shelley and Synesthesia, pp. 145-51. 52

34

INTRODUCTION

principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world." 57 These shifts in the meaning of terms do not necessarily make his statements contradictory or incoherent. For one thing, as we have noticed, there is a remarkable coherence of imagery, not only in the things the "poet" deals with ("film", "disguise", "apparitions", "darkness") but in his actions too ("purges", "seeks", "arrests"). The images, moreover, suggest a pattern of parallelism and opposition, the sense of which is that the poet or poetry comprises each of two distinct things, but in so comprising them, unites them. Therefore, the rule that a man must "imagine intensely and comprehensively", applies to both poetry and ethics, and in its formulation suggests the basically ambivalent or paradoxical cast of Shelley's thought. The presence of organized paradox does not, of course, affirm the presence of coherence. It affirms only, perhaps, that he is aware of difficulty, and has sought means to overcome that difficulty without negating it. The sustained pattern of imagery, in other words, suggests a unified means of discussion. How appropriate are his means to his purpose? The theoretical difficulty that Shelley encounters in describing poetry implies in its content and in the way it is formulated the basic purpose of his argument. The content of that difficulty is that poetry is on the one hand an affair of intense isolation and personal meaning, and on the other one of community with nature and society, prophetic revelation, and comprehensive relevance to men. It is clear from this that his critical purpose is to define and exemplify a series of interdependencies among the features of poems and among the features of different products of culture. Poetry is "the center and circumference of knowledge". And this, besides indicating that poetry has more to do with thought than action, means that it is not isolable as a unique product of a personality, or as certain universal qualities, or as technique, or as an imitation explicable in terms of formal causes. Yet, while not isolable as any one of these, the definition of poetry is illuminated partially by all of them. Shelley's purpose, in 57

Prose, p. 293.

INTRODUCTION

35

other words, is to defend poetry by harmonious inclusion. He does not intend a "general annulment of distinction", but an exploitation of as many relations as possible existing among disparate things.58 The ultimate identity of center and circumference is the keystone of his ambition. The sustained imagery of the Defence seems almost a perfectly suited vehicle of Shelley's purpose, if only because it suggests a method of synthetic comparison where similarities and differences are held together and simultaneously grasped. But it is a dangerous method. It depends too much on cumulative effect, on an understanding of total contexts. For, as McKeon has so amply demonstrated, the meaning of terms used in this method depends wholly on contexts (rather than precise definitions of the terms themselves) and the relation of these contexts to the argument as a whole.59 To return to our illustrations from the Defence, poetry, when compared with habit, expands to mean a perspective on experience in which intellectual error is eliminated or found out, and self-knowledge made possible. The context is that of poetry as a psychological process of vision, more or less identical with the particular powers of the particular poet. When poetry is called "a habit of order and harmony", it is differentiated from other forms of habit according to the effects of devotion to a craft; and when this devotion leads to intellectual error, it is "obnoxious to calumny" because the craft itself is superior to other occupations, and one only proves himself narrow-minded by attacking poets. The same shift of context appears, although in an inverted form, when Shelley locates the poetic faculty in a "sense of approximation to a certain order", 58

Cf. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 129. "The history of critical discussions could be written in terms of a small number of words, which with their cognates and synonyms have moved back and forth from obscurity to prominence in the aesthetic vocabulary, or from neighboring vocabularies to criticism, or from one significance to another in different modes of criticism. Yet such relativity does not mean that standards are impossible or insignificant in criticism. It means rather that significances must be sought in the sense and application which statements of critical doctrines have in their context and relative to their purpose." McKeon, "The Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism", p. 251. 59

36

INTRODUCTION

the result of a conscious seeking of pleasure, and later calls poetry, "probably a feeble shadow of the poet's original conceptions". The "certain order" refers to a property of "mimetic representation", and implies that poems, or the action, character, and thought produced out of language that is harmonious and vivid, are themselves objects of value, the approximate sources of perfect pleasure. The "feeble shadow" refers not to a property of representation, but to a relation between verbal expression, cast out (though not thereby disvalued since the image is paradoxical, not merely negative) from the substance of ideas, and the light or power (or inconstant wind) that stirs the mind into perception and action.60 The contrasting metaphors, in other words, operate in different contexts of his subject: the context of poetry as a "made" product on the one hand, and as a visionary process on the other. Shelley adopts a metaphorical method to permit the inclusion in what we mean by poetry of both "product" and "process".61 These are the major categories to which such topics as the natural sensibility of poets, the poet's social role, the nature of language in poetry, the imitation of manners, the significance of poetic themes, and the capacity of the reader to respond sensuously and morally can be finally reduced. To be sure, both major categories, reflecting as they do the opposition of the One and the Many in Shelley's thought, have metaphysical and ethical, as well as esthetic implications. We have, therefore, in the Defence of Poetry, "two planes of thought" that are actually two broad arguments: one proceeding sub specie aeternitatis, and the other sub specie saeculorum, one concentrating on the changeless qualities of the poetic product, and the other on the fluid qualities of the poetic process. These 60

Shelley makes this "light" virtually equivalent to the elementary pleasure consciously sought by poets, despite the fact it has nothing to do with "the conscious portions of our natures". See Prose, p. 278. 61 For more recent discussions that have something in common with Shelley's "dualism" of product and process see Bertram Morris, The Aesthetic Process (= Northwestern Studies in the Humanities, Vol. 8) (Evanston, 1943); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 66-67 especially.

INTRODUCTION

37

arguments are Platonic in method, and indeed reflect an alternating consciousness of the One and the Many. But the specific content organized under each argument owes little to Plato. This content, which is presented largely in terms of images that suggest the language of paradox, presumes the idea that poetry is at once mimetic and expressive, and implies that the separation of these two activities by critics results in a loss of cogency. Shelley sought to hold them together not simply by appeal to the harmony of his two broad arguments, but also by distinguishing tacitly two different but mutually supporting points of view towards the topics of his discussion. These points of view, which show the specific relevance of his thought to the critical literature of his time, we may call the psychological and the historical. They supply the critical terms in which his Platonic method functions. From the psychological point of view he traces the source, medium, and effects of poetry to the general nature of the mind and the special nature of its faculties in valuing experience. From the historical point of view he traces the same topics to the general nature of civilization and its development, and to special connections between poetry and the social, moral, and religious in short, the value-making processes of life. The working of these two points of view can be observed not only in the Defence but throughout Shelley's statements about art and in the themes of his poetry. The several ways in which they are distinct yet mutually supporting provide this study of his theory with its special theme.

IV

The Defence of Poetry is necessarily the central document for any discussion of the nature and significance of Shelley's theory. Additional evidence is supplied, however, by his various fragmentary essays, his prefaces and poems, his letters and his occasional, brief reviews. These documents, of course, present varying critical problems. His essays on Morals and Metaphysics, for example, have still not been definitively dated, D. L. Clark

38

INTRODUCTION

dating them from the period 1810-13, and James Notopoulos favoring the period 1816-18. 62 1 have followed Baker's suggested dates (1815-16) mostly out of a spirit of compromise.03 In any case, the contribution Shelley's philosophical essays make to his theory of poetry seems to me require fresh exposition as a body of ideas rather than as biography. The critical problems inherent in treating some of the poems as illustrations of artistic principles that we must presume Shelley to have followed I know I cannot hope to resolve with entire satisfaction. In this I have tried to distinguish the mere possibility that all his poems somehow make implicit comment on the principles that inform them, from the firm probability that his persistent interest in themes of vision and unified consciousness, and his frequent allusions to imagination and art, often employing images found in the Defence, are tokens of a vital link between the view of life implicit in the poems and his ideas about poetry. Therefore, I have selected for analysis only those poems and parts of poems that have definitive bearing on the topic at hand. In no case have I presented these analyses as wholly sufficient interpretations of the poetry. The plan of this study is relatively simple, but certain of its features probably need emphasis. In dividing Shelley's theory into Poeta, Poesis, Poema, I have hoped not only to show its association with traditional critical categories but to correct the oversimplified view that he reduces all problems to the single one of defining the poet. Ideas of the poet and the imagination are surely dominant, and nobody would deny Shelley's preference for a "genetic" vocabulary. Oversimplification here, however, has led most scholars to neglect or minimize his very interesting ideas on the historical development of literature, and his imposing conception of literature itself as "that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world".64 The writer who conceives 62 See Prose, "Introduction", and Notopoulos, The Platonism of Appendix, pp. 606-23. 63 See The Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Carlos Baker (New York, 1951). 64 Prose, p. 287.

Shelley, ed. by

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39

of literature in this way is unlikely to be uninterested in the formal and technical matters of art, although he might not label them as such. Another feature of the plan is that it has been possible to organize the three large chapters in a roughly dialectical way. This organization is meant to reflect the basic oppositions within the theory: between psychological and historical points of view, and between the product and process of poetry. These oppositions, of course, appear in each topic of Shelley's discussion, but the topics he chooses to discuss themselves have a kind of dialectical relationship. Hence, in Chapter One, Poeta, the social responsibilities of the poet are set over against the analysis of mental faculties and the creative imagination. In the final section of that chapter, this opposition is brought to bear on the topic of the prophetic poet. The same kind of arrangement will be found in Chapter Two, Poesis, where Shelley's ideas of poetic language and representation are first discussed separately and then examined together as they merge in his conception of the "great poem". In Chapter Three, Poema, an attempt is made to define his conceptions of imagery and narrative as the agencies of poetic effects. The last section of the chapter is devoted to a brief sketch of the intention and effects of the visionary, lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound. The advantage of this organization is that it provides a conveniently systematic framework for Shelley's ideas. It is not meant to stand for what he "really intended", or for a coherence which the ideas themselves lack. Instead, it should be looked upon as a wholly critical reconstruction of an argument that appears in a variety of sources serving a variety of functions. Except for a few specific places (noted in the text) where Shelley's logic is elliptical, it is by means of this "dialectical" reconstruction that I have argued and criticized his thought. Finally, I must make clear that my ambition in this study is to show more fully and more precisely than has hitherto been shown the kind of coherence and penetration scholars have long recognized in his theory of poetry. The aims of the theory are wellknown: it is a Platonic attempt to create a single set of criteria for judging art, and to view poetic problems in the broadest pos-

40

INTRODUCTION

sible contexts. My contribution, hopefully, is to the understanding of the specific shape of this attempt, and its specific relevance for literary criticism. My concentration on this purpose has led me to say little of the many critics who influenced Shelley and the critics whom he in turn influenced. Given the kind of coherence he achieves in his theory, nothing like pure absorption or pure transmission was possible. Moreover, he offers, I think some important insights into the nature of poetry, the significance of which can only be appreciated deeply in terms of his own presuppositions and methods. When these insights are thus measured, we see unfolded a body of ideas whose roots lie deep in the Romantic experience of life and literature, and very close to the center of our total literary experience.

I. POETA

Reconstruction of Shelley's idea of the poet may begin with the clear recognition of the two distinct perspectives of his criticism. "The poet and the man are two different natures", he wrote to John Gisborne in 1821, and thus recorded in its radical form what we may term his psychological perspective.1 The poet is inspired, a rapt seer into mysteries which lie beyond the experience and control of ordinary men. His visions cannot be judged, in any strict sense, but only felt and affirmed as articulations of something irreducible to logic. A few months later, however, Shelley records an idea which must strike us as quite different. In commenting on Hellas (1822), he writes "the popular notions of Christianity are represented . . . as true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which in all probability they will supersede. . . . " 2 A little further on he makes clear that his use of these notions is strictly conventional, that he would not be mistaken for an orthodox Christian.3 But he claims, "as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality".4 His justification, 1 Letter to John Gisborne, June 5, 1821, in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Julian Edition, 10 vols. (New York, 1926-30), X, p. 270. Hereafter cited as Julian Ed. 2 Poetry, p. 478. * Poetry, p. 478. "The received hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of His nature . . . still would remain inexplicable and incredible." 4 Poetry, p. 478.

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"POETA"

in other words, is cultural or historical rather than psychological, based on a broadly interpreted common heritage among men rather than a division of the poet and the man. And the projection of this heritage into the future can be best accomplished through the use of traditional symbols, symbols which can be called true for their context, but not absolutely true. The poet in this view attempts to communicate, in full awareness of his own limitations and the limitations of his medium, a state of being of universal and historical value. Shelley gives us, then, two distinct views of the poet: the visionary who is strange to men and whose basic function is selfexpression, and the interpreter who feels allied with men and whose basic function is to communicate a common heritage of thought and value. As we shall see, these views are by no means incompatible, and they will be discussed in conjunction with one another in the fourth section of this chapter. Meanwhile, our business will be to trace Shelley's idea of the poet in terms of principles of communication and expression. The first section will take up his view of the socio-political role of poets. And the second and third sections are devoted respectively to his understanding of epistemology and to his idea of the creative imagination. Shelley's synthesis of these ideas in his conception of the prophetic poet will be discussed in the fourth section. I The communication of knowledge, including knowledge of cultural history, is usually associated in Shelley's work with social reform. Culture is for him a constructive activity, a continuing effort to bring nature and society into agreement, and to render both increasingly subject to human purposes. In this sense, culture is itself a principle of reform. The process of enlightenment is its radical mode, the mode also of Godwinian perfectibility.5 5

of

One of the best accounts of Shelley's general agreement with the ideal the gentleman held by thinkers of the Enlightenment, an ideal

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43

Early in Shelley's career the culture-principle is associated with Necessity, the principle underlying the perfectibility of all natural things. And in 1811 Shelley felt that poetry might be an instrument of Necessity, so long as it remained "subordinate to the inculcated ideal".6 By a kind of mechanical operation governing nature as well as human society, culture and all of its forms were to become increasingly more perfect, more genuine representatives or manifestations of the spiritual and material power of the universe. It is in such terms, which are never wholly absent from his work, that Shelley first conceived of the role of the poet. Yet, he came to modify these terms considerably: first through a recognition that human aspirations were essentially independent of and even at times alienated from the conditions of things in nature, and second, through a recognition that Necessity itself was an amoral force, neutral in man's struggle for reform. 7 He develops a scientific humanitarianism into an ethical humanism, and the development of his theory of poetry is roughly contemporaneous with this achievement. The poet is no longer the instrument of an inhuman will, nor is his work praised simply for its moral instruction. Rather, the poet provides ethical leadership through his special, cultivated detachment from "faith and custom", a detachment which celebrates love "as the sole law which should govern the moral world". 8 It is thus in The Revolt of Islam (1817) rather than in Queen Mab (1813) that we find Shelley's most cogent summary of the poet's cultural role. The association of culture with social rerelevant to his conception of culture, is by Joseph Barrell, Shelley and the Thought of His Time (New Haven, 1947), pp. 36 ff. especially. 6 Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, June 5, 1811, Julian Ed., VIII, p. 100. 7 Carlos Baker finds this shift as early as "Alastor" (1815). "In Alastor Shelley was attempting to dramatize a conflict of allegiance between what might be called the law for thing (natural law) and the law for man (the law of love)." See Shelley's Major Poetry, p. 47. The moral neutrality of Necessity is suggested in The Revolt of Islam, IX, xxvii: One comes behind Who aye the future to the past will bind Necessity, whose sightless strength for ever Evil with evil, good with good must wind In bands of union, which no power may sever. 8 Preface to The Revolt of Islam, Poetry, p. 37.

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form is just as strong in the later as in the earlier poem, but it is without the relatively confused admixture of physical science. Moreover, we are presented in The Revolt of Islam with a "beau ideal" of the French Revolution, and presented in the preface to the poem with an analysis not only of the poet's role in contemporary events but also of the causes of an "age of despair". And, as the preface makes clear, ethical leadership is viewed less as a power for effecting aims than as a dedication to the human ideals embodied in those aims. According to the preface, the French Revolution neither succeeded nor wholly failed. Ultimately, its value lay in its lesson on man's capacity for reform and his capacity for self-delusion.9 The Revolution failed to achieve those objectives envisioned by Rousseau, Voltaire and others, but these objectives, given the social and economic conditions in France in 1788 "were impossible to realize".10 Shelley asks rhetorically, "Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing and independent?" 11 His point is that such qualities are developed only gradually through education. It is precisely a lack of general education on the part of the people, an education which would have pre-supposed institutional reform, that is responsible for the course the Revolution took. What set it off was "a defect of correspondence between the knowledge existing in society and the improvement or gradual abolition of political institutions." 12 And it was this very defect that prefigured its political failure. Shelley's hope for reform lay in gradualness, the "resolute perseverance and indefatiguable hope, and long suf9

Poetry, p. 33. "The most generous and amiable natures were those which participated the most extensively in these sympathies [with the ideals of the Revolution]. But such a degree of unmingled good was expected as it was impossible to realize. If the Revolution had been in every respect prosperous, then misrule and superstition would lose half their claims to our abhorrence, as fetters which the captive can unlock with the slightest motions of his fingers, and which do not eat with poisonous rust into the soul." 10 Poetry, p. 33. 11 Poetry, p. 33. For a similar view of the causes and defects of the French Revolution, see Wordsworth's "Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff", and Coleridge's "France: an Ode". 12 Poetry, p. 33.

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fering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue".13 The ethical ideal requires dedication. It is for a lack of dedication that Shelley scores the poets of his own day. Impressed by present imperfection, they fall into the error of believing the ethical ideal rather than the condition of institutions is to blame. He writes in the preface: "on the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solutions of these questions.... Thus, many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes." 14 The "age of despair" is thus attributed to a short-sighted emotional collapse on the part of those who should have assumed leadership. Their perception of life was blunted by gloom, "the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair".15 Shelley's view of the Revolution is morally centered; an "ardent thirst for excellence" is seen as its strongest motive. But he does not fail to recognize real evil in the Revolution's internal failure, nor the need to reinterpret "excellence". His moral center is formed at the outer edge of the whirlpool of emotions and events which have led to the gloom and "misanthropy" of his own age. He attacks these with a sense of a "reflux in the tide of human things", a sense of having survived the worst; but it was no simple optimism that encouraged Shelley in 1817, only his own apprehension of the possibility of sane reinterpretation. The turbulence of the Revolution had obscured perception, had stirred "vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus". His critique was designed to free the intellect from its mistakes, to reveal "mankind emerging from their trance".18 "

14 15 18

Poetry, Poetry, Poetry, Poetry,

p. p. p. p.

33. 33. 33. 34.

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In surveying the Revolution Shelley shows us a mind accustomed to thinking of political probabilities as well as of longrange goals. He displays also a tendency, more pronounced in his later work, to frame his thought in terms suggesting a cyclical pattern to events. His sense of "a reflux in the tide of human things", and his view of the conservative reaction to the Revolution as a trance-like aberration serve to mark this framework. Its implications for the poet-intellectual are important. First, it eliminates the notion that permanence and stability are values identifiable with any one type of social organization. Social change is natural and necessary, though it need not always lead to more perfect states of being.17 Second, his framework suggests that the original motive of social movements, the motive to liberty and equality in the case of the Revolution, survives even when the movement itself becomes distorted or is made to serve foreign ends. Historical defeats and victories are tentative rather than final. And finally it implies that the poet-intellectual can, by perceiving long-range causes and effects, help realize broadly ethical aims through educating his audience. The image of the poet standing at the outer circle of events is appropriate to these implications. Shelley's hero is a leader in wisdom and virtue, and thus provides the ethical center for social movements; but at the same time, his primary responsibility is to keep clear his ethical conceptions, becoming neither demagogue nor soldier. His responsibility is therefore to teach through forecast, not through propaganda.18 17 Kenneth Neil Cameron, in The Young Shelley, Genesis of a Radical (New York, 1950), contributes a full discussion of Shelley's debt to Paine, Godwin and other radical thinkers for these ideas. Cameron connects them with belief in an immutable necessity and an environmentalist theory of morals, which Shelley is alleged to retain throughout his career. While Cameron largely restricts himself to the poet of Queen Mab, in whom radical thought appears more or less undigested, his point is, I think, too rigid. The idea of cyclical pattern is ancient, and Shelley's use of it, in his later work at least, is not environmentalist in the sense of mechanical explanation. He tends rather to emphasize bold imagination and the awareness of choice in social reform. Cf. Cameron, pp. 62-70 especially. 18 In the preface Shelley carefully calls his poem "narrative, not didactic". Poetry, p. 32. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound (1818-19) he says,

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Shelley's summary of his own personal history in the preface to The Revolt of Islam is brief but significant. H e means to include some random samples of his experience with nature, men, and books, which might qualify him as a social commentator. H e begins by announcing that his "accidental education" has been favorable to the ambition of becoming a poet, disparaging by implication his formal schooling. In the Dedication to the poem he describes his awakening on "a fresh May-dawn" to a vocation of the spirit, and to a knowledge that his own power of wisdom and virtue must arise from within his own nature. 19 From a schoolroom he hears voices which "were but one echo from a world of woes", and vows to "heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore", an implication of that esoteric learning which Volney and others had used to win "the secrets of the birth of time". 20 On this basis, then, he describes his education in the preface. I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon the brinks of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among the distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war; cities and villages reduced ravages to scattered groups of black and "It is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely lo the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse." Poetry, p. 207. 19 The Revolt of Islam, Dedication, stanzas i-iii. 20 The phrase is Shelley's: Alastor, 1. 128 in Poetry. The same esoteric education is acknowledged by Laon and Cythna: "For love had nursed us in the haunts / Where knowledge, from its secret source enchants / Young hearts with the fresh music of its springing, / Ere yet its gathered flood feeds human wants." The Revolt of Islam, VI, xli, 11. 2698-2702. R. G. Woodman has found an essentially Greek, "Orphic", pattern in this part of Shelley's education. See The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley, pp. 26 ff.

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roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. 21 (Poetry, p. 34)

The genuine biography in this passage is surely subordinate to its inculcated fictional ideal. What is stressed is the scope of these travels in nature and a continuous sense of individuality, indeed, isolation. Rivers, mountains, forests, and fields, the passage of the sun, the showing forth of the stars, the ravages of war - these are the natural "mines of lore" the poet explores. They are a composite symbol of the entire natural world, and include within their cyclical pattern the behavior of men and the rise and fall of civilizations. The poet is involved with the movement of the natural world, but his involvement is not an identification or communion with it in the sense of a mystical rapport or blending of wills. The "I" of the poet remains self-possessed, and the stress is on nature as seen by the poet. The point of view here, in other words, essentially repeats the one established toward the Revolution earlier in the preface, essentially describes the perspective of an interpreter rather than a devotee. This does not mean that Shelley is not dedicated to the frank experience of nature or the political principles of the Revolution, but only that he, like Johnson's Imlac, desires to see "everything with a new purpose", and to familiarize himself with everything. The thoughts and feelings nature excites constitute a source of interpretation, not the interpretation itself, its insight or its power of awakening others. The cyclical pattern of nature is seen only from a vantage point on the outer edge of nature, and this is the position Shelley takes. The isolated adventurer does not travel through "realms of gold", but through a world of experience, partially ruined, and 21

K. N. Cameron, in "A New Source for the Defence of Poetry", SP, XXXVIII (1941), pp. 629-44, records this among several echoes of Johnson's Rasselas to be found in Shelley's criticism The "new source" is interesting but, unfortunately, of little value in determining the principles of his theory of poetry. It does indicate, howevor, the extent to which Shelley stylized his "autobiography", a point too often neglected in scholarly accounts of both the prose and poetry. We should not underestimate, however, Shelley's knowledge of the terrible conditions of the life of the English poor as one of the inspirations of this passage and the poem. See Mary Shelley's Note on The Revolt of Islam, Poetry, p. 157.

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rather pointedly sinister. In the preface to the poem, as in the Dedication, the "tyrants" are in control, and the poet must learn first to remove himself from their sphere before the more gradual process of reforming the moral center of society around the poet's acquired vision can begin. The summary of the themes of The Revolt of Islam in the preface develops further the function of the poet as interpreter and moral leader. Shelley says of his poem that it is "a story of human passion in its most universal character, diversified with moving and romantic adventures, and appealing in contempt of all artificial opinions or institutions, to the common sympathies of every human breast." 22 The moral leader arouses universal sympathies or emotions by presenting them in situations which are themselves governed by feeling rather than by such external criteria as "general nature". Enthusiasm becomes a normal reaction, the poet requiring only that it proceed from natural rather than artificial causes. The interpretation of "artificial" is important here, because it is clearly meant to refer to certain types of social artifice, and not to the poet's art. It stands in relation to nature as reaction stands to reform in politics. Shelley's "contempt" for all that is artificial can perhaps be best explained by comparing it with his similar feelings about literary criticism.23 These he expresses in the idea that criticism is the "art which professes to regulate and limit" the powers of Poetry. Criticism "never presumed to assert an understanding of its own", but always followed rather than led the opinion of mankind. To be sure, he qualifies his charge somewhat by labeling this "art" a "species of criticism", but the image he produces is one of parasitism and distortion. Rules stunt rather than nourish native genius, prevent the feelings from following their normal course of expression. It is in this sense of the word "artificial" that Shelley writes in the preface. He implies it is a mode of distortion, a measuring of the life of the whole by the dimensions of a disjointed member. Politically, artificial opinion is a scheme for enforcing the 22 25

Poetry, p. 32. Poetry, pp. 35-36.

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status quo, for treating men in classes, or en masse, without respect for individual potentialities. Esthetically, it dictates the manner and substance of poetry by deriving general rules from a series of unique works which have been cut up into "beauties" and "defects". Shelley asks for "natural" opinion: a society which is based politically on freedom and equality, and a poetry proceeding from individual insight rather than from the application of norms. The broadly ethical purpose of The Revolt of Islam is interpreted to stand in direct relation to this contrast. Shelley hopes to appeal to "the common sympathies of every human breast", yet, he finds his poem to be, in addition to a trying out of his own powers, "an experiment on the temper of the public mind".24 He will test, in other words, the extent to which "gloom and misanthropy" have solidified the intellectual error which produced them. For artificial opinions as well as natural ones are moral lightning rods, important in determining man's will to reform. The contrast of natural and artificial opinions within the context of a cyclical pattern in both nature and society is the central form of the themes of The Revolt of Islam. The story of Laon and Cythna is a "succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind".25 The excellence they seek is primarily moral and cultural, a self-realization which has necessary consequences for society as a whole. Their communion with one another leads Laon first to recognize that "never will peace and human nature meet / Till free and equal man and woman greet / Domestic peace." 26 And from this discovery about themselves, Laon and Cythna feel the moral imperative to communicate the laws of freedom and equality to mankind. Their individual experience presumes in its very nature a universal application.27 24

Poetry, p. 32. Poetry, p. 32. 26 The Revolt of Islam, II, xxxvii, pp. 994-96. 27 If this presumption were to be expressed technically, it would seem to me to be very like Kant's categorical imperative, though Shelley tends to blend Ideas of Reason with feelings. That ethical universality has a ground in Shelley's version of the categorical imperative is suggested by these lines 25

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Thus, Laon and Cythna enter fully into the life not only of the poet-intellectual but also of the cycle of social events. And it is from this entrance that their story is tragic. They represent a state of innocence poised against a world of experience where liberty and equality must be translated into the complexities of human capacity and need. These are different and opposed states of being; and the innocent relationship of Laon and Cythna is viewed from the world of experience as a type of political and sexual criminality. Shelley deliberately inverts traditional symbols to stress the anti-utopian or sinister potential in social institutions which, through restrictive, artificial codes, are incompatible with natural human desire. The brother-sister formula is especially indicative of this inversion, being, as Shelley says, a "circumstance which was intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life".28 The tragedy of innocence as reflected in the moral ruin of his contemporaries, who have lost touch with the ideals of the French Revolution, is the literary basis for his challenge to "the temper of the public mind". The framework for the cyclical pattern of the poem, for the rise and fall of Laon and Cythna and the revolution they inspire, is an adaptation of the Zoroastrian myth that the world is ruled by two contending spirits, Oromaze, the spirit of Good, and Ahriman, the spirit of Evil.29 These spirits, which make a direct in which Cythna finds Laon's "deep spirit" the source of moral strength (II, 1036-1044): Yes, I will tread Pride's golden palaces, Through Penury's roofless huts and squalid cells Will I descend, whene'er in abjectness Woman with some vile slave her tyrant dwells, There with the music of thine own sweet spells Will disenchant the captives, and will pour For the despairing, from the crystal wells Of thy deep spirit, reason's mighty lore, And power shall then abound, and hope arise once more. 28 See Preface to The Revolt of Islam, in Prose, p. 320. The paragraph from which this is taken was not published with the poem. For a discussion of Shelley's own censorship of the brother-sister formula see Newman Ivey White, Shelley, I, pp. 548-52. 29 For an extended discussion of Shelley's use of the Zoroastrian myth, along with its inversion of traditional Christian symbolism, see Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry, pp. 64-77.

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appearance only in Canto One, are universal symbols for the contrast throughout the poem of innocence and experience, natural and artificial opinion. Their presence, while not very successful as an ordering device in the narrative, helps make clear that the dedication of the poet-intellectual to freedom and equality is not merely an emotional protest against the status quo. Nor is it simply a protest against this world on behalf of another, ideal one. Oromaze and Ahriman are potential in the same events, and the primary issue of their struggle is less what is decreed by Necessity in fact than what is chosen in spirit by the human will. A man may choose to be bound by events, in which case he becomes the slave of faith and custom. Or, he may choose to be bound by moral imperatives, in which case he is the willing minister of his own capacity for culture. This is a choice of conflicting objects which produce different states of mind; and it is the object, not simply the state of mind, which determines ultimately self-realization, the cultural goal of the poet-intellectual. Perfect self-delusion, the possibility of which in man is never denied in the poem, is the goal of tyranny.30 The world seen in the preface to The Revolt of Islam, and in the poem itself, is basically a divided one. Both works are, intellectually, a presentation of contrasts between the artificial and the natural, the tyrannical and the liberal, the short-sighted and the comprehensive. Even the individual poet is pictured as divided from his readers. The gloomy and misanthropic one retreats into his own despair, and becomes morally unintelligible. The one who, like Shelley, retains hope for man designs his poem as "an experiment on the temper of the public mind", and expects to 30

In Canto Twelve of The Revolt of Islam the resurrection of the "martyred" Laon and Cythna to the heavenly "Temple of the Spirit" is an emblem of their imaginative victory not over the cycle of events but over the self-deluding bondage to events. They merge with "shapes and shadows changing ever", as they sail along a "vast stream, a long and labyrinthine maze" [1. 4747, 1. 4745], They arrive at a vision of cyclical process in which true virtue is the single form of permanence: "For a deep shade was cleft, and we did know/ That virtue, though obscured on Earth, not less Survives all mortal change in lasting loveliness." (Canto XII, 11. 4780-83)

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shock even liberal-minded readers with the boldness of the inverted symbolism. Here is sure indication of at least an imagined division of poet and audience. Shelley alleges signs that these gaps (as well as those in other spheres) are restoring, that the cycle of events has begun its upward swing towards reform. But this prognostication is reduced to secondary importance when compared with his vivid account of the poet as interpreter. For here the contrast of what is with what ought to be is made dynamic. The interpreter is imaginative as well as emotionally innocent, and in fact must imperil his innocence to become truly a prophet. The vision of cyclical process is itself an imaginative one, and it is only in the regrouping of society around such a perspective that victory over the artificial, the short-sighted, and the tyrannical can be achieved. A concept of imagination as capable of seeing apocalyptic potential in the conflict of innocence and experience conditions this cultural victory. The imagination is for Shelley capable of absorbing the world of social and natural necessity in a vision of social and natural freedom. "It is the business of the poet", he says in the preface, "to communicate to others the pleasure and the enthusiasm arising out of those images and feelings in the vivid presence of which within his own mind consists at once his inspiration and reward".31 Such communication is required of the poet not only for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of moral regeneration as well. The "image" dominating The Revolt of Islam is that of love as the spiritual governor of the world. And love is primarily a cultural rather than hedonistic principle in Shelley, arising as much from the intellect as from the senses.32 The key to communicating this "image" and feeling lay in the poet's capacity for expression, his faculty of imagination. Thus, the social re31

Poetry, p. 33. See the preface to Alastor, in Poetry, p. 14. In describing the Being the Poet loves, Shelley writes: "Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings."

32

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sponsibilities of the poet reflect a concept of mind and a theory of poetic creation. To these we may now turn. II

The preliminary conditions for poetic expression are to be found for Shelley in the nature of mental faculties. Faculty psychology forms one of the two major philosophic bases of his criticism of poetry; the other, as suggested above, relates poetry to a humanistic conception of history. Shelley's faculty psychology is rather complicated, occasionally astute, largely derivative from eighteenth century empiricists, and rather formless as philosophy. He thinks logic may be reduced to a "science of words", and thus finds it of little help in metaphysics, which he interprets as mainly introspective psychology.33 At the same time, he keeps clear of solipsism, approximates in his own way the Kantian distinction of the kinds of judgments the mind makes, and consistently rejects narrow or over-simplified conceptions of the mind. His philosophical speculations seem to have been undertaken independently of his poetic compositions, but their relation to the poetry is clear. They inform us not only of his intellectual backgrounds, but also of the kinds of material he developed in his poems. A recent critic, in writing on Shelley's intellectual development, has said, "What gives it coherence and unity is the way in which he took Plato's theory of knowledge and applied it to Beauty. Beauty was truth, reality, goodness, and its efficacy depended on the virtue and power of love which could 'bind to33

Shelley finds "metaphysics" to be a word "very ill adapted to express the science of mind", for it "asserts a distinction between the moral and material universe which it is presumptious to assume". Moreover, "Locke and most of the modern philosophers gave logic the name of metaphysics", while for Shelley logic concerns words rather than thoughts, the proper province of the science of mind. "Metaphysics will thus possess this conspicuous advantage over every other science that each student by attentively referring to his own mind may ascertain the authorities upon which any assertions regarding it are supported." Prose, p. 185, p. 184. This is roughly an appropriation of the introspective method of Berkeley and Hume.

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gether the whole universe of things'." Against this judgment we may place a statement of the poet's. "Metaphysics", says Shelley, "may be defined as the science of all that we know, feel, remember, and believe inasmuch as our knowledge, sensations, memory, and faith constitute the universe considered relatively to human identity." 35 It is evident that Shelley's critic did not have this passage in mind when he wrote, but it is evident too that his summary alleges a different philosophical basis from the one underlying the poet's statement, and it is doubtful that this basis (a Platonic theory of ideas) explains his thought. The poet views metaphysics as a science of the mind, of knowing, feeling, remembering, and believing. What we know, feel, remember, and believe constitutes the universe in relation to the human mind. The "facts" of metaphysics consist precisely in these thoughts and perceptions, and not in a conception of Being whose elements may be ideal or material. The universe is consistently regarded by Shelley in relation to human identity, and not as it is in itself. The Platonic theory of knowledge, while idealist in character, is fundamentally a theory about things, and is oriented towards an objective, knowable universe.36 The Ideal nature of these things does not alter the fact that they exist quite apart from considerations of human identity. In Shelley, existence is seen in terms of modes of perception, without which "sensation and imagination cease". Pure reason or pure mind are fictions.37 Shelley's concept of Beauty requires a similar differentiation from Plato's. In "The Symposium" Socrates finds Beauty an eternal object continuously pursued by Love. When the object is 34

Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work, p. 305. Prose, p. 185. 36 See Richard McKeon, "Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity", for a discussion of the way Plato's theory of ideas, as well as his theory of imitation, reflects a world of unchanging substance. Critics and Criticism, pp. 121-22. 37 "For if the inequalities produced by what has been termed the operations of the external universe were levelled by the perception of our being uniting and filling up their interstices, motion, mensuration, time and space; the elements of the human mind being thus abstracted, sensation and imagination cease. Mind cannot be considered pure." Prose, p. 184.

35

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possessed, possible only in a purely rational state, love, by its own nature, ceases to function. Love is conceived as a spirit linking man in the world of change to eternal ideas, such as Beauty, in the world of Being.88 For Shelley Beauty is characteristically a judgment of the mind, connected indirectly to love through the faculty of imagination.39 It is a "certain order or harmony" created out of the free-play of the imagination rather than a rational distillation of essences. This differentiation of principle is suggested in one of Shelley's marginal notes to "The Symposium". "A subtlety to beat Plato: Love neither loved nor was loved, but is the cause of love in others." 40 Socrates blamed men for loving Love because it was the beautiful which they ought to love. Shelley inverts this emphasis to find love the ground for beauty, to find the spiritual medium between man and Beauty not simply a state of mind linking two worlds but a universal process in which those two worlds are equal. His position seems to me closer to Augustine than to Plato, though he is here concerned with psychology rather than theology.41 "The Symposium", trans, by Shelley. Diotima identified the beautiful with the divine. "He [Love] is a great spirit and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. . . . He interprets . . . between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest . . . find their way." Julian Ed., II, pp. 198-99. 39 For example, in the Defence of Poetry Shelley writes: "to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful - in a word the good, which exists in the relation subsisting first between existence and perception and secondly between perception and expression." Prose, p. 279. The true, the beautiful, and the good are Platonic terms and will probably always be fruitfully analyzed with reference to Plato's use. But in Shelley's use they derive their meaning less from the status of objects than the relation of objects to a perceiving mind. And it is only when objects are imaginatively perceived that they have intrinsic value, or what may be called beauty. 40 Quoted from Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work, p. 44. Rogers' discussion of the observation is designed simply to point out the degree to which the poet's mind was "saturated" with Plato, and thus it seems to me to miss the point of the "subtlety". 41 Shelley employs a quotation on love from Augustine's Confessions as motto to Alastor, Poetry, p. 15. "Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare." 38

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Shelley's Platonism can be appreciated fully only when his terms are seen in reference to a faculty psychology which is not in Plato, and are seen formulating problems which emerged chiefly from the empirical analysis of the mind during the eighteenth century. The formula that "all things exist as they are perceived - at least in relation to the percipient" is the starting point for the poet's own analysis of the mind and art. It is from here that he develops an analogical scheme for discussing poetry, in Platonic fashion, as "the center and circumference of knowledge". For as Plato regarded the elucidation of the Idea, Shelley regards the elucidation of the identity of the human spirit, as the purpose of all inquiry. Human perception rather than pre-existent Ideas is the first problem of his analysis. Shelley is an empiricist in his general subscription to this statement from David Hume: "As the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so, the solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation." 42 Two important principles are implied here. First, the indispensable firststep of philosophy or science is the criticism of knowledge itself. The instrument of knowing (the mind), its powers and limitations, must be defined before its ideas and beliefs can be accurately measured. Second, the method of such analysis must be that of the natural sciences, experience and observation. Hume states this clearly: "And though we must endeavor to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing our simplest and fewest causes, it is still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical. . . . " 43 Shelley accepts these premises, although his informal analysis led him to expand the usual empirical conception of experience. He thought perception of "the ultimate, original qualities of human 42

David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1888), "Introduction", p. xx. Hereafter cited as Hume. Shelley's acquaintance with Hume and with the tradition of empirical and sceptical inquiry is the subject of a book by C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth (University of Nebraska Press, 1954). 43 Hume, p. xxi.

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nature" was indeed the aim of philosophy and the philosophical life, even if it proved unattainable. Science for him, as perhaps it was for Bacon, led back finally to First Philosophy, and those "axioms common to all knowledge". While he distinguishes between normal experience and dreams, he does not reject dreams as possible evidence of this hidden reality, and he tends to regard perceptions of reflection as equal in importance to perceptions of sensation. His empiricism, in other words, is radical and almost wholly psychological rather than logical.44 There are no a priori or innate ideas, but there are fundamental principles which, though hidden from ordinary perception, may possibly be glimpsed in "visionary" awareness or prophetic openness. The chief features of this extraordinary experience, which is itself only a tentative form of knowledge, are an active harmony of the mental faculties, individuality of the object of thought, and an organic relationship between the knower and the known. Shelley begins his "Speculations on Metaphysics" (1815) this way. "It is an axiom in mental philosophy that we can think of nothing which we have not perceived. When I say we can think of nothing I mean we can imagine nothing, we can reason of nothing, we can remember nothing, we can foresee nothing. The most astonishing combinations of poetry, the subtlest deductions of logic and mathematics are no more than combinations which the intellect makes of sensations according to its own laws. A catalogue of all the thoughts of the mind and of the modifications is a cyclopaedic history of the Universe." 45 The formulation given here is that of psychological empiricism. All ideas are the products of perception molded by the laws of the intellect. These laws would appear to be associative in character since Shelley consistently speaks of "combinations" of thought, but two points are worthy of note. First, he finds the laws of thought proper to the intellect, and not to sensations, thereby cutting away any bias towards an external substance in the discussion of experience. 44

The phrase "radical empiricism" is, of course, from William James, who seems to me in many respects a disciple of Romantic psychology. See his definition in The Will to Believe (London, 1897), pp. vii-ix. " Prose, p. 182.

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Association is accomplished by the mind. Second, he will admit all thoughts into "a cyclopaedic history of the Universe", indicating a tendency to leap past Hume's atomistic methods and conclusions towards an assumed relation between the mind and what may be called reality. The first point tends to undercut a Berkeleian reliance on God as a substitute for substance, and the second tends to promote a similar substitute in which thought is equated with reality.46 The implied contradiction is perhaps helped a little by the following remarks from the same essay. We are intuitively conscious of our own existence and of that connection in the train of our successive ideas which we term our identity. We are conscious also of the existence of other minds; but not intuitively. Our evidence with respect of other minds is founded upon a very complicated relation of ideas, which it is foreign to (the) purpose of this treatise to anatomize. The basis of this relation is undoubtedly a periodical recurrence of masses of ideas which our more voluntary determinations have in one peculiar direction n o power to circumscribe or to arrest, and against the recurrence of which they can only imperfectly provide. The irresistible laws of thought constrain us to believe that the precise limits of our actual ideas are not the actual limits of possible ideas; the law, according to which these deductions are drawn, is called analogy; and this is the foundation of all our inferences f r o m one idea to another inasmuch as they resemble each other. 47

The remarks are unfortunately sketchy, but it is possible to glean from them a coherent approach. Unlike Hume, but like Berkeley, Shelley does not recognize the idea of identity as a metaphysical problem. We "intuit" our own existence and identity, which is to say, our "sense" of them is present whenever we perceive or reflect. Hume was unable to accept a distinction between such a "sense" and normal sensation, which he felt was always distinct, 46

Berkeley says in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge that we have knowledge not only of "an endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge", but of "something which knows or perceives them". He calls this perceiving agent, "mind, spirit, soul, or myself'. See Berkeley: Essay, Principles, Dialogues, ed. M. A. Calkins (New York, 1929), p. 125; hereafter cited as Berkeley. 47 Prose, pp. 183-84.

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separable, and determinate. Because identity was not a sensation but a relation made by the mind, the existence of the self became a problem for Hume.48 Shelley denies the problem by departing from Hume's genetic method to assume the mind as necessary to experience.49 He is saying, in other words, that without the consciousness of our own identity sensation as well as imagination is impossible, and experience itself would cease.50 But if the existence of mind is not a problem to Shelley, the existence of minds other than our own is. He attempts to avoid solipsism first by an appeal to observation, and second by an appeal to the "law" of analogy. His jump from the first to the second of these appeals is muddy and probably not clear in his own mind, but the appeals are actually distinct. The first involves the observation that our ideas are not the products of conscious will. We cannot prevent our ideas; therefore, we ought not to conceive of ourselves as the source or sole repository of ideas. Berkeley had used a similar argument to demonstrate the notion of the One Mind.51 The second appeal, also related to an argument 48

See Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment (New York, 1956), pp. 230-33, and Hume, pp. 252 ff. 49 Shelley appears to contradict himself once more in the next paragraph, but it is more the phrasing than the tenor of his ideas that gives this appearance. "We see trees, houses, fields, living things in our own shape, and in shapes more or less analogous to our own. These are perpetually changing the mode of their existence relatively to us. To express the varieties of these modes, we say, 'we move', 'they move', and as this motion is continual, though not uniform, we express our conception of the diversities of its course by, 'it has been', 'it is', 'it shall be'. These diversities are events or objects and are essential, considered relatively to human identity, for the existence of the human mind." Prose, p. 184. Despite the emphasis here on "diversities" of perception as the necessary feature of the individual mind, he is not considering the mind as a chaos of distinct impressions. The diversities themselves must still be considered "relatively to human identity". 50 "For if the inequalities produced by what has been termed the operations of the external universe were levelled by the perception of our being uniting and filling up their interstices, motion, and mensuration, and time and space; the elements of the human mind being thus abstracted, sensation and imagination cease. Mind cannot be considered pure." Prose, p. 184. 51 See Berkeley, pp. 300-303, "Third Dialogue" ("Between Hylas and Philonous").

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of Berkeley's, is simply based on the law of analogy. It is not a perception of other minds which demonstrates their existence. But the probability that they do exist and have the capacity for perception is recognized in reflection. This probability is founded on analogy ("an irresistible law of thought"), the principle of relating similar things. Again, something of Kant's emphasis on the mind's contribution to knowledge is hinted in this appeal to a principle of thought, even though Shelley's definition of the principle is empirical. Such a disturbing blend, however, seems endemic to Shelley's writing on metaphysics. In another paragraph of the "Speculations" he wrote: "A specific difference between every thought of the mind is indeed a necessary consequence of that law by which it perceives diversity and number; but a generic or essential difference is wholly arbitrary." 52 His terminology suggests the reduction of experience to thought 01 perception, and the consequent promotion of psychological empiricism. But his empiricism is not absolute: the distinctness of every thought is "a necessary consequence of that law by which it (the mind) perceives diversity and number". Thoughts themselves are not said to be distinct, as Hume held, but they are perceived as distinct because of a law of the mind, a law which is apparently necessary for knowledge of experience. The same kind of formulation is present in the discussion of causation. Hume's conception of cause as "a constant conjunction of events" is repeated in the "Notes to Queen Mab"; and in the "Speculations" the imagination is conceived of as the agent of our perception of cause. 53 Yet, in the following passage Shelley indicates a departure from the strictly genetic approach. But, it will be objected, the inhabitants of the various planets of this and other solar systems, and the existence of a Power bearing the same relation to all that we perceive and are, as what we call a cause does to what we call effect, were never subjects of sensation, and yet the laws of mind almost universally suggest, according to the various dispositions of each, a conjecture, a persuasion, or a conviction of their existence. The reply is simple: these thoughts are also to 52 53

Prose, p. 183. Prose, pp. 109-112, p. 184.

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be included in the catalogue of existence; they are modes in which thoughts are combined. . . . 54 H e will admit those thoughts as objects of his grand science of mind which have never been recorded in sensation. H e admits them as "modes in which thoughts are combined", or, in other words, as constructions of the mind. They are admitted to existence even though they can never be perceived; and the reason for this is that the laws of mind "almost universally suggest" or, in other words, assume their existence. Kant makes the very same point in his Prolegomena, though, of course, in his own terms. 55 Cause for Shelley is equally a constant conjunction of events and a construction placed o n events according to principles of the intellect. His weakness as a philosopher is perhaps most clearly seen in his failure to recognize the incompatibility of these two views. At the same time, recalling the revolutionary importance of Kant's critique of Hume, it is perhaps remarkable that he approximated Kant at all. 56 54

Prose, pp. 182-183. See Kant, Prolegomena Concerning Every Future Metaphysics. "From the earliest days of philosophy students of pure reason have postulated, in addition to the beings known to sense (phenomena) constituting the world of sense, special intellectual beings (noumena) which are supposed to constitute an intellectual world. Since previous students held appearance and illusion to be identical [an error], which may be excused in an undeveloped epoch, they conceded true existence only to the intellectual beings." Quoted from The Philosophy of Kant, ed. by Carl Friedrich (New York, 1949), pp. 86-87. 58 There is no evidence that Shelley read Kant, although he ordered an English translation of his works in 1812. See Newman Ivey White, I, p. 277. He does, however, say that he "looked at" Bom's translation of Kant (1795) for "nine days". He describes the translation as "A world of words, tail foremost, where/ Right-wrong-false-true-and foul-and fair/ As in a lottery-wheel are shook." "Peter Bell III", 11. 520-22. He finds Sir William Drummond, the philosopher he credits with founding the "Intellectual System" to which he subscribes [see "On Life", Prose, p. 173], had read Kant [1. 532], but since he is satirizing "German psychologies" and especially the "furor verborum" of Bom's translation, he gives no further information about his own intellectual relations with Kant. In a note to the poem [Poetry, p. 357], he refers jokingly to the term "pure anticipated cognition", which probably stands for Kant's a priori ideas. Throughout the spring of 1822 he wrote Horace Smith asking for a French translation of Kant, so we may suppose a continuing seriousness 55

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63

Shelley is a psychological empiricist who consistently, if halfunconsciously, formulates problems in such a way as to deny the absolute authority of empirical procedures and conclusions, at least on Hume's model. He drifts in the direction of Kant in finding the laws of the intellect to be the regulatory principles of experience, but his terminology, drawn mostly from Berkeley and Hume, provides him with no way of distinguishing accurately perception, as the mere presentation of images to the intellect, from experience, as the judgment of these images according to the principles of the intellect. His terms are sensation and reflection, terms utilized by Hume to explain the different force or liveliness ideas possess. Moreover, while emphasizing the need for a thorough study of the mind, Shelley is given to pronouncements about existence, whether it is external, or different from thought (which he seems to deny), or a universal mind. Indeed, it is very tempting to associate Shelley's thought with Berkeley's.57 There is actually nothing a-spiritual, if nothing very human, about Necessity in the poet's earlier works, and in "On Life" (1815) he says "the words I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of about Kant underlying Shelley's jokes. See letter, e.g., of June 29, 1822, Julian Ed. X, p. 410. René Wellek, in his book, Kant in England (Princeton, 1931), dismisses any direct Kantian influence on Shelley. 57 See Wasserman, The Subtler Language, pp. 201 ff. For an earlier and still very valuable discussion, see G. S. Brett, "Shelley's Relation to Berkeley and Drummond", Studies in English by Members of University College (Toronto, 1931), pp. 170-202. Brett argues convincingly that Berkeley and Drummond, and through them, Shelley, must be considered primarily as empirical thinkers. Their "Neo-Platonism" has a Newtonian orientation (pp. 183-84). He speculates that Berkeleian philosophy removed "some great obstacle" for Shelley: "With the discovery of the immaterial philosophy this terrible separateness (implied in materialism) of persons vanished: there was no more any necessity to think of persons as primarily flesh and blood; on the contrary the form, the voice, the look are our own experiences, the sense-material through which the other person is revealed; and that other person in its inner self is what we are, a living experience" (my italics) (p. 176). Brett probably over-dramatizes Shelley's "discovery" of immaterialism: Shelley's basic attachment was not to Berkeleian metaphysics any more than it was to Platonic metaphysics. At the same time, Brett's exposition of the doctrine of "persons" illuminates a great deal about Shelley's drive to value experience, morally and esthetically.

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thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind. Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it." 58 No better source exists than Berkeley for the doctrine that our knowledge is ideal, and that the fact of this condition need not lead to solipsism. It is also consistent with Berkeley for Shelley to write further in "On Life": "the relation of things remain unchanged, by whatever system. By the word things is to be understood any object of thought, that is any thought upon which any other thought is employed, with an apprehension of distinction." 59 The doctrine that ideas or perceptions are defined by their being distinct and separable is a common-place of empiricism. Moreover, Berkeley's religious belief that nature was the manuscript of divine spirit, which contained the original ideas of everything and causes all finite minds to have their ideas, is certainly compatible with the view of life Shelley finds in his "Intellectual Philosophy", "that of unity".60 And, finally, it would seem a perfectly adequate philosophical basis for the poet's description of himself to Godwin in 1817 as able "to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole".61 But Shelley's allegiance to the "one mind" as a ground of existence is always tentative and sometimes rejected. Even at the end of "On Life", where he is employing a kind of Berkeleian idealism against "materialism . . . a seducing system to young and superficial minds", and against "the popular philosophy of mind and matter", he rejects the idea of the "one mind" as First 58

Prose, p. 174. Prose, p. 174. 60 Prose, p. 173. For a lucid summary of Berkeley on this point, see Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment, pp. 146-47, 154, 156. 61 From a letter to William Godwin, Dec. 11, 1817. Quoted from Poetry, p. 158. 59

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Cause. "That the basis of all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident.... It is infinitely improbable that the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind." 63 Later in his career Shelley returns to this improbable similarity to view it from another angle. In the "Essay on Christianity" (1818) he writes that "the abstract perfection of the human character is the type of the actual perfection of the divine"; 64 and in Adonais (1821) he suggests an analogy between "the One Spirit's plastic stress" and the tradition of creative poets described in the Defence as "like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind".63 Yet, these "revisions" seem essentially to reinforce his humanism rather than to set forth either orthodox or natural religion. And, perhaps more important, their context is not primarily an empirical analysis of the mind, but an exposition of the value-making processes of the poetic imagination. The boundary between these two contexts is never fixed in Shelley's writing, where metaphysics, morals, and esthetics are never firmly separated. Yet, failure to discriminate the two contexts of empirical analysis and poetic imagination can lead to oversimplification. His Intellectual System is not designed to reveal truths about substance, but to elucidate the nature of experience. Hence, its primary aim and procedure is to expose "vulgar errors", like the confusion of words and things: to place analytical awareness in opposition to custom. The poetic imagination, on the other hand (to anticipate the discussion of the next 62

The "popular philosophy" has been variously identified. C. E. Pulos (The Deep Truth, Lincoln, 1954, p. 53) thinks it refers to Common Sense. D. L. Clark (Prose, p. 173 n.) sees it as Immaterialism. But it is improbable that either of these doctrines which have something in common with his own analysis of the mind and experience is intended as the "popular philosophy." The Christian apologist, Paley, seems to have been the most "popular" philosopher of Shelley's day, and Shelley's phrasing seems to indicate he is talking about religion, about Christianity, rather than secular philosophy: "The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy . . . its fatal consequences in morals, and . . . violent dogmatism concerning the source of all t h i n g s . . . . " 63

Prose, p. Prose, p. Adonais, esthesia, pp. 64 65

174. 207. stanza 43. See discussion in O'Malley, Shelley 120-21 and 134-35.

and

Syn-

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section), is itself a value-making process, and essentially affirms itself, its own activity. It produces an awareness of order, or spirit, or value in immediate acts of perception rather than in rational distinctions. It works by what Coleridge called the "coalescence" of subject and object, and implies that the imaginative apprehension of value stands in theoretical opposition to the whole realm of the Intellectual System where fact is distinguished from vulgar error. The great links between Shelley's empiricism and his view of the imagination are found in the importance for both of perceptual activity, and in the single attitude they express towards habit. Because his empiricism was as detailed about perceptions of reflection as about perceptions of sensation, he seems to have had little difficulty in identifying "atoms" of thought with the "integral thoughts" or individuals which are the valued objects of imagination. Moreover, he saw no intrinsic difficulty in maintaining a balance between analysis and synthesis. He saw experience as "a rapid succession of thoughts", or as a consciousness of consecutive wholes, "whose operations may be indefinitely combined".66 As to habit, it is the specific task of the Intellectual System to free us from its errors, the results of "a series . . . of impressions, planted by reiteration".67 And it is part of the efficacy of the poetic imagination to redeem us from "the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions".68 To be sure, the Intellectual System does not redeem us from a curse - it can only make us better aware of our habitual responses. But such awareness was only different in mode, not in kind, from states of imaginative activity. Shelley's hope in metaphysics is to come upon the "facts" of the mind.69 And his chief assumption seems to be that these 66

Prose, p. 183. "By considering all knowledge as bounded by perception whose operations may be indefinitely combined, we arrive at a conception of Nature inexpressibly more magnificent, simple, and true than accords with the ordinary systems of complicated and partial consideration. Nor does a contemplation of the Universe in this comprehensive and synthetical view exclude the subtlest analysis of its modifications and parts." 67 Prose, p. 173. 68 Prose, p. 295. 89 "Let us contemplate facts. Let me repeat that in the great study of

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facts are much larger in scope, leading to broader fields of inquiry, than most empirical philosophers had been willing to admit. He writes: "Most of the errors of philosophers have arisen from considering the human being in a point of view too detailed and circumscribed. He is not a moral and an intellectual - but also, and preeminently, an imaginative being." 70 This "fact" he finds painfully obvious in the attempt to analyze thought. But t h o u g h t c a n w i t h d i f f i c u l t y visit t h e intricate a n d w i n d i n g c h a m bers w h i c h it i n h a b i t s . It is like a r i v e r w h o s e r a p i d a n d p e r p e t u a l s t r e a m flows o u t w a r d s - like o n e in d r e a d w h o s p e e d s t h r o u g h t h e recesses of s o m e h a u n t e d pile a n d d a r e s n o t look b e h i n d . T h e c a v e r n s of t h e m i n d a r e o b s c u r e and s h a d o w y ; o r p e r v a d e d w i t h a lustre, b e a u t i f u l l y b r i g h t i n d e e d , b u t s h i n i n g n o t b e y o n d their portals. If it w e r e possible t o b e w h e r e w e h a v e b e e n , vitally a n d i n d e e d - if, at t h e m o m e n t of o u r p r e s e n c e t h e r e w e c o u l d d e f i n e t h e results of o u r e x p e r i e n c e - if t h e p a s s a g e f r o m s e n s a t i o n to r e f l e c t i o n - f r o m a state of passive p e r c e p t i o n to v o l u n t a r y c o n t e m p l a t i o n w e r e not s o dizzying a n d s o t u m u l t u o u s , this a t t e m p t w o u l d b e less d i f f i c u l t . 7 1

We seem no more able to prevent, or arrest, our imaginations than our sensations. Thought flows outwards, concealing its points of origin. The sense and definition, the life and the formulation of life, seem always at odds, always altering one another. The caverns of the mind are obscure or bright; but it is not ourselves we ought resolutely to compel the mind to a rigid examination of itself. Let us in the science which regards those laws by which the mind acts, as well as those which regard the laws b y which it is acted upon, severely collect those facts." Prose, p. 185. ™ Prose, p. 186. 71 Prose, p. 186. We shall meet this imagery again in " M o n t Blanc". The philosophical "meaning" of Shelley's cave imagery has long been traced to Plato and the Neo-Platonists. Here, we see we must also take account of Bacon's "idols of the cave". Roughly what Bacon did was to distinguish sharply between errors of perception (idols of the tribe) and errors of personal education or habit (idols of the cave). Shelley seems to retain Bacon's idea that the cave is the individual or personal mind, and Bacon's emphasis that the error is not in believing in appearances, but in believing in false appearances (the corrective device is thus experiment rather than Reason). Like Plato, however, Shelley tends to merge errors of perception and errors of habit. T h e "union" of Plato and Bacon was not uncommon in his age. Cf. Coleridge, "The Baconian method essentially one with t h e Platonic", The Friend, Essay IX.

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clear whether they are so because they are the graves or the seedplots of our awareness of existence, the graves or seed-plots of our voluntary contemplations. What is clear is that an anatomy of the mind or ourselves must consider reflective powers as well as powers of sensation. The "facts" of metaphysics, at any rate, are too complex to allow for a completely "genetic" approach, where sense-data alone are important. Getting at facts is for Shelley, as for Bacon whom he cites, the principal way of eliminating error. He says of the Intellectual System: "it establishes no new truth, it gives no additional insight into our hidden nature, neither its action nor itself. Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining as pioneer for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this object: it destroys error and the roots of error. . . . It 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." 72 The analytical process of doubt is fundamental to Shelley's conception of philosophy. This process has nothing to do with the illumination of "truth", or the "hidden nature" of man; but it prepares the way for such illumination. This must be the sense in which he speaks of the "freedom" to which the mind is reduced when error is eliminated. At the same time, he tends not to deceive himself by thinking that the eradication of error and the building up of truth are the same thing. The appearances of things are not "lies"; they are rather the materials of knowledge. Error is an abuse of the creative powers of the mind, not a mere reliance on the experience of appearances. To summarize, Shelley deserves to be considered a radical empiricist who places an even heavier emphasis on imagination than his great predecessor, Hume, and tends to formulate problems of knowledge in ways that challenge the limits of the "genetic" method of inquiry. He accepts the tradition of doubt, but interprets it much as Bacon did, as an interim method designed to lead ultimately to a positive method of exact science. His conception of the creative imagination can, in fact, be seen as 72

Prose,

p. 173.

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69

a substitute for Baconian exact science, a substitute no doubt encouraged by Bacon's calling the imagination "the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge", and suggesting that the "similitudes" of things are real instances of "the unity of nature", which it is the business of First Philosophy to display.73 Shelley's philosophical essays are highly informal exercises, and technically very uneven. But they express a rather firm allegiance to empirical attitudes, and at least three premises which he seems never to have completely abandoned. First is the rejection of innate ideas, or the conception of a pure mind unconditioned by perceptions. Second is the focus on perception and mental activity that deal with a common world (although an internal one, largely), one available to men's experience rather than one dominated by "distinctions of Reason". Third is the critique of abstractions. Shelley was not a nominalist, but he was aware of the latent absurdity in speculating on non-experienceable entities. General ideas (which he seems to conceive of as ideas of relations), even the idea of the One, must have roots in perception to be intelligible. Shelley's radical empiricism combines in his philosophical thought with a radical humanism in which "life and the world" take on the greatest possible human significance. An alert and intelligent awareness of life reveals to us essentially "the wonder of our being".74 In the essay, "On Life", he records the "wonder" of seeing nature stripped of "the mist of familiarity", and compares nature to a "gigantic and wondrous work of art". He is awed by the greatness that he sees. But it is basically an internal truth he pursues, a truth of the imagination. His metaphysical speculation, formless as it is, provides him with a critique of er73

Shelley cites these passages in the Defence of Poetry. See The Advancement of Learning, Book III, Chapter 1. 74 Prose, p. 172. The "wonder" of life is, of course, merely the other side of the question, "What is life?". "Thoughts and feelings arise with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain it is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much."

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ror. His poetry is an attempt to build an imaginative truth on the freedom which this critique establishes.

m

In the opening paragraph of the Defence of Poetry Shelley distinguishes between the reason and the imagination. 73 The basis of the distinction is the awareness that the mind acts in different ways on the products of experience, that the different faculties of the mind form judgments appropriate to their own principles of action (or judgment). Reason and imagination act in conformity to principles proper to their own nature in the mind. Reason is described as "mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced". Its principle is analysis, the comparison of ideas in order to find their agreement or disagreement. Its sphere of judgment is the intellect alone. The imagination is described as "mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity". Its principle is synthesis, the joining or compounding of distinct ideas so as to produce another which is wholly new and distinct.76 Its sphere of judgment is complicated; for it not only brings images before the intellect, where the reason may compare and analyze them, but "colors" those images, which is best summarized here as a way of saying it acts also in terms of the judgment of feeling and pleasure. The imagi75

Prose, p. 277. This statement of the difference between reason and imagination contains strong overtones of Coleridge's argument in Biographia Literaria, Chapter 13, with hints of his description of the poet in Chapter 14. Coleridge distinguishes between truths "either mediate, that is derived from some other truth or truths; or immediate and original". This distinction is preparatory for his definition of Imagination. "The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception. . . . The secondary Imagination . . . dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.... It struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead." Quoted from Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. by Donald A Stauffer (New York, 1951), p. 246, p. 263. 79

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nation, in other words, as the principle of synthesis, brings together intellect and emotion, provides knowledge that is also value. Hence, "reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole". For the reason is limited by its principles to factual demonstration, whereas the imagination construes experience in relation to moral and esthetic feelings. And the crucial point about these feelings, as distinct from the faculties of the intellect, would seem to be their connection with esthetic ends or purposes, and hence with human values. The distinction between reason and imagination, and the implication that the imagination deals in some way with judgments of purpose underlie Shelley's definition of poetry as an expression of the imagination. As an attempt to clarify this definition he devised the comparison, put to use earlier by Coleridge and others ("Eolian Harp", 1795), of the mind with a wind-harp. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts other wise than in a lyre and produces not melody alone but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds and motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them in a determined proportion of sound, even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. {Prose, p. 277)

Man, like the lyre, can produce thought only out of what his mind receives in experience. Thought is limited by perception. The product of the lyre is called melody because the wind produces a succession of single tones, implying that mental experience may be broken down into its elements, or a succession of single impressions. But the product of the mind is not a simple succession of ideas, a melody, but a harmony of ideas, a "determined proportion". The mind adjusts its ideas to the impressions which call them forth. From the standpoint of the intellect the formulation is neither Kantian nor empirical, but somewhat different from

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each of these opposed views. It is not Kantian because then the impressions would have been found to be accommodated to the principles of thought, and not the other way around. But it is not strictly empirical either because the "determined proportion" effected by the mind is not simply a construction of arbitrary or customary relations among impressions, which are "in fact" related only by their contiguity or succession.77 Shelley's point would seem to be that the harmony of the product bears immediate as well as necessary relation to the succession of impressions. The immediacy of the harmony established in the imagination is suggested both in the primary comparison of the mind with a lyre, and in the subordinate comparison of the lyre-mind with the voice of a musician. The impressions of the wind and the motions of the chords are simultaneous and continuous. So, too, is the internal adjustment of the imagination which produces a "determined proportion". Harmony exists specifically in this adjustment, and is neither in the impressions themselves nor is it pre-formed by the mind. It is "determined" by the imagination, which regards impressions as "elements" or "objects . . . common to universal Nature and existence itself".78 The imagination is not a mold into which impressions flow, but shapes impressions by determining itself in them. It reveals the "unapprehended relations of things" by re-arranging, blending, and completing sense-impressions, making them at once satisfying to the mind and the materials of knowledge. The "determined proportion" effected by the imagination has, thus, an intrinsic cause in the action of the mind, a cause or "logic" in the process of imagining itself. This is neither the "logic" of the Unconscious or Will, nor the logic of Reason. Its basis, rather, is a "presump77 The principle of harmony is not rooted, in other words, in associational features; these features are rather the manifestation of the principle. In a fragment belonging to this portion of the Defence of Poetry, he writes of imagination: "it has been termed the power of association.... Association is, however, rather a law according to which this power is exerted than the power itself.... Association bears the same relation to imagination as a mode to a source of action...." Prose, p. 277. 78 Prose, p. 277.

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tion", or a need of the mind for order in immediate experience, and its mode of operation is synthesis or play.79 Harmony and proportion are valued precisely because they have "integral unity", are experienced as immediate and, hence, free from interests or concepts. They are produced by the logic of play, whose rules wholly refer to objects and situations, and yet are selfdetermining. Poetry, in a general sense, Shelley calls the expression of the imagination. The objects of poetry arise from experience determined by the free-play of the mind.80 The representation becomes a medium of expression and is subject to the laws of imagination. This is true of all arts, musical, pictorial, plastic, or verbal.81 Now just as imagination itself obeys an intrinsic principle of action, so "there is a certain order or rhythm" belonging to each of the arts "from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other".82 The medium of expression, in other words, has value in itself which gives rise to pleasure. These values may be thought of as proper to their respective arts, but since each medium is an expression of the imagination at base, the values as well as the forms of art have a fundamental connection with one another. It is partly in this sense that the "certain rhythm or order" is said to be "an 79

Kant calls this "presumption" a "need of the mind", and I have borrowed the phrases from him. He finds that the esthetic imagination or "reflecting judgment" is "obliged to ascend from the particular in nature to the general" . . . and that it "can give such a transcendental principle as a law only to itself" (see Critique of Judgment, Friedrich, p. 275 and pp. 270-71). As I understand it, this explains why we value immediate experience in poetry (the Concrete Universal according to Hegel), and suggests Shelley's view that in imagination particulars become "types of all things that are". Both men seem to me to recognize such experience as a "construction" (but not, therefore, unreal) rather than as an intuition. 80 "Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds." Prose, p. 278. 81 Prose, p. 278. 82 Prose, p. 278. "Although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects."

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approximation" to the beautiful. A n d when Shelley reduces the value of art to the beautiful, he is reducing art itself to the imagination, "the relation subsisting, first between existence and perception and secondly, between perception and expression". 8 3 According to this view, art and nature are equally sources of the judgment of beauty, for such judgment belongs to the medium and agency of perception (the imagination) rather than to the objects perceived, or the various interests served by expression. In imaginative apprehension, objects are not referred to concepts, or "algebraical representations", nor are they referred, though this is less clear in Shelley, to interests governing the will. 84 They are self-determining, in other words, insofar as they are objects of imagination. The idea is essentially a literal interpretation of Sidney's view that the poet "doth grow . . . another nature", and that while nature's world is brazen, "poets deliver only a golden". Shelley writes: Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil f r o m before the scene of things, it creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges f r o m our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to 83

Prose, p. 278. For example, poetry is connected directly with man in society. "The social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the present as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to action . . . and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind." Prose, p. 278. This leveling of art, morality, philosophy, etc. is accomplished in terms of principles intrinsic in the human spirit (the social sympathies); and in the "Speculations on Morals" (1815-16) he traces them to the imagination. "Imagination or mind employed in prophetically [imaging forth] its objects is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation of its progress, nay, every, the minutest change depends." And, moreover, he finds the imagination "disinterested" in its promotion of social progress, and confined by self-interest when social change lags, or society itself disintegrates. 84

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feel that which w e perceive, and to imagine that which w e know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.

The curse of subjection to accident, "life's dark veil", is surely related to Plato's conception of the world of appearances as a kind of error. But Shelley is not essentially opposing objective and subjective states of being, knowledge and mere opinion. He is contrasting, instead, different states of perception and expression, different states of knowing and believing. The "scene of things" poetry discovers is both objective and subjective: objective in that it has claims to universality, to a discovery, for instance, of the principle of unity within multiplicity; and subjective in that it is essentially a creation of the mind, of "a being within our being", which belongs to "thought" and not to surrounding impressions". The poet, in effect, realizes thought, gives it objective existence. He presents images directly to the feelings and the imagination, and not indirectly to them through the categories of familiar experience. 85 The objective existence or principle presented by poetic thought is not a concept about nature, or "surrounding impressions", but a result of the "internal adjustment" of the lyre-mind to nature. Its ground is, in other words, the feeling of pleasure in the unity of objects. Thus, poetry need not always cut through natural appearances to natural reality; it may "spread its own figured curtain". In so doing poetry gives us the "common Universe" not as a natural reality but as a kind of extension of the human mind, a universe of thought. 86 Poetry in this sense is a "beautiful idealism", arising out of the process of image-making itself. The ideality of poetry to Shelley is not a concept about the real 85 René Wellek, in A History of Modern Criticism, calls attention to Shelley's awareness of "what modern theory would call 'realization' ". II, p. 126. 86 "Those who are subject to the state called revery feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were dissolved into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which usually precede ,or accompany, or follow an unusually intense apprehension of life." "On Life", Prose, p. 174.

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nature of things, but a principle of the imaginative process. Our knowledge of things, he implies, is always tentative, always conditioned by our particular relations to nature. These relations are what imagination dissolves by assuming relations which cannot be demonstrated with reference to nature or sensation. Poetry that cuts through "life's dark veil" works from the same principle, only here particular relations are visualized as external, attached to natural events. The objective principle discovered when these relations are dissolved, or seen through, is contributed by the imagination, but it is felt to reside in the objects seen. Shelley's language concerning these problems is metaphorical, and often obscure. It seems to me a mistake, however, to think that he was not aware of implying some rather precise distinctions. He is trying here, as in most of the Defence for that "rare union of close and subtle logic with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry" he appreciated so much in Plato, and the task is enormously difficult. Shelley conceives of the imaginative process, whose source is inseparable from its operation, as having hypothetical content, as it were, as a dramatization of intelligence. Imagination produces a type of belief, but a type for which there is no evidence or demonstration beyond its own presence, its own vivid experience, here and now. Imaginative belief is, therefore, distinct from belief in nature, without which, he feels, mind could not exist, consciousness would cease. Imaginative belief arises out of consciousness, out of "an intense and vivid apprehension of life"; the belief in nature gives rise to consciousness itself.87 Perhaps the clearest evidence of what Shelley felt the idealisms of poetry to be is found in his treatment of the theme of vision in his own poems. Especially interesting are the three poems written 87

Shelley makes these two kinds of belief remarkably clear in his "Essay on a Future State". Belief in nature and natural laws are facts of experience from which we cannot escape, though indeed an anatomy of these facts tells us nothing about eternal permanence (Prose, p. 177). Imaginative belief is summarized in this manner: "The desire to be for ever as we are, the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change which is common to all the animated and inanimate combinations of the universe is, indeed, the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions of a future state" (p. 178).

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in 1815-16, Alastor, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", and "Mont Blanc"; for each of these develops the theme of visionary awareness in a distinct way. Vision is developed in Alastor in terms of the human need for love, in the "Hymn" in terms of religious dedication, and in "Mont Blanc" in terms of the natural world itself. These shifts in context reveal distinct attitudes towards vision, and, taken together, provide a rather comprehensive commentary on Shelley's idea of the creative imagination. Three separate accounts of visionary experience are presented in Alastor. The first occurs in the invocation (11. 1-49), and seems deliberately incomplete.88 Shelley is addressing the "Mother of this unfathomable world", the repository of the truth of "what we are". But he reaches the climax of his address in a frank denial of having seen this truth: . . . and, though ne'er yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath . . . (11. 37-45)

He waits for the power of expression to make communicable the vision which "shone" within him. The vision which is sufficient for poetry given this "breath", however, is not derived from nature, but from "dream", "phantasm", or "thought". The same tension is hinted at here as is presented forcefully in the "Ode to the West Wind", where the poet attempts to harmonize power with his own being.89 The struggle to find meaning in nature has resulted in an inner light which is now ready for translation into audible experience. Presumably what is to be expressed 88

Glenn O'Malley makes the same point for slightly different reasons in "Shelley's Air-Prism", MP, LV (1958), p. 183, repeated in Shelley and Synesthesia, pp. 48-49. 89 See "Ode to the West Wind", stanza v, Poetry, p. 579. The same elements of light ("sparks"), in the poet's words, and power in the wind are present.

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will be ideal rather than factual; yet it will still harmonize with nature.90 What Shelley leaves simply suggested in the invocation is elaborately worked out in connection with the visionary Poet of his narrative, whose extraordinary perceptual powers give rise to the second and third visions in the poem. They occur in close proximity, and provide the framework for what Baker has called "the conflict of allegiance" between Nature's law and the law of love in human beings.91 And we may see in them, additionally, an anatomy of Shelley's vision in the invocation; only, where his vision there appears wholly potential and unrealized in form, these are completed. They suggest a division of external and internal sources of vision, each possessing an integrity of its own, while the vision of the invocation suggests a tension between the light of the mind and the motion or breath of the spirit of nature. The Poet's initial vision, the second vision of the poem, is of the "inmost sanctuary" of nature. 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 strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. (11. 121-28)

The flash of meaning is fused with the breath of nature or "strong inspiration". His vacant mind is illumined by secrets hidden within "speechless shapes" and "floating shades". And, as Shelley writes in the preface; "So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, »o O'Malley convincingly suggests that the ideal light within the poet is a preparation for "Aeolian inspiration". "The burden of the invocation has been a transcendence of ordinary perception. . . . Here at the climax . . . a silent harmony of ideal light may be said to be potentially 'refrangible' as Aeolian music." "Shelley's Air-Prism", p. 183, and Shelley and Synesthesia, pp. 35-51 passim. 91 See Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry, p. 47.

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92

tranquil, and self-possessed." The implication is that of a complete rapport between the Poet and the external world. The inmost sanctuary, the source of the manifold variety of time, is beheld. The vision of the veiled maid competes with the vision of nature's secrets, even though it appears to be a distillation of natural forms. The veiled maid visits the Poet's sleep, whereas the earlier "meaning" had arisen from continuous wakefulness; and she comes as a voice, "like the voice of his own soul / Heard in the calm of thought", rather than as a flash of light. Yet, the music of her voice, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. (11. 155-57)

It is a natural harmony of light as well as sound, and it makes manifest the inmost sanctuary of the Poet, his "inmost sense". The maid offers the tantalizing hope to the Poet that he may find her revealed in the external world, that, indeed, his creation is an antitype of some form of nature. Shelley describes this dream in the preface as an embodiment of the Poet's imaginations; yet, it is said to occur when "his mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself." 93 Evidently, the dream is, paradoxically, an awakening, an awakening to "that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction".94 This "sudden darkness and extinction" is the usurpation of nature's light by the ideal light of the Poet's own soul. When the dream leaves him, he sees The cold white light of morning, the blue moon Low in the west, the clear and garish hills, The distinct valley and the vacant woods, Spread round him where he stood . . . (11. 93-96) 92

Poetry, p. 14. This state, realized in the Poet, is only potential in Shelley's own vision in the invocation; the two have quested for meaning, however, in similar ways. 93 Poetry, p. 14. 94 Poetry, p. 15.

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The imagery suggests his isolation and sense of vacancy, the apparent disrelation of his former rapport with nature with his present absorption with the creature of his own soul. It has been suggested that the Poet's allegiance, throughout the remainder of the poem, to the vision of the veiled maid represents a kind of solipsism, which Shelley himself struggles against.95 Actually, the opposite appears to be the case, for the Poet is constantly aware that the natural harmonies he wanders through, while paradoxical symbols of his own perceptual power, do not reveal "the being within his being". Their profound source in nature is explicitly made an analogy for the profound source within the Poet's soul which gave rise to his vision, but an analogy which reveals no final meaning.96 He sees in the water of a stream the reflection of his natural self in the process of a natural disintegration. His own natural harmony is, in effect, the symbol of his own "sudden darkness and extinction" when he perceives the power of love. The quest for the antitype of the maiden in nature leads only to the irony of an impotent innocence, to a passing from the ideal web of inmost sense to "the web of human things, / Birth and the grave" (11. 719-20). It is because of this essentially melancholy necessity, the necessity of distinguishing the human spirit from nature, that Shelley finds it hard, I think, to express in his preface the moral instruction suggested by the Poet's quest.97 95

See Albert Gerard, "Alastor: or the Spirit of Solipsism", PQ, XXXIII (1954), pp. 64-77. In "On Life" Shelley calls solipsism a "monstrous presumption", and seems never to have been strongly tempted by it as Gerard suggests. Cf. Prose, p. 174. 99 See Alastor, 11. 502-14. O stream Whose source is inaccessibly profound, Whither do thy mysterious waters tend? Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs, Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course Have each their type in me. 97 The consistency of the preface and the poem is still an unsettled topic of criticism. For the first and most influential statement of their inconsistency see R. D. Havens, "Shelley's Alastor", PMLA, XLV (1930), 10981115.

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In Alastor, then, the anatomy of visionary awareness leads to paradox. Unity in variety is attributed to nature, but it is also an expression of the Poet's own soul. The paradox is not resolved in the quest where, instead, the disparity of the two kinds of unity is stressed. The need of their being resolved is clear from the invocation where Shelley explicitly waits not for the voice of his own soul, but for the voice of the "Great Parent". Yet, this need, as it is related to human love, brings on a tragic awareness in the poem, an awareness of the disintegration rather than the perfection of innocence. It is the paradox of having to express unity in order to perceive it or its absence clearly. In the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" this paradox is not so much resolved as made the basic characteristic of a purely spiritual state of being. The theme of the poem turns on the identification of the poet as the dedicated worshipper of a spirit or power, to which all forms of reality are subordinate. T h e awful shadow of s o m e unseen P o w e r Floats though unseen a m o n g us, - visiting T h i s various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower. . . . (11. 1-4)

Intellectual Beauty is clearly related to the "Great Parent" of Alastor, but it is not the source of nature or existence, not an ideal ground for the world of appearances. In technical terms it is autonomous, disinterested, and independent of limiting concepts. Yet, it is also essentially inconstant, providing a transient illumination or inspiration. We should note that its "shadow" is what is beheld in the opening lines, and it is beheld or apprehended not by direct sight but by reflection, by means of a series of analogies with the most tenuous phenomena: summer winds, moonbeams, clouds, and "memory of music fled". They are all images of "fading birth".88 They suggest the related processes of transformation, dispersion, and waxing and waning. In this sense the shadow "floats . . . among us", challenging realiza98 The phrase "fading birth" is from Epipsychidion, 1. 384. A similar position on this imagery is maintained by Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 13-24.

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tion, keeping no "firm state, but yet potential in all perception and thought. It seems to constitute a purely spiritual medium, or atmosphere, in which the One and the Many coalesce. What this suggests is a merging of those features in the Spirit of Beauty which in Alastor were held distinct, belonging there either to the spirit of nature or the spirit of human love. At the same time, the visionary awareness presented in the "Hymn" does not reveal laws, whether for things or for men. The spirit gives "grace and truth to life's unquiet dream" [1. 36], and is a "messenger of sympathies" [1. 42], but does not disclose the secrets either of existence or of human desire. "Doubt, chance, and mutability" [1. 31], are the inevitable facts of perception and knowledge, the grace and truth lent by beauty being unconfined by existence or desire. The conception, in other words, is of a spirit which remains purely potential or hypothetical, appealing to the imagination simply, and not through the imagination to a confining belief or purpose. It binds the visionary simply, though profoundly, to "fear himself and love all human kind" [1. 84], the word fear being used in the sense of religious awe or respect. He is bound, that is, to the mysterious imaginative process of his own mind, which apprehends beauty only by expressing itself. Perhaps the best gloss on Shelley's Spirit of Beauty is his own famous statement on inspiration in the Defence of Poetry. "A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry'. The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to a transitory brightness; this power arises from within like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure." 99 The organic terms of the description are appropriate both for repudiating in advance attempts to limit the poetic imagination to a habitual ordering of events, and for suggesting that enlightened vision consists in a formal process of the mind. The wind of inspiration is thus a special refinement of the wind of impressions that strikes the lyre-mind at the opening of the Defence of Poetry. The latter, arising from within or M Prose, p. 294.

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without the mind, has contact not only with imagination, but forms relations which are contemplated by reason. Inspiration, on the other hand, has no relations as such, but constitutes a unity. It arises sui generis, and remains self-contained through its process of birth and decline (or dispersion). Such organic unity is characteristic of the Spirit of Beauty as well as of imagination. Beauty, the "transitory brightness" of the mind, is not identical with imagination. Its transformational process, however, readily suggests an intrinsic relation with the "principle of synthesis" in man. 100 In "Mont Blanc" the scope of vision is existential as well as spiritual. Where the "Hymn" is concerned with an essentially esthetic power, the One and the Many coalescing in momentary illuminations, "Mont Blanc" is concerned with the total relation of mind to the world it experiences, and especially, the relation of mind to the power of the natural process, or order. The vision of "Mont Blanc" takes us back to the problem of the great world of "doubt, chance, and mutability", the problem of the basis of spiritual awareness in phenomena which are known only as fragments. The nature of the imagination is, as we shall see, the key to this problem. 101 100

See above, pp. 70-73. "Mont Blanc" has recently received a great deal of critical attention. Argument has centered on the relation of the visionary to the power symbolized by the mountain. C. E. Pulos, in The Deep Truth (1954), finds Shelley maintaining a sceptical attitude to power, the "principle of causation or of a creative deity" remaining essentially a hypothesis and unknown, see pp. 64 ff. Charles H. Vivian, on the other hand, in "The One Mont Blanc" (KSJ, 4, 1955), finds that Shelley is "half an empiricist, half an idealist" (p. 56). This does not, however, lead to philosophic confusion because, Vivian insists, the burden of the poem is the religious manifestation of a "Principle of Permanence", not the investigation of Necessity (pp. 63-65). His position falters, it seems to me, when he fails to make clear how this principle has both subjective and objective grounds. Roughly the same position is maintained in Shelley's Mythmaking (1959) by Harold Bloom. Here, Shelley's inspiration is said to be personal religious experience, "the affrighted sense of the great world itself'. He struggles with experience, but his way of knowing is solely intuitional, as he confronts Power in the "universal mind". See pp. 22-35. Bloom's account would wish away the implications of philosophical analysis in the poem, yet, it is itself strangely committed to a Berkeleian "universal mind" 101

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Imaginative vision in "Mont Blanc" is a state of active experience associated with perception and reflection but differing from them in that it "colors" thought with its own light and "has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself".102 It is this synthetic activity which governs the pattern of imagery in the poem, in the interchangeability of "mind" and the "universe", and in the surcharge of meaning attached to the mountain, which becomes a symbol of power. Vision is also involved in the "interpretations" of the scene presented, for not only does it make out a natural order which includes the mind as a portion of the universe, but it is also the faculty for comprehending the universe as it is related to man. Each of the five parts of the poem presents a speculative crux, the "resolution" of each one giving rise to the next until we reach the fifth. There, a final, obstinate question comments on the whole imaginative procedure of the poem, and is resolved only in terms of that procedure. It poses the possibility of a purposeless universe, of a "vacancy" occupying the seat of what has been imagined as "Power". The question both tests and limits the scope of imaginative belief. Let me summarize briefly the problem and resolution of each part so that we may turn an informed attention to this final problem. as the object the poet seeks to confront. The latest and most complicated argument has been advanced by E. R. Wasserman in The Subtler Language. Shelley is found to build an independent view of life and nature in the very process of describing an essentially religious experience. The essential feature of this view is the unity of subject and object: "reality, then, is neither a thing nor a place, but an act; it is not in the mind nor outside, but in the very act of searching" (p. 221). Wasserman relates this "Berkeleian approximation" to the elaboration in the poem of opposites: "the experiential and the transcendent . . . the immediate and the inaccessible; qualities and essence; cause and effect" (p. 236). Shelley affirms in the mountain "the ultimate Cause, the quality-less essence of everything" (p. 237). Imagination becomes, according to Wasserman, the faculty of transcendental intuition. My own feeling is that Wasserman confuses what Shelley keeps relatively clear: the difference between knowledge and imaginative belief. What is revealed in the act of searching is not a quality-less essence but human identity (see 11. 41-48), the tension rather than the unity of subject and object. This will be discussed presently. 102

Prose, pp. 276-77.

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In lines 1-11 (Section I) we are presented with a prospect of the mind as a ravine containing waters from the "everlasting universe of things" and from "secret springs / The source of human thought." A philosophic dualism of thought and thing would appear to be implied. But the "source" (or stream) of human thought has "a sound but half its own", and the things flowing through the mind are themselves qualities, or associated with qualities: "dark", "glittering", "gloom", "splendour". Thought and thing, in other words, tend to merge, and to reflect Shelley's definition of "things" in "On Life" as "any object of thought - that is, any thought upon which any other thought is employed with an apprehension of distinction".103 Things are distinct perceptions, or thoughts which exist relatively to other thoughts. In this sense the everlasting universe is neither mind nor matter but sheer manifestation without an apparent or even technically necessary source. This idea gives rise to the crux of section II (11. 12-48), where the poet directly addresses the ravine of Arve, the model of the initial prospect of the mind. The ravine is an "awful scene / Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down / From the icegulfs that gird his secret throne. . . ." 104 The river, by analogy, is the universe, a "ceaseless motion", and "unresting sound", which is the likeness or manifestation of Power, like the lightning bolt in a storm (11. 18-19). The speculative problem of the section, however, concerns human identity in the midst of this confluence of things and thoughts. Shelley attempts to separate his own mind from the universe. He is looking at the ravine which is "pervaded" by the river: When I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate phantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding unremitting interchange 103 Prose, p. 174. Wasserman finds that mind and matter are both affirmed and denied, depending on which is taken as first assumption, throughout the first two parts of the poem. See pp. 193 ff. 104 "Mont Blanc", 11. 15-17.

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With the clear universe of things around; One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! (11. 34-48)

Like the ravine, the mind is pervaded with the indistinguishable waters of the interchange of things and thoughts. Shelley calls the mind passive, but this word is misconstrued if taken as meaning inactive or static and implying a "tabula rasa". Its antonym would seem to be "impassive", or "insensible"; and his use of the word seems rather to refer to a suspension of will (in keeping with a "trance sublime") than to a state of inactivity.105 This reading agrees with the description of a legion of thoughts seeking in reflection an image of the ravine-mind. These "wild-thoughts", which are implicitly like the waves of the rapid river flowing through the ravine, now float "above thy darkness", or on the surface of the river, and now rest in the cave of poetry, at the river-bottom, close to the "secret springs" which release the contribution of the mind to the mighty waters it contains. It is significantly here that the legion of thoughts seeks the image of the ravine-mind, for at the surface is, by analogy, mainly the reflection of "the clear universe of things around". Shelley's introspection is an inverted form of perception. It involves the dizzying task of passing from perception to reflection in an effort to bring to the present and alive what is passing and fading into something else.106 This is not simply memory or 105

The same reading of the word "passive" is given by Bloom (p. 28), and Wasserman (p. 218). los w e have already examined an interesting passage on this same problem of reflection or introspection in the "Speculations on Metaphysics". "Thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards - like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile and dares not look behind." See Prose, p. 186, and above, p. 67.

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recollection. It is a quest for an image not of a thing or a thought, but of a value or identity residing in activity itself. As Wasserman has suggested, the search is imaginative or poetic.107 The difficulties of the quest are immense; the legion of thoughts now far below the surface of the metaphorical river, seeks to reflect the dark Ravine they inhabit, darkness to be reflected by shadows. No image appears at this depth, no perception translatable into sense. The specific search fails; yet, the passage ends: "thou art there!" intimating success. The obscurity of this utterance would be intolerable were it not organically connected with the obscurity of the subject-matter. For the solution seems to lie within the paradox, not behind it. The mind-ravine is not itself imaginable apart from the shadows which pervade it. But it is intuited in the very act of imagining, which regulates these shadows. The shadows compose the mind, but in our consciousness of their existence we intuit our own consciousness, our own identity. Without such consciousness or mental activity, there is no human identity. The ravine-mind is thus "there" as long as thought seeks to reflect it in images, or as long as thought itself continues. This summary of section II has been perhaps too complicated, but the resolution it offers is vital to the interpretation of the rest of the poem. Vivian, Bloom, and Wasserman all seem to regard, for instance, the intuition of personal identity as a type or anticipation of the intuition of Power in the last three sections. My opinion, to the contrary, is that Power is not intuited at all. Instead, it is frankly symbolized in the mountain as the sheer possibility of existence. It stands in relation to the universe as imagination to thought, regulating rather than constituting the phenomena of existence. Hence, it is necessary to see that the intuition of personal identity anticipates a symbolic projection of Power rather than a piercing of "distilled essence". Shelley struggles to read the imagery of Mont Blanc which stands "far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, / . . . still, snowy, and serene" (11. 60-61). He gathers hints from the wilderness of mountains piled around Mont Blanc, shapes "rude, bare, and high, / Ghastly, and scarred, and riven" (11. 70-71). 107

See Wasserman, p. 228.

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"poeta" T h e wilderness has a mysterious tongue W h i c h teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, s o serene, that m a n m a y be, But for such faith, with nature reconciled; T h o u hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and w o e ; not understood B y all, but w h i c h the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or m a k e felt, or deeply feel (11. 7 6 - 8 3 )

The ancient scene of desolation, which seems to hold the secrets of existence in its silent history, can teach "awful doubt" or mild faith, can suggest man's alienation from nature or Ms reconciliation with it.108 The first alternative seems obvious enough from the very mystery and unearthliness of the scene, a scene which suggests to the mind a state of dream or futurity where "the very spirit fails".109 Reconciliation with nature is less obvious, and, indeed, depends for meaning on the suggestion that the voice of the Mountain can be related to human existence by the "wise, and great, and good". Significantly, it is a voice of repeal, and we may suppose that, like the mountain itself which is now a glacier, and was probably once a volcano, the voice will strip away all that is merely superimposed on nature.110 The mild faith is a faith in the innocence of nature, innocence in the sense of an original serenity behind the awful mystery of the wilderness. This faith does not cancel out the doubt that the wilderness itself teaches. That doubt and this particular faith, a clearly unorthodox one, are paired responses to the direct experience of the natural world. Neither response, however, is complete in itself. Both acquire a full relevance to the human spirit when the wise, the great, and the good interpret them. Such interpretation, presented as a subtly metaphorical com108

The phrase "But for such faith" has been read by Harold Bloom (p. 30) as a denial that faith reconciles man and nature. The Boscombe MS reading of the line is "In such a faith". See Poetry, p. 533. 109 Lines 49-59. 110 Shelley speculates: " . . . did a sea / Of fire envelop once this silent snow?" [11. 73-74]. For an interesting discussion of Shelley's use of contemporary information on volcanoes, mountains, glaciers etc., see G. M. Mathews, "A Volcano's Voice in Shelley", ELH, X X I V (1957), pp. 191228.

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prehension of the total natural world of the poem, is precisely the descriptive burden of the fourth section. Shelley traces this world from the mountaintop to the ravine and (speculatively) through "distant lands" to "the ocean waves". In this great manifestation of existence, "all things that move and breathe with toil and sound / Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell" (11. 94-95). Existence manifests cyclical process, in which "much of life and joy is lost". But at the center of this great vision of natural and human tragedy come these lines: Power dwells apart in its tranquillity, Remote, serene, and inaccessible; And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains Teach the adverting mind. (II. 96-100)

This central truth, understood in the midst of gazing at the entire cyclical process governing the "naked countenance of earth", is continuous with the experience of cyclical process. Visually, Mont Blanc itself, the symbol of Power, is at the circumference of the poet's experience, so high (or so deep within, for in lines 50-60 sublimity and dream are associated) that "the very spirit fails". What is visualized as transcendent earlier is "seen" here by the "adverting mind" as immanent. Obviously, the adverting mind "sees" in no ordinary sense. It is rather taught, taught in the same sense that the "mysterious tongue" of the wilderness teaches both faith and doubt. The adverting mind must interpret a pattern of meaning, a meaning which advances beyond (or penetrates beneath) the twin responses of faith and doubt. In abstract terms what is taught is the comprehension or inclusion of sheer manifestation in sheer possibility. Behind the cycle that manifests both the reconciling order of innocence and, especially in this passage, the alienating order of experience, dwells the pure potentiality of order itself. The mind identifies power, even though Power is inaccessible to the senses, and in itself indemonstrable. The identification of power is an imaginative construction (hence, distinct in content and purpose from the intuition of section II) built out of the perception of the manifest greatness of cyclical process. The imaginative identification of Power trans-

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forms the responses of faith and doubt, without subverting their contrariety or accuracy as interpretations, into a vision of unity in multiplicity. It is this vision, which interprets both life and death, that makes the human tragedy, recorded with such clarity and strength in lines 117-26, intelligible. We can now turn to the final lines of the poem. Shelley addresses Mont Blanc: The secret Strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? (11. 139-45)

The question is not rhetorical, but summarizes the qualified nature of spiritual meaning developed in the poem. The final lines suggest that silence and solitude are symbols of Power to the adverting mind. Imaginative comprehension is a "reading" of Power in the place of vacancy, an interpretation of Power or order that cannot be directly perceived in "the everlasting universe of things". Hence, the meaning of the universe is essentially a human meaning, even though the universe exists apart from the mind, and manifests a power to which man is subject.111 This meaning is derived from a need intrinsic to the mind for harmony, design, or completeness. But insofar as Power comprehends cyclycal process, the meaning is both internal and external, both an expression and a discovery. Imaginative belief comprehends natural faith and doubt just as the silent reality of Power is imagined as comprehending the silent appearance of vacancy. Silence and solitude are symbols of real power, just as plenitude was the symbol of the likeness of power in the Arve in sections I and II of the poem. The harmonies of this contrast between reality and appearance, Power and manifestation, as they are themselves imaginative constructions, make up the thematic burden of "Mont Blanc".112 111

For divergent readngs see Vivian, pp. 64-65, Bloom, pp. 33-35, and Wasserman, pp. 235-40. 112 Shelley wrote in "A Refutation of Deism" (1814): "The word powei

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The Spirit of Beauty and the Power symbolized by Mont Blanc are surely different. Yet, both are associated with the "truth of nature", both command a kind of religious attention, and both have intrinsic relation to the imagination. For my purposes, their basic difference is that they bring out different aspects of visionary awareness. Beauty appears essentially as a momentary illumination, a light or harmony (or both together) that dwells within perceptual activity, and is beheld rather than "taught" in the transience of experience. It is a state of vivid intensity, and "integral unity". Power, on the other hand, suggests comprehension and universality. It is the possibility of sound and sight rather than the special property of harmony and rainbow coloring. And it suggests the imaginative power of creating a total order which makes the objects of imagination "common to universal nature and existence itself". The Spirits of Beauty and Power are hypothetical and ideal; that is, they are not entities in nature discoverable by reason. But neither are they simply in the mind, determined by habit or desire. Shelley prefers to think of them as mysteriously intermediary, occupying some middle-space, floating undetermined by interests or concepts, until the imagination finds symbols capable of expressing their spirit and so revealing them. IV

So far, we have surveyed Shelley's idea of the poet in two distinct frames of reference, the first concerning the poet's social reexpresses the capability of anything to be or act. The human mind never hesitates to annex the idea of power to any object of its experience. To deny that power is the attribute of being is to deny that being can be. If power be an attribute of substance, the hypothesis of a God is a superfluous and unwarrantable assumption." Prose, p. 136. He wrote in the "Essay on a Future State": "There is in the generative principle of each animal and plant a power which converts the substances by which it is surrounded into a substance homogeneous with itself. That is, the relation between certain elementary particles of matter undergo a change and submit to new combinations. For when we use the words 'principle', 'power', 'cause', etc., we mean to express no real being, but only to class under those terms a certain series of co-existing phenomena." Prose, p. 177. The use of "Power" in "Mont Blanc" does not contradict these definitions, but, as an "imaginative construction", builds on them.

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sponsibilities, the second concerning the nature of mind and of poetic imagination. F o r the first of these, communication is basic to poetry; for the second, expression is basic, this act having reference to the free-play of imagination rather than to any set of interests or doctrines. Shelley's view of the poet incorporates both principles when he identifies the poet as a prophet. He writes in the Defence of Poetry of this prophetic character. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets; a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretense of superstition which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; and far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. (Prose, p. 279) As "legislator" or "prophet" the poet performs a social role. H e discovers the moral necessities of his time, and apprehends the future form of civilization, the destiny of aspirations, if not the future form of events or circumstances. But the power of the prophetic poet to perform this role lies less in his status in society, his recognized leadership, than in the special nature of his apprehension and conception. His power derives from his faculties rather than from the peculiar circumstances of his time; thus, while the name prophet was given to the poet "in the earlier epochs of the world", and may now be withheld f r o m him by society, the "character" of the prophet remains an essential attribute of the poet. And this "character" refers basically to a kind of knowledge and a kind of expression not found in any other. T h e knowledge and expression of the prophetic poet are specifically not determined by circumstances, existing either externally in nature or society, or internally in the personality or interests of the poet; and in this they are unique.

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Shelley explains the fact in two ways: philosophically - prophetic knowledge and expression transcending time, place, and number; and historically - their having germinal relation to "latest time". Poetry is being viewed here both as a kind of philosophy and a kind of history, and this is possible because the poetic faculty essentially combines lawmaking and foreknowing, the present "intensely as it is" and the spirit of the future. It is in the identification of the poet with the "character" of prophet, then, that the two strands of Shelley's idea of the poet merge into a single body. The social responsibilities of the poet, the duty to communicate what he has vividly felt in "present things", are interpreted by his imaginative capacity to see wholeness and harmony, and to express them. Such expression foretells the spirit of the future both because it is free from circumstance and timeless, and because it is a germ which can influence future expression and contain the influence of the past. The "spirit of events" is thus both always the same, reflecting the same law, and always changing, developing in relation to ever-new "present things". As such it may be reduced to the laws of synthesis and freeplay that govern the imagination. Yet, it also suggests a kind of cultural humanism that interprets poetic creation as an attempt to inform an elusive and stubborn reality according to patterns of human desire. The term "prophet" derives its meaning from a blend of these two kinds of reduction in Shelley's thought. It refers at once to free genius and the apprehension of wholeness and harmony, and to political leadership and broadly ethical interpretation of social facts. The poet is thus, paradoxically, unique among men, while at the same time their chief spokesman. He is, paradoxically, free to make radical innovations in social and literary conventions, and yet his work necessarily becomes a memorial of his time and is conserved by the future. The poet is, in effect, both a God and a chamelion, a creator and a reflector.118 11S The figures come from Shelley. Shelley was fond of comparing the poet to God. Cf. Prose, p. 172, and p. 295 where he paraphrases Tasso: "Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta." For the chamelion, see "An Exhortation" (1819), Poetry, p. 579.

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The paradoxes of the prophetic character identify not only the nature of the poet, but delineate the scope of his power. First, it should be clear that this power is not strictly reducible to a purely subjective principle of the mind.114 Prophetic power involves as well the phenomena of concepts and desires. It synthesizes or blends the individual mind with its tradition or culture. Second, because it does blend imagination and cultural spirit, prophecy is conceived of as a mediating link between opposed perspectives or situations.115 It is precisely as a medium or link that poetry becomes "the center and circumference of knowledge". In a note to one of the choruses of Hellas (1822), Shelley wrote: "The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or less exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatize upon a subject, concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. . . . That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain: meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permit114

A s in "Mont Blanc" the prophet-poet interprets the voice of the mountain. This voice, "the naked countenance of earth", is analogous to the poet's capacity for comprehending the totality of his experience, but it is itself not reducible to the poet's voice. See above, pp. 87-89. 115 These perspectives are called "natural" and "artificial" in The Revolt of Islam', see above, pp. 42-53. They reflect as well, however, the contrast between ordinary and visionary awareness. F o r instance, Cythna's natural education is frankly symbolic of her imaginative awareness of the One and the Many (Canto, VII, xxxi): M y mind became the book through which I grew Wise in all human wisdom, and its cave, Which like a mine I rifled through and through, T o me the keeping of its secrets gave One mind, the type of all, the moveless w a v e W h o s e calm reflects all moving things that are, Necessity, and love, and life, the grave, A n d sympathy, fountains of h o p e and fear; Justice, and truth, and time, and the world's natural sphere.

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ted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being." 116 This defines succinctly the mediating function of the prophetic poet. He connects the self-determined and "inextinguishable thirst" for life with the truth of the object of desire. Desire alone is simply a presumption, nothing more, finally, than self-assertion. But the same is true of dogma where concepts work to determine desire. Both are latent forms of selfdeceit, desires tending to falsify objects, dogmatic concepts tending to falsify both objects and desire. For Shelley finds it "equally certain" that our arguments presently cannot solve the riddle of evil, and that the riddle can be solved. Only the fact of the "thirst for immortality" can be the source of this certainty. But that fact has no meaning apart from "the condition of that futurity" which it impels, and which the prophetic poet imagines. The prophetic poet, therefore, apprehends the truth of desire by giving it form, by imagining the condition its fulfillment requires. In so doing he transforms desire, a free state of being, into a necessary state, the future condition of things. Thus, his vision sometimes competes with other "assertions" about existence, for dogmatic concepts also determine desire. But, for Shelley, the competition is unequal because the poet's prophecies are fundamentally conjectural and speculative, and rooted in perception rather than in "distinctions of reason" and custom. They elaborate internal truths in terms of existence, conceive images of evil, construct symbols of a future state. Shelley's "progressive state of more or less exalted existence", a theme that he first employs in Queen Mab (Cantos VIII-IX) and refines upon throughout his career, does not so much compete with the religious dogma of the Church as with the religious imaginations of Dante, Milton, and Pope. It is thus not a solution to the riddle of evil, but a speculation on what that solution would be like given 118

Poetry, pp. 478-79.

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the intellectual and social conditions and energies of the early nineteenth century. The fact of its ancestry (in Plato, Dante, Milton, and Pope) is juxtaposed with the fact of its contemporary relevance to a world in which opportunity for great good and great evil has descended to classes of men unused to having it, and to men whose power exceeds their knowledge. The prophecy, or foreknowledge, connected in Hellas with the Greek Revolution, is the projected realization of a state of greatly increased physical and moral opportunity. At the same time, it is a variation on a theme dear to the ancient Greeks and memorialized in Plato's Phaedo. It illuminates the present from the past not to declare what the future must be, but to affirm a continuity of spirit, to reveal the latent truths of man's nature. Shelley's rejection of the part of the dogmatist is significant. Not only does it make clear the distinction in his mind between poetry and religion, but it makes clear also the extreme sophistication of his view of poetic prophecy. He plainly sees the difficulty and thus entertains the doubt of believing in "a progressive state of more or less exalted existence". He seems to understand it as a "myth", and to hold conflicting attitudes to it: that it is symbolic of natural truth, that it is merely a creature of desire. Professor Notopoulos described this situation as "paratactic" thinking, and proposed that the poet solved his dilemma by an "emotional leap".117 In fact, he neither solves the dilemma nor leaps past it, but reconstructs the problem. He says that the disentangling of the Gordian knot of the origin of evil is "in our pre117

See James Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, pp. 171 ff. "Paratactic" thinking is "the capacity to see things separately, to gravitate to two different systems of philosophy without being aware of the contradictions" (p. 175) Notopoulos shows here the tendency of "philosophic" readers of poetry to misinterpret metaphors. Yet, in this instance, his reading is more sensitive than that of the "poetic" critic, Milton Wilson, who finds Shelley "uninterested in anything as original as the Fall itself' {Shelley's Later Poetry, p. 69). Indeed, he is almost wildly interested in the Fall, but his awareness of contradictory interpretations, and his sense of the relativity of all such interpretation, keep him from dogmatism and qualify his enthusiasm. That the solution of the problem of evil is a solution of a "riddle" should inform us why it is poetry, the true use of words, that offers presently our best opportunity for solution.

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sent state . . . unattainable by us", and says that "it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity". The myth, in other words, is a truthful symbol of man's desires and spirit. It cannot resolve the contradictions of desire, nor establish absolute conditions in which desire functions. The moral and material efficacy of myth is relative to men, and myth takes its identity from what men value rather than from what in nature or in thought is simply available to be known. Yet, it is the truth of desire that poets aim at, a truth that is as often pessimistic and ironic as optimistic. If in Hellas the goal was an ennobling truth, in The Triumph of Life (1822) the goal seemed to have been the truth of man's radical defects. The poet's myth, therefore, is neither merely a creature of desire, nor a natural truth, but a symbolic form of a distinctly human truth. In this sophisticated view, belief in the poet's myth is necessarily tentative, necessarily intertwined with doubt. For the human truth symbolized by the myth includes the limited conditions of perception that characterize the environment in which the poet works no less than the transcendent perceptions by which he illumines the present from the past. Shelley reconstructs the problem of religious myth into a problem of poetic myth. The spirit of man, as expressed in "an inextinguishable thirst for immortality", is constant in both, but where the truth of religious myth is expected to solve the riddles of existence, the truth of poetic myth is relative to the psychological and historical conditions in which men live. The two are not incompatible, but they tend to be so whenever poetic myth takes on the role of pointing out "higher" or more scientific truths about life than the prevailing religion recognizes, or when religious myth dictates values to the poet. This role, I think, comes close to being the norm in Blake's prophecies (although Blake is a fierce ironist), and it is at its clearest in Shelley in Queen Mab. There, he give us, in effect, a religion of science in which a negative theology has become a dogma. It is also the only major work (and in this unlike Blake) in which the poetry is "subordinate to the inculcated ideal". By the time of Prometheus Unbound, religion and science have become aspects of

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poetic myth, interwoven with the themes of disillusionment and love that organize that work. The moral vision of Prometheus Unbound competes with Milton's poetry rather than with Christianity (for Milton was also anti-Christian according to Shelley); and it is a moral vision that competes by being, specifically, "more poetical", truer to man's basic desire and spirit.118 In the poems of 1821, where Dante replaces Milton as the chief influence, the attempt to identify moral and poetic vision is even more pronounced. Refinement of the idea that prophetic poetry aims at a conceptual harmony of man's moral and material nature is one of the important facts of his development. This conceptual harmony or apprehension of value is, I am aware, close to what many recent writers on Shelley have described as fundamentally religious experience.119 The idea presented in this chapter is that Shelley distinguishes poetry from religion, intrinsic values from extrinsic ones. Analytically conceived, poetry is an "idealism", a purposive construct of personal education and experience; religion is a faith in what is unknowable that often takes the form of unexamined custom. Synthetically conceived, religion is treated as poetry, as an apprehension of the nature of the human spirit in the midst of its own historical flux. What is apprehended is product-as-process, Being and Becoming in tension, and such knowledge is always tentative, always relational. Though Shelley shifts his emphasis frequently from one side to the other of this basic formulation, he does not, it seems to me, depart from it. In Adonais, where his subject is death, he stresses Being; but in Epipsychidion (written only a 118 "Prometheus is . . . the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and truest motives to the best and noblest ends." Poetry, p. 205. 118 See Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry, pp. 239-50; Milton Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry, pp. 170 ff.; Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 123 ff.; E. R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language, pp. 223-37; and R. G. Woodman, The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley, pp. 129 f f . Everyone of these writers, in his o w n way, suggests that the drive of Shelley's thought goes beyond poetry, beyond the words of the imagination, towards a direct identification or relationship with what is variously called the One, the Eternal, the Thou, "distilled essence", or Death. And, in their various ways, all suggest Shelley's incapacity to achieve such word-less union in imagination.

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few months before Adonais), where his subject is the "new life", he stresses Becoming. He fluctuates, in other words, within a consistent framework. Take this passage from Epipsychidion as an example. Mind from its object differs most in this: Evil from good; misery from happiness; The baser from the nobler; the impure And frail, from what is clear and must endure. If you divide suffering and dross you may Diminish till it is consumed away; If you divide pleasure and love, and thought, Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not How much, while any yet remains unshared, Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared: This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law By which those live, to whom this world of life Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife Tills for the promise of a later birth The wilderness of this Elysian earth.

(11. 174-89) Shelley's conceit, while beginning in an ironically simple eitheror manner, actually works on to harmonize being and becoming. The process of dividing the Mind (pleasure and love and thought), in which "each part exceeds the whole", suggests what takes place when the principle of analysis functions as a part of the principle of synthesis. The distinction between Mind and its object is, indeed, a synthetic distinction, a definition by analogy in which the degree of difference appears so great that the terms are treated as different in kind. Hence, the division of the object reduces it to that point where "suffering and dross" no longer exist, where we observe only, as he notes elsewhere, "a succession of events". The division of Mind, on the other hand, reduces it simply to "integral unity", to patterns of pleasure and identity which suggest a creative life as opposed to an anatomized death. The opposition of creation and anatomy, also a synthetic opposition of degree, is a formulation of the truth about the mind. And in suggesting that the "light of hope", the eternal law we may identify with the principle of synthesis itself, is drawn out of this

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truth, Shelley is suggesting an intimate tie between whatever has being or value and the image-making process of imagination. Hard and fast distinctions between the imageless truth of being, and a Power in back of or beyond consciousness, dissolve in the face of the poet's radical effort to give coherence to conscious, perceptual experience. This coherence, to be sure, is subtle and not always clear. It can never be detached from the paradoxes of the prophetic poet. Understanding these, however, demands that we grasp the metaphorical or synthetic method of Shelley's thought, what he calls in the Defence, philosophical criticism. By this method he formulates distinctions between reason and imagination, the historical and the poetic, time-serving and prophecy, necessity and freedom, the limiting and the universal, in order to illustrate the primacy of the human spirit in knowledge, morals, and poetry. These distinctions, however, build on, rather than cancel, those distinctions he makes according to his empirical analysis of the mind. Doubt and faith, perception and delusion, analytical awareness and habit, relative freedom and tyranny are distinctions which are not rungs kicked away in the visionary ascent up a Platonic ladder. They are instead incorporated into the central vision as distinctions between appearance and reality in a field of limited awareness. Because logical demonstration is, in Shelley's view, a product of this very field, his central vision is rendered tentative and speculative. At the same time, it is the power to include these limited distinctions that makes his thought cogent. The prophetic poet does not proclaim an absolute truth, but symbolizes a relative form of truth in what he knows of the internal nature of men and the external conditions they seek to understand and control. He, therefore, necessarily participates in the truths his vision symbolizes, in values that can be realized only here and now. Shelley's idea of the poet lays the foundation for his theory of poetry. It largely determines his conception of the materials, effects, and structure of poetry and provides the principal reference for the metaphors of vision and creation that dominate all phases of the theory. The reason for this importance is clearly implied

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in the nature of his critical assumptions and methods. He treats poetic criticism not as a discrete discipline with its own rules of investigation but as a discussion entailing the whole life of man. Moreover, he finds the principles of this discussion not in a changeless realm of Being, but in the spiritual relations between men and the objects of their attention, relations examined alternately in terms of cultural history and in terms of the faculties of mind which make "relations" possible. He has, therefore, a basic interest in the life of the artist, but an interest balanced by an appreciation of the "order or rhythm" that may be discovered in the poetic medium. Indeed, it is in his doctrine of imagination that this balance between life and art is most clearly seen. In its broadest application, imagination is identified with consciousness itself, both the consciousness of an impinging environment of physico-spiritual objects, and the consciousness produced by dream and illusion. In the narrower application to art, it is a reflective power, which, in Coleridge's seminal phrasing: "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify".120 The struggle and tension, the paradoxical unity of ambivalence, that both modify and define prophetic poetry is a token of the interrelationship, in Shelley's thought, of life and art.

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Biographia

Literaria,

Chapter XIII.

II.

POESIS

1 Shelley thinks of the prophetic poet as fulfilling the functions of the maker and seer. These antinomies are resolved, however, only by indirection. Making and seeing are not reduced to a third function containing them both. They are, instead, exploited as descriptive metaphors of the relationship between the poet and his object. The object of the poet is both created and creating, both a form selected as appropriate to the various elements of intention working in the poet, and a spirit or substance which impresses on the poet qualities undetermined by his conscious will. Making and seeing describe opposed tendencies in the process of composition. Yet, as is usual with metaphors, the two functions are not discrete. The created form is not simply determined by the will; it is also an apprehension or arrested "order" with qualities relative to but not circumscribed by those elements of intention that pre-date it, or even underlie it. The created form is a "medium" of the poet's intention, but a medium with as much "being" as the intention itself. Similarly, the seen or creating object does not simply impress the poet; it is also a new ordering of consciousness that modifies the poet's intentions. Hence, there is no strict dualism of making and seeing in Shelley's thought. Prophetic poetry includes both functions as contraries that imply one another, and suggests that kind of self-contained relationship in which the poet and his object are both different and identical. Such a concept of relationship, described by a pair of mutually interacting metaphors, governs Shelley's idea of poesis no less

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than it governs his idea of the poet. The metaphors reflect the distinction of process and product. As maker the poet arranges and combines materials according to formal purposes - a god manipulating the stuff of chaos. As seer the poet discovers patterns of expression mostly concealed in the mass of materials and forms available in experience. But the maker also builds the unique expression; the seer also connects this product with its formal origins in the tradition of literature. This, in the context of poesis, is the same crux we encountered in the paradoxes of the prophetic poet - the assertion of opposed explanations or perspectives. Expression itself, not simply the dichotomy of perception and expression, has a double nature. The resolution of this double nature is suggested in Shelley's idea of the "great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world". The "great poem" is to his thinking about the medium of poetry what the prophetic imagination is to his thinking about the nature of the poet. It identifies differences without destroying them by treating the fact of relationship as mutual and autonomous. Poetry is both unique and familiar because each of its parts exceeds the whole without losing its status as a part. Every new poem includes and advances beyond the whole of literature, yet in its advance serves to extend the province of literature itself. The part-to-whole relationships of the poem to poetry are in this view interchangeable, and it is this essentially that causes making and seeing to be compatible oppositions. Shelley's conception of poesis, then, has its roots in his idea of the "great poem". It is the radically human expression in which all poetic value resides. At the same time, the "great poem" is the ideal rather than the actual state of poetry. The reason for this is not simply that poets do not, in fact, cooperate in making a single, gigantic work (Shelley himself stresses individualism and novelty). Instead, the "great poem" is ideal because it at once transcends the historical conditions to which every actual poem is subject and lies within the qualities which every actual poem exhibits. Its universal principles are known only through the particular principles of individual poems; yet,

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poems are themselves possible only because of the principles of poetry itself, the principles of the "great poem". The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the way this central idea gives order and coherence to Shelley's thinking about the medium of poetry. He generally divides the subject of poesis into two parts: language and representation. In dealing with each of them his point of view is alternately psychological and historical; thus, each section of his argument serves as both introduction to and mirror of the series of autonomous relationships expressed in the idea of the "great poem". We shall follow Shelley's order of increasing emphasis, taking up his discussions of language and representation before considering in detail the "soul" of his criticism.

n Shelley's idea of the language of poetry is derived alternately from a notion of original genius, which supplies the "rules" of poetic diction, and from the relations existing between language and social needs and purposes. The operations of genius, or "the imperial faculty of imagination", on language are outlined in the Defence of Poetry. Poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language and especially metrical language which are created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts a l o n e . . . . (Prose, p. 279)

Language is plastic, and words the direct representation of the activity of the poet's mind. The obedience of language to thought allows poetry to express "various and delicate combinations".1 1 Shelley may also have in mind the idea that poetry is more capable of producing synesthetic effects, or intersense analogies, than the other arts. The belief that poetry expanded the responses of our senses (see

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Genius operates on language by producing it "arbitrarily", by forging out of thought the verbal expression of that thought. Shelley's emphasis on metrical language is simply an extension of this definition, for the imagination apprehends an order among sounds in the same way that it apprehends an order among thoughts. Words connect the sound to the thought of poetry, and insofar as poetry is metrical language, sound and thought are its basic components. 2 Like words, both sounds and thoughts may be defined as expressions of the imagination. One implication of this reduction of poetic language to imagination is that it marks every "true" poet as an original. In the preface to The Revolt of Islam, Shelley claims that his diction follows the natural movement of his thoughts and that he has not "permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to my ingenuity in contriving to disgust them [sic] according to the rules of criticism". 3 The "most obvious and appropriate" words are chosen to delineate the "moving adventures" of his poem. He attempts to make the poem "properly my own", avoiding style as such, since all styles are "peculiar to . . . original minds". 4 This concept of style shows the inBlake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and that the senses had a common basis in the "sense of feeling" was current in his day. See Glenn O'Malley, Shelley and Synesthesia, pp. 15-24. 2 See Prose, p. 280. Shelley insists that without harmony of sound there would be no poetry, regardless of conceptual harmony, and that "every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification". 3 Poetry, p. 34. Shelley may be hinting at Wordsworth's doctrine of poetic diction, although, in the preface to The Cenci (1819), he appears to accept Wordsworth's implications. He writes there: "I entirely agree with those modern critics who assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the familiar language of men, and that our great ancestors the ancient English poets are the writers, a study of whom might incite us to do that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must be the real language of men in general and not that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to belong." Prose, p. 278. 4 Poetry, p. 34. Shelley's point is very close to Wordsworth's in fact. He places the same stress on "habitual association" with nature. "A person famifiar with nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the

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fluence of the doctrine of "Original Genius", where, as formulated by Edward Young, "an original" is "of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius". Imitations, on the other hand, "are of a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own. . . . " 5 At the same time, Shelley does not pretend that the imagination acts on language in a vacuum. Both "external nature and the celebrated productions of the human mind" educate or nourish the imagination to the end of freeing its powers.6 What they supply, however, are not rules for effecting certain ends in an audience. Art and Nature are the sources, rather, of examples which must be recreated individually, or appropriated to the processes of the imagination. The goal of such "education" is power of expression, or self-discipline, which Shelley thought a value in its own right. The means of education are a formal exercise of this power, a formal exercise different from the application of rules or following of custom (because the forms themselves must arise as perceptions), but no less exacting than they.7 human mind, can scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to the selection of language, produced by that familiarity." 5 Edward Young, "Conjectures on Original Composition" (1759). Quoted from Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. by W. J. Bate (New York, 1952), p. 241. 6 For example, he writes in the preface to The Revolt of Islam-, "I have considered Poetry in its most comprehensive sense; and have read the Poets and the Historians and the Metaphysicians . . . and have looked upon the beautiful and majestic scenery of the earth, as common sources of those elements which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine." Poetry, pp. 34-35. 7 This seems to be Shelley's meaning when he finds that study of art and nature does not "constitute men Poets, but . . . prepares them to be auditors of those that are" (Poetry, p. 35). The sense of self-discipline is present even in his defence of inspiration: "The toil and delay recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean . . . a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions . . . " (Prose, p. 295). While, admittedly, Shelley usually disparages what is "artificial" and "conventional", the terms themselves are not blasphemy. Here they are coordinated, not unfavorably, with "careful observation" and "intertexture", and the whole suggests that even inspired poetry requires discipline.

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A second implication of the reduction of language to the imagination is that words and combinations of words are themselves repositories of pleasurable order. In the Defence Shelley traces the origin of poetry to the child's response to "pleasurable impressions", impressions which are the "corresponding antitypes" of his "expression of delight". 8 The response is "the reflected image" of the impression, a mirroring of what is at once an impinging presence and an integrated (pleasurable) part of experience, a "before unapprehended relation". It is a harmony of mind and sense conceived of as a natural human technique for prolonging pleasure (not too different from Aristotle's doctrine of the love of imitation inherent in man). The impinging presence itself is not, in any simple way, the "cause" of the reflected image; nor is the reflected image a simple duplication of what is present. 9 Implied instead is an epistemology of participation, of mutual interrelationship. 10 The root of poetic expression is the drama the mind makes in order to harmonize its sensations with its needs. The "child at play" illustrates the principle of a reflective intelligence which works to idealize and unify experience in order simply to continue or make permanent that experience. 11 Appropriately, Shelley connects the idea of poetry as a vehicle for making pleasurable experience durable with the idea of poetry as a social art. "Language, gesture, and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium. . . . Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in 8

Prose, p. 277. Shelley's use of the words "antitype" and "prototype" is very complicated. He seems to borrow them from the vocabulary of Platonism but to imply less a Platonic concept of Being than a Baconian concept of a "peculiar image residing in the inner cave of thought". See, for example, the preface to Alastor, Poetry, pp. 14-15, and below, pp. 111-112. 10 See above, pp. 70-76. 11 Shelley, like Keats, was keenly aware of the closeness and even interdependency of pleasure and pain. In the "Speculations on Morals" the civilized man is described as "prophetic" of both, and thus capable of great sympathy with his fellows. It is true, however, that poetry, through its contemplative motive, is expressive of a higher, durable pleasure, but not of a higher, durable pain in Shelley's view. See Prose, pp. 188-89. 9

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words and actions distinct from that of the objects and impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds." 12 His terms are plain. Verbal order is dependent on the laws of imagination. The pattern of delight that words achieve has fundamental reference to an imagined universe, one perceived and valued simultaneously. And this is possible because imagination is "the germ of a relation" between existence and expression, the active principle both of perception and expression. Verbal order, therefore, is a product of synthesis, an imagined harmony growing out of the confluence in experience of mind and object.13 Imagination arbitrarily produces language in order to satisfy its own need for order, its own laws of assimilation and completeness. It is significant that Shelley's discussion of poetic language implies that the medium of poetry has a history as well as a psychology, that language has an impersonal order of its own, distinct from the experience out of which it grows. Throughout the Defence of Poetry he finds the poet central to society for practical as well as theoretical reasons, and one of the most practical is that poets clarify and nourish language. They make language a more useful instrument for dealing with social needs precisely because their creative imagination brings to consciousness the "before unapprehended relations of things". There is, in other words, an interest as well as a disinterestedness in the development of language, a social as well as an esthetic function. The words of the poet (and every man is a poet in the infancy of society) become useful conventions to the community.14 His language becomes, in a sense, the official language of the folk, although the fatherhood of the poet in this respect would seem entirely spiritual. Still basically reflections of "integral thought", words are now broadened in function to cover prag12

Prose, p. 278. See above, pp. 85-86. 14 Poetry, in other words, is a cultural force, "ever found to co-exist with whatever arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man" (Prose, p. 283). Poets are expressly compared to "legislators and founders of religion", and, the term "poet" is expanded at one point to mean "all authors of revolution in opinion". See Prose, p. 279, p. 281. 13

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matic needs, conforming with the principle of utility in what Shelley thought was the "narrower" sense of that term.15 And in the transition from esthetic to pragmatic uses, words seem inevitably to lose their original association with the experience they were designed to reflect. Recognition of the necessity of this transition from esthetic to pragmatic uses of language leads Shelley to propose a two-fold relation between the poet and his verbal medium. He is at once the author and the destroyer of language. The hardening of words into pragmatic counters, reflecting not an integral verbal experience but an abstraction of that experience, requires that later poets break down the given language of earlier poets in order to create a fresh idiom. Shelley does not pinpoint this process as the reaction of poets towards their predecessors, or as a battle of wits, but such an understanding, with its implication of a republic of letters, would not be misleading. The pleasure resulting from the manner in which they (poets) express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds communicates itself to others and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension until the words which represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thought instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be 'the same foot-steps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world . . . ' . (Prose, p. 278)

Pleasure in the manner of expression is here unified with the pleasure in the "integral thoughts" which words picture. The disorganization of metaphor means the simultaneous disorgani15

"The meaning in which the author of The Four Ages of Poetry [Peacock] seems to have employed the word utility is the narrower one of banishing the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage." Prose, p. 291.

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zation of imaginative thought, and the rise of dead abstractions. The autonomy of words breaks down so that they reflect not a self-contained pattern, but a meaning contingent on things or ideas outside the metaphor, the metaphor itself being viewed only as a fictional form of actual experience. Shelley distinguishes here, tacitly, between the potential and actual values of metaphor: between metaphor as a verbal structure connate with the origin of community experience, and metaphor as an instrument of social power. It is in the latter sense that it becomes a sign "for portions or classes of thought" since it is regulated now not simply by a need for order in the mind, but by a variety of social needs which arise in direct relation to experience. Shelley's distinction between metaphor and sign has affinities with his critique of abstractions (after the manner of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) in the "Speculations on Metaphysics" and "On Life".16 There, abstractions are found to be generalizations of fact, and require criticism in order to be properly grounded on experience. Characteristically, Shelley felt that "integral thoughts" were the basic components of experience, and this idea appears to be carried over in the discussion of metaphor. Metaphor, in picturing mental unities, is truer to experience than the "algebraical" picture that constitutes a "sign". At the same time, the discussion of metaphor differs from the discussion of abstractions in being concerned with formal and expressive values primarily. Therefore, while "facts" and metaphors are both valued for the dense and "real" relation they imply between words and things, they are obviously different ways of describing things and have different formal characteristics. Both are opposed to abstractions because abstractions merely name relations and lead to the confusion of these relations (words) with things, or "facts" of the mind. Metaphors fuse words and things because they arise directly from the elementary unities of experience. They are autonomous whereas abstractions are contingent. The "death of language to all nobler purposes of human intercourse" is a direct consequence of the failure of poetry to be rebom at regular intervals in the course of history. This deduction, 16

See Prose, pp. 172, 185, and the discussion above, pp. 58 ff.

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like the whole of the discussion of language, does not follow from a literal definition of metaphor, but from an analogizing of metaphor with the central forms of community life. Metaphor is not only the reflected image of integral thoughts but also the image of integral human purposes. Hence, Shelley in the Defence of Poetry brings his discussion of language to bear on the prophetic role of the poet. Poets "are the institutors of laws and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion".17 The poet is central to these forms of culture because the "indestructible order" he expresses in words is analogous to the order expressed ideally by institutions. Although his history is wholly "traditional" here, Shelley is claiming that laws, manners, skills, and beliefs are formed on the example of the poet. Thus, the degeneration of poetry into "algebraical representation" has vital consequences for institutions as well as philosophy. The analogizing of metaphor, or poetic values, with community values is clearly implied in his statement: "every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem." 18 The basis of this poem is the integrity of thought (in the imagination), and the integrity of human purposes in the community. These wholes are themselves ever accompanied by pleasure, and may be taken as expanded forms of the pattern of delight developed by the child at play, or by the savage in the infancy of society. They are values, and have a radically human origin; and their perpetual realization, Shelley implies, is the fundamental aim of culture. They are also what he means by "the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men". 19 The analogy of poetry with culture seems best expressed in Shelley's quotation from Bacon on metaphor. Metaphor is "the 17

Prose, p. 279. Prose, p. 279. This idea may be taken as the root in language of Shelley's conception of all poetry as constituting a single cyclic poem. 19 Prose, p. 291. The term "eternal truths" points to the radically human origin of metaphor, and suggests that existence has an ultimately human form. 18

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same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world". Bacon's notion of the idola specus, defined by Shelley as "peculiar images which reside in the inner cave of thought", summarizes the meaning of "the various subjects of the world".20 It is what determines our individuality, our specific difference from other men. Through metaphor, poetry joins the peculiar image with the universal one, the paths of subjective mind with "footsteps" of objective nature. This universal "image" is rooted in the activity of the imagination (which makes possible our sense of unity within multiplicity in nature), and is made manifest only in expression, only in conjunction with the idola specus. Metaphor is a concrete universal, a uniqueness and a sameness at once, self-contained and yet inexhaustible in its relationships. It is in this sense, and not in the sense of a "spurious Platonism", that Shelley finds a spirit in the forms of poetry. The function of metaphor is to point out "minute and remote distinctions of feeling" while communicating a conception of wholeness.21 It deserves emphasis that the logic of prophecy implied by Shelley's rejection of "system" in style obscures at least a portion of his actual practice. His prefaces disclose that while he aimed at a prophetic poetry, he is never confident of his having created a fresh language.22 He writes in the preface to The Cenci: "1 entirely agree with those modern critics who assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the familiar language of men, and that our great ancestors the ancient English poets are the writers, a study of whom might incite us to do that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must be the real language of men in general and not that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to belong." 23 As stated, Shelley's principle of the "real language of men in general" is 20

See "Essay on Christianity", Prose, p. 199. Shelley's conception of metaphor is thus a mirror of his own critical method which seeks harmony in contrariety. A recent study, to which I am generally indebted, has examined this "dialectic" in Wordsworth. See E. D. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling (New Haven, 1960). 22 Shelley defends himself against charges of plagiarism in the prefaces to The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, and The Cenci. 23 Poetry, p. 278. 21

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rather half-formed and improbable. It is hard to conceive of a familiar language that is not somehow associated with the language of a particular class. His vagueness here probably reflects the fact that poetic diction was undergoing a crucial shift during the Romantic age, and that poets were reaching out to a variety of sources for support — his own sometimes stilted verse in The Cenci reaching back to Jacobean sources. But there is in the passage also a hint of the stylistic principle underlying his practice in such poems as "Julian and Maddalo" (1818), "The Sensitive Plant", "Letter to Maria Gisborne", and "The Witch of Atlas" (all written in 1820), not to mention his short lyrics. Donald Davie has correctly identified this principle, I think, as "urbanity".24 Its main features are accuracy of description and familiarity of tone. 25 There is certainly nothing systematic about urbanity; it has the liberal features of gentlemanly conversation. Yet, it also has little in common with the radical "freedom" from system incumbent upon prophecy. His rejection of stylistic "system", therefore, points curiously in two directions: towards a

24

Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London, 1953), pp. 133-59. 25 Here is an example from "Letter to Maria Gisborne", lines 72-91.

... I

Yield to the impulse of an infancy Outlasting manhood - I have made to float A rude idealism of a paper boat: A hollow screw with cogs - Henry will know The thing I mean and laugh at me, - if so He fears not I should do more mischief. - Next Lie bills and calculations much perplexed, With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint Traced over them in blue and yellow paint. Then comes a range of mathematical Instruments, for plans nautical and statical; A heap of rosin, a queer broken glass With ink in it; - a china cup that was What it will never be again, I think, A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink The liquor doctors rail at - and which I Will quaff in spite of them - and when we die We'll toss up who died first of drinking tea, And cry out, - 'Heads or tails?' where'er we be.

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sublime idiom on the one hand, and towards a conversational idiom on the other. Technical discussion of his use of these idioms is beyond the scope of this book. The fact, however, that they exist together in several of his poems has theoretical implications. Perhaps Shelley "fell back" on urbanity when he could no longer sustain his prophetic mood; or, perhaps, he recognized no distinction between them. Perhaps, finally, he saw the prophetic and urbane styles as different but compatible modes of achieving the same end. All of these have some plausibility, especially if we understand his "falling back" on urbanity as an "interval" of the sort he describes in the "fading coal" passage; or if we consider that the leveling of styles was part of the literary movement that culminated in the Lyrical Ballads, and was connected with the doctrine of social equality.26 But in Shelley's case we should probably expect that he views urbanity and prophecy as different but compatible modes. In its emphasis on accuracy of description, the urbane style has itself a revitalizing effect on language. In the "Ode to Liberty", where he "affects the sublime" (Davie's phrase) and supplies us with some choice examples of grammatical and rhetorical obscurity, he makes this ceremonious plea for clarity in language: Oh, that the words w h i c h make the thoughts obscure F r o m which they spring, as clouds of glimmering d e w F r o m a white lake blot Heaven's blue portraiture, Were stripped of their thin masks and various hue A n d frowns and smiles and splendours not their o w n , Till in the nakedness of false and true T h e y stand before their Lord, e a c h to receive it due. (11. 2 3 4 - 4 0 )

The oversimplification of "false and true", and the image of the reflection of thought by language as that of murky, fogbound waters reflecting a blue sky ought not to deter us. Furthermore, Shelley probably means precisely to bring to mind the "erotic" connotations of the "nakedness" of words as a kind of synec20

See Meyer Abrams, "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age", in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. by Northrop Frye, pp. 60-72.

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doche of total honesty. Words obscure thought by their use, not by their natures. Obscure phrasing is itself a type of flattery or hypocrisy, a social insult notable traditionally in sexual relations. The only nai've part of this idea is the sublime "realism" of "false and true"; the counter-implication that sincere and intelligent individuals can make relatively good use of words is "there", but sublimated. Sublimation, of course, is not non-existence. The sublime occasion of the "Ode to Liberty" requires that he see words as "integral thoughts", poetry as the embodiment of the aspiration to political freedom. Hence, he emphasizes the autonomy of language rather than its capacity for use as a legitimate social instrument. The prophetic view of language, in other words, entails a challenge of the very assumption that words are social instruments. But if the antinomian prophet sees the language of society as a chaos of abuse, he sees it also as the potentiality for a new poem, and the reflection of a new life. In the same stanza of the "Ode to Liberty", Shelley appeals to the wise to "kindle... lamps" from their "bright minds" so that thoughts might be more clearly judged. The "lamps" are words used with purity, and are unlike words like "priest" that were invented as "a scoff of impious pride from fiends impure" (there's no defending Shelley's tone here). As Davie has pointed out, Shelley's urbane work seems primarily addressed to an audience of close friends; for example, the small society of British exiles at Pisa. Poems like the "Ode to Liberty" were, obviously, not addressed to this familiar audience. Yet, it seems that in the sublime idiom Shelley was trying to become familiar to an unknown audience, that he is trying to make a potential community of experience an actual one.27 The " He writes in the Preface to The Revolt of Islam-. "If the lofty passions with which it has been my scope to distinguish this story shall not excite in the reader a generous impulse, an ardent thirst for excellence, an interest profound and strong such as belongs to no meaner desires, let not the failure be imputed to a natural unfitness for human sympathy in these sublime and animating themes" (Poetry, pp. 32-33). From the phrasing it seems clear that the poetry itself - while lofty and sublime in subject is intended as a kind of life-source, inspiring not doctrines but an "im-

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prophetic retreat to the circumference of society is, in fact, ambivalent (and actually so in Shelley's case) because it is in the nature of the prophetic poet to carry along with him the central values of society. And Shelley's prophetic cave is typically the gentleman's city turned inside out, a potential paradise hidden within ruins. 28 If the shift in the circumstances of "familiarity" leads to an opposition of tones, it does not, or ought not, lead to any failure of accuracy. The prophetic poet merely extends descriptive accuracy from the physical and social to the spiritual life. We do well to understand Shelley's lack of confidence in having created a fresh language as a symptom of his discouragement with the reception of his major work. He seemed confident of what the prophetic poem ought to be, but unsure of his artistic powers to master it. His practice in the familiar style from 1820 onwards, especially in poems which are also (in his own phrase) visionary rhymes, may be a sign of his awareness that something plainer than the elaborate metrical, tonal, and imaginal schemes of Prometheus Unbound, was required. What seems sure is that his sense of the need to display artistic control, the need to abandon, in other words, the artistic reticence of The Revolt of Islam, increases markedly from 1818 on and is profoundly felt in Epipsychidion, Adonais, and "The Triumph of Life". And the first and last of these, for all their obviously "sublime" qualities, have

pulse", a "thirst", and an "interest profound and strong". His sublime idiom, in other words, aims at making contact with his readers' deepest levels of awareness. 28 As a very "literal" example, see the descriptions of the two caves "designed" for Prometheus and Asia, Prometheus Unbound, III, iii, pp. 1063 and 124-47. The first is brimming with civilization, science and the arts ("Where we will sit and talk of time and change, / As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged"). The second is primitive (a gift of Earth), equipped with temple and oracle. Significantly, these Promethean caves associate with the Promethean myth the contrariety of urbanity and sublimity. The first is located in the Academy and the second nearby in the grove of Colonus, and suggest in their allusions to Plato and Oedipus an interplay between Platonic symposium and Sophoclean tragedy, perfect Greek examples of urbanity and sublimity. See the illuminating discussion of the caves in E. B. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (New York, 1941; reprinted, 1963, as a Meridian Book), pp. 194-204.

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important connections with his development of the familiar style.29 What distinguishes Shelley's idea of poetic language most is his view of the compatibility of observation and metaphor. If metaphor is an inner activity of poetry, expressing "integral thoughts" and a pleasurable order in words alone, observation is an outer activity expressing the pleasures of veri-similitude. In the Defence of Poetry, where Shelley wants us to see that poetic metaphor is analogous to the central patterns of cultural experience, a concrete universal, the aim is to include the outer within the inner activity, to show that "the same footsteps of nature" tread the various paths of the world, and suggest the "unapprehended relations of things". His prefaces and his practice, however, generally show an awareness, sometimes a nagging one, that metaphorical power and descriptive accuracy are not easily assimilated. Indeed, original genius and urbane familiarity do not ordinarily make good companions. But Shelley's natural idiom was that type of familiarity that includes a rather high degree of sophistication (like Byron, he deplores Keats's early style), a liking for wit, a tolerance of the bizarre - all, apparently, qualities of "Fancy" by Wordsworthian standards of what is natural. Hence, his dismissal of "peculiar systems" of style in favor of "the real language of men in general" shows confusedly both the logic of original genius and the taste of a sophisticated man. In his prophetic view of style, such "real" language was the chaos of divine poetry. We need not confuse the two. His prophetic poetry was an attempt to build on natural forms of communication, to "familiarize" a select class of readers with "beautiful idealisms of moral excellence". Such idealisms were to be a fusion of sense and intellect, of metaphor and fact. Veri-similitude 29 Harold Bloom stresses the urbanity of the first one-third of Epipsychidion (Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 208-10). Somebody might think of a better term to define this sublime familiarity. What Shelley accomplishes, roughly, is "characterization", or "impersonation". H e produces a voice that is unmistakably appropriate to the special circumstances of his poem - the personal nature of his theme becoming an integral part of the artistic form. His literary source for this is Dante, and his practice should be related to Keats's "The Fall of Hyperion", although Shelley could not have known this poem.

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would be stretched to its limits on the assumption that the reader's apprehension of intelligible analogies would in itself be a source of value. 30 Obviously, such practice demands an audience that is both educated and imaginative, one that will seek accuracy of description without confining that accuracy within the narrow limits of routine experience.31 It is as an exploitation of the richness in existing forms of communication, and as a Satanic critique of the unnatural in custom, that the prophetic imagination "arbitrarily produces" the language of poetry. in Shelley's idea of representation is developed along the same lines as his conception of the language of poetry: in relation to the natural genius of the poet and to the moral and intellectual conditions of society. Indeed, his discussion of representation properly begins in the Defence of Poetry with his description of the synthetic imagination, especially as exemplified in the free expression of the child at play. The child produces the "reflected image" of his impressions in order to prolong pleasure, and this capacity leads to an awareness of the medium of this mirroring, a medium which modifies what is expressed. Poetry itself, as "an expression of the imagination", may be taken as such a medium, and Shelley finds language one major element of poetry. Representation is another element, and is distinguished from language as actions, characters, and thoughts are distinct from the words which represent them.32 The child's reflected image, and the "certain order" found by poets to be related to or to exist potentially in all expression pertain equally to language and to the 30

See Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Poetry, pp. 205-06. Shelley tries, for example, to give a certain psychological plausibility even to the sublime convention of the rapt seer. In the "Ode to Naples" the setting is the ruins of Pompeii where "The oracular thunder penetrating shook / The listening soul in my suspended blood; / 1 felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke" (lines 6-8). 32 "Hence men even in the infancy of society observe a certain order in their words and actions distinct from that of objects represented by them." Prose, p. 278. (My italics.) 31

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"objects" symbolized by language. Character, action, and thought are at once "the representation and the medium"; they reflect at once natural objects and the "dreams" of man. Shelley's ideas of representation have never been fully examined. A. C. Bradley was, perhaps, the first to appreciate the fact that the poet had a great interest in form as well as content, but Bradley interpreted form in Shelley as simply applied metaphysics, and this tended to spoil his insight. He decided that Shelley thought all form emanated from the Ideal, but that one could distinguish between "direct" and "indirect" representations of the Ideal. Hence, "good" characters, like Prometheus or the Witch of Atlas, were direct representations of the Ideal, while "evil" characters, like Count Cenci and Jupiter, represented the Ideal indirectly by showing men how they ought not to behave.33 This approximation of Sidney has a germ of plausibility, but it is based on a misunderstanding of Shelley's use of the term "idealism" (which refers always to a product of man's internal nature, especially products of art, and only sometimes, and tentatively, to other-worldly Forms), and abuses the complexity of his idea of evil. It can scarcely help us to understand why "impersonations" like Prometheus must struggle to master the relationship of good and evil within themselves. Nevertheless, Bradley's thesis has had great currency. Melvin Solve was in essential agreement when he wrote "to Shelley there was a direct connection between 'life' and imagination on the one hand, and imagination and the world of ideal truth on the other".34 This is his interpretation of the poet's statement about beauty as "subsisting first, in the relation between existence and perception, and secondly, in the relation between perception and expression".35 What Shelley rather carefully gives us as two distinct relations becomes, in Solve's statement, a single "direct connection". And, although Solve is less rigid than Bradley in applying the Platonic metaphysic to the poet's idea of representation, recognizing in the handling of evil and ugliness 33 34 35

See Bradley, "Shelley's View of Poetry", Oxford Lectures, Solve, Shelley: His Theory of Poetry, p. 2. Prose, p. 279. See discussion above, pp. 74-75.

pp. 163-68.

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a "sympathetic curiosity", he still interprets representation to mean "an imitation of the ideal".36 The elusiveness of Shelley's ideas of character, thought, and action may well be traced to his own distinction between spirit and form. It occurs most notably in the preface to Prometheus Unbound. It is impossible that any one who inhabits the same age with such writers as those who stand in the foremost ranks of our own, can conscientiously assure himself that his language and tone of thought may not have been modified by the study of the productions of those extraordinary intellects. It is true, that, not the spirit of their genius, but the forms in which it has manifested itself, are due less to the peculiarities of their own minds than to the peculiarity of the moral and intellectual condition of the minds among which they have been produced. Thus a number of writers possess the form, while they want the spirit of those whom, it is alleged, they imitate; because the former is the endowment of the age in which they live, and the latter must be the uncommunicated lightning of their own mind. (Poetry, p. 206)

The distinction between spirit and form given here is essentially the same as the distinction between expression and existence. The study of poetry, as well as the study of nature, does not in itself "constitute men Poets, but only prepares them to be the auditors of those who are".37 The aspiring poet learns form from his predecessors, and from the conditions of life in his time. He can express, however, only his own perception of these forms, "the uncommunicated lightning of his own mind". Yet, if we recall the definition of the objects of imagination as "common to universal Nature and existence itself", the distinction of spirit and form takes on a modified meaning. Spirit becomes the power of transforming the limited conditions of things, "the peculiarity of the moral and intellectual condition" of the age, into universal conditions. These are not conditions of life so much as conditions 36

Solve writes of Shelley: "Thoughts are the great reality and thought compells . . . formulates the dim chaos of things" (p. 72). Under this interpretation "thought" can hardly be considered an element of the poetic medium. 37 See Poetry, p. 35.

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of expression. They owe their being not to perception simply, but to the imagination, which is "mind acting on . . . thoughts so as to color them with its own light". The "uncommunicated lightning of the poet's own mind" implies an imaginative selection as well as an individualized perception. The terms "modified", "manifested", and "endowment", used in the quotation above to describe the relation between form and spirit, the age and the mind of the poet, may also be seen as terms of imaginative expression. They indicate an interrelationship rather than a sharp division of spirit and form. The language and objects of poetry are themselves limiting forms or manifestations of the genius of poets. Shelley writes of their relation to the conditions of existence. "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. Every man's mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form." 38 It is precisely through the forms of expression that poets "modify the nature of others", and the internal powers of the poet are excited and sustained by the forms of nature and art expressed upon his own consciousness. These "external influences" are indeed sources of his expression, and are necessary to poetry, but only as his mind is "a mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form". The identity of these forms, in other words, is dualistic in existence, both external and internal; but in expression they are wholly internal, comprising the identity of the poet and of the man.39 Shelley's terms indicate that he is making a distinction between spirit and form without implying that they are different entities, 38

Poetry, p. 206. Because language is "arbitrarily produced by the imagination" (Prose, p. 279), and thus directly related to poetry, Shelley characteristically found poets differing only in degree from other men. Indeed, "in the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet . . . " (p. 279). 39

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or different elements within poetry. 40 Formal representation is a genuine element of poetry, derived indirectly from the total social conditions of life through the medium of the imagination, which transforms these conditions into universals. As an "endowment of the age", such representation might best be summarized as the minimum conditions of perception. But, as a manifestation of the imagination, it is an "idealism", its conditions becoming universal. 41 In the latter sense, formal representation is capable of communicating spirit. And Shelley's distinction of "imitation" and "genius" in poetry would seem to follow this gradation of form: between that which simply reflects the age, and that which makes over this reflection into an imaginative whole. 42 The interrelationship of form and spirit in poetry is brilliantly suggested in the Defence of Poetry. Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful and it adds beauty of that which is deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union, under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things. 40

Solve tends to ignore the interrelationship of spirit and form: "the spirit of one's genius is less affected than is the form in which that spirit expresses itself, for it is chiefly the form which is contributed by an age". P. 101. 41 The term "idealism", as used by Shelley, for instance, in his description of Prometheus Unbound as "beautiful idealisms of moral excellence" {Poetry, p. 207), is understood here and elsewhere to mean the product of imaginative synthesis, the "composing . . . of new thoughts". See Prose, p. 276. 42 "Imitation" has at least four meanings in Shelley's criticism. First, there is the deliberate copying of other authors, as in his description of the heroic tragedy as "a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces of antiquity" (Prose, p. 285). Second, there is a kind of inevitable copying of authors, as illustrated in the remark: "a number of writers possess the form, while they want the spirit of those whom, it is alleged, they imitate . . . " (Poetry, p. 206). Third, there is the synthesizing process involved in imaginative form, as suggested in the image of the mind, given above, as a mirror composing one form while reflecting all forms. Finally, there is what might be called the imitation of the future: "Poets are . . . the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present" (Prose, p. 297). This idea will be discussed presently. In the third and fourth senses, the term "expression" is an effective substitute for "imitation".

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It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms. {Prose, p. 295)

Essentially, poetry transforms life, gives it a humanly desirable form, which is, at the same time, a form true to man's perception of himself and nature. While it "turns all things to loveliness", it still recognizes "horror", "grief", and "change", and unites "irreconcilable things". The radiance of poetry makes nature into an "incarnation" of spirit, but does not dissipate things so much as the conditions under which they exist. The poisonous waters are changed to potable gold, the waters of death to the elixir of life. Life and death are irreconcilable in terms of existence, but in terms of poetry they are married, their bonds of exclusiveness dissolved. And it is this dissolving, transforming activity that is proper to poetry alone, both in its origin in the imagination, and in the words and representation which are its elements. This activity is itself "wondrous", and "secret", but its product is not unintelligible. Poesis is a second nature, a nature of abstract or ideal forms containing all forms that might exist.43 Shelley's conception of the drama may be seen as a reflection of this view of the poetic medium. "The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary 43

Perhaps the closest approximation to a description of this "second nature" is found in an obscure passage in Act I of Prometheus Unbound. The Earth speaks (11- 195-202): For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unites them and they part no more; Dreams and the light imaginings of men, And all that faith creates or love desires, Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes. These shadows are an imagined universe, directly related to the faith and love of the human spirit.

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forms and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects and endows it [sic] with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall." 44 The laws of dramatic poetry are essentially laws of activity as well as reflection. The drama "collects", "divides", "reproduces", "touches", "multiplies", and "endows". It is also a mirror which "reflects", but Shelley has altered this traditional metaphor by making the mirror prismatic; it refracts as well as reflects. Indeed, we must imagine a three-step process. First, human nature is collected: action, character, and thought are selected by the many-sided mirror. Second, these "rays" are divided, or "broken" by the prism, and reproduced. The form of the reproduction is the divided or "broken" form, the spectrum resulting from the refraction of "rays" of light. The simple, elementary forms of human nature become majestic and beautiful through their reproduction into the spectrum of human nature. Again we have the example of the fragment becoming universal, the actual form of life becoming the potential form of spirit. And, third, the spectrum of human nature (the multiplication of what drama collects in simple form) is reflected to an audience. It is endowed with "the power of propagating its like" in the audience, in the sense that it is the potential in every man for exhibiting what is universal in men. The true-likeness of the drama is an idealism, reflecting a source in nature only through the process of transformation, or prismatic refraction. It suggests a potential identity of the various forms of human nature selected, in that each may be turned into a spectrum, or universal form. Yet, at the same time, the spectrum or universality produced does not lose distinct relevance for individuals. Shelley writes of the Athenian tragedy: "The spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, or would become." 45 Self-perception seems the key to the effects of tragedy, but it is a perception of an "ideal" self, an intense aware44

«

Prose, p. 285. Prose, p. 285.

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ness of an "internal type". Drama "modifies the nature" of the spectator by compelling him to identify himself with what is represented. Clearly, as this representation is essentially a universal form, it will be relevant for all spectators, an "internal type" of all men. But for each man the identification occurs as an individual thing, connected with what he "loves, admires, or would become". It involves, for each, the defeating of "the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions." 46 The communication of the "internal type" is accomplished in the drama, as Shelley notes, "under a thin disguise of circumstance". The problem of the "disguise", which may be taken as the equivalent of "form", is basic to his conception of the medium of poetry. H e addresses the problem in the following passage. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses; the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object were unveiled to their depths in these immortal creations; the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations until f r o m admiring they imitated and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be objected that these characters are remote from moral perfection and that they c a n b y n o means be considered as edifying patterns of general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; revenge is the naked idol of a semi-barbarous age; and selfdeceit is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed and 46

Shelley describes the same state of self-perception in terms of "evanescent visitations" later in the Defence of Poetry. "These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and while they last, the self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe." Prose, p. 294. We should note especially the atom-universe image as describing the fundamental relation of intensity and universality as properties of the poetic medium.

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which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient armor or modern uniform around his body while it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendor; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal ears. (Prose, p. 282)

Shelley defines character as a flowing together of disguise and essence, of form and spirit. Except in rare instances, which suggest more the possibilities than the probabilities of poetry, characters wear masks, or "costumes". His analysis of this idea combines his usual perspectives, the psychological and the historical. It demonstrates from both viewpoints that the disguise and the essence are intrinsically related, that poetic representation does not so much refer to a distinction between appearance and reality as include that distinction as a property of its medium. In addition, the analysis refutes Peacock's claim that poetry takes its elements and significance from social customs by putting that claim to new and important use. Shelley's historical view of the relation of disguise and essence develops a contrast between the "ideal perfection" and the "peculiar errors" of any age. The perfection and the errors are considered in moral terms: friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion set over against revenge and self-deceit. Yet, we are mistaken if we understand these terms, as Bradley and others have done, as setting forth a distaste for "mixed characters" that gives rise to the grotesque notion that a poet may arbitrarily indulge by choice in the errors of his age.47 A clearer reading suggests, first, that while the perfection of an age is "embodied", or transformed into the condition of sensible experience, its 47

Bradley, "Shelley's View of Poetry", p. 166.

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peculiar errors are "deified", or abstracted into a mask, a "naked idol", or a "veiled image". Moral perfection indeed competes with moral error in poetic characters, but the two are intrinsically and complexly related. Virtue and vice become the body and the mask. In Achilles, for example we can see moral "competition" between his friendship and his revenge. But obviously his determination to take revenge for the death of Patrochlus is an expression of the truth of his friendship, the mask his friendship wears.48 Second, because vices are the clothing in which characters "must be arrayed", it is unlikely that moral virtues, which have peculiar interrelationships with moral vices, are identical with the "eternal proportions" characters reveal. The "eternal proportions" underlie both virtue and vice, both body and mask. They are the spirit, barely recognized in sensible experience, that is the internal nature of poetry, and its universal dimension. In viewing Homer's characters historically, then, he first distinguishes between the ideal perfection of the age and its peculiar errors; then he differentiates both the perfection and the errors, or the whole moral condition of the age, from "eternal proportions", a term that suggests the transcendence of history. Peacock's historical relativism is thus appropriated without essential alteration and worked into a view of literary history as a kind of providence, successively revealing itself to men. The resolution of these two arguments comes about by a doubling of the meaning of "vesture" and "body". They stand opposed to one another, but both stand in harmonious opposition to the term "spirit". The critical principle presumed here might run: the nature of poetic character is determined and re-determined continually by the moral conceptions peculiar to historical ages and milieus, but when, as in Homer, the moral life of poetic character is fully realized or communicated, an identity of spirit can be recognized 48

Shelley thought revenge was a "pernicious mistake" that had been idolized or deified by the past. Yet, he values the form no less than the spirit of the great literature of the past. In fact, he sees the "naked idol" of revenge as more wholesome than the subtler, modern idol of "selfdeceit". This, of course, is merely a repetition in a serious tone of Peacock's appreciation of the barbarous manliness of ancient poets in comparison with the sentimental hermits of his own time.

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that resolves the multiplicity of historical forms into a unity. Like Blake, Shelley is suggesting that what we now call "myths" are the bases of literary form. Shelley's psychological analysis of disguise and essence leads to the same point. Homer's characters are worthy of the sympathetic response of their "auditors", whose thoughts and feelings are refined by their loveliness and enlarged by their greatness. The characters are worthy because they approximate what all men wish to become, and because they reveal the process of discovering the value of such wishes. Shelley describes the process of discovering value by tracing the response of the "auditors". Admiration, imitation, and identification are the phases of this response, their order indicating, apparently, degrees of intensity. We may well think of it as a process of "empathy". But it is also a process of "realization", a clearing away of the distortions that modify our perceptions of things. The objects of the response are true and beautiful, great and lovely, impersonations precisely because they objectify desire. They "unveil" their own experience of "satisfaction" (which in itself need not be abstractly good or happy), and their auditors share this experience, "clothe" themselves in their truth and beauty. Both the "veiling" and the "clothing" describe a pattern of identification, a coalescence of fiction and reality, in which new levels of awareness are opened up. It is this principle, which combines the sense of wholeness with new levels of awareness, that governs the idea that characters approximate what all men wish to become. Shelley appears to accept Peacock's thesis that values have the same limitedness and impermanence as wishes. This relativity is carefully modified, however, by his distinction between the "costume", the wishes expressed by characters, and the manner in which the costume is worn. The manner is what identifies the inner nature of poetic characters. It is the selecting principle by means of which the pattern of identification between character and auditor is established. It seems to be Shelley's term for art, or the skill of characterization. It determines the form in which characters "satisfy" their own wishes or motives, and is therefore itself the "spirit"

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that informs poetry. Through the poet's manner of treatment, the behavior and thought of characters take on a "permanent" interest for men, an interest that can be aroused only by a revelation of "eternal proportions". Perhaps the most important application of the idea that poetic character is the artistically controlled flowing together of disguise and essence is to the problem of allegory. For Shelley, what characters think and do seems to signify simultaneously in two distinct ways. First, characters reflect "eternal proportions"; that is, they point inward, to themselves, to an ideal, poetic significance. Second, characters reflect their social and natural settings, pointing outward to the blurred margin where poetry and life mix. They have, in other words, an ideal and an actual reference, a figurative and a biographical function. But the striking thing about this conception is that in tracing either of these points of reference, the other comes into view. The sense of wholeness (art) and the new awareness of life (biography) are not discrete: they are both contrary and the same. In the Preface to Prometheus Unbound Shelley says that the imagery of the poem has been "drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed".50 He implies not only that the landscape will be burdened with ideas, a normal condition of allegory, but that thought will be made an image, reflecting what the mind acts on, so that the mind itself "becomes that which it contemplates". The imagery, in other words, is to blend perception and interpretation, "distinctions of feeling" and intellectual significance. Shelley does not generally think of allegory as a fixed system of meanings, although he suggests that such systems may be profitably employed, as in Dante.51 Allegory is rather a pervasive principle of expression itself, common to every vision of the mind or report of the senses. From one point of view, allegory is simply interpretation: the vision of the Poet in Alastor is "alleM 51

Poetry,

p. 205.

See, for example, the Notes to Hellas, nos. 2 and 8 (Poetry, pp. 478, 480). Yeats was the first to point out a "system of correspondences" in Shelley's handling of Venus symbolism. See W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), pp. 88-89.

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gorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind", a situation Shelley and Peacock humorously described as "nympholepsy". From another point of view, allegory names the relation between poetic spirit and its "impersonation" in character, action, and thought. Although Shelley often uses themes of "animism" and of "correspondences" in his poetry, he does not restrict his theory of allegory to these themes. He conceives of it, rather, in broad terms as an attitude to literature, in which mythical and biographical implications are equally true and necessary to one another. In this view, allegory names the relation between unity and multiplicity, and is identical with his metaphorical method of criticism. In Shelley's view poetic representation is a selection of objects whose actual conditions of existence have been transformed. The poet takes the partial and limited objects of nature and makes them into representations of universal human nature. These representations retain their likeness to life both because the poetic powers can be "excited and sustained" only under the influence of life, and because the poet does not create ex nihilo, but by selection and combination.52 Their universality is thus not dependent upon the objects of existence they reflect, but upon the manner in which these objects are combined. The objects themselves are potentially universal when they are the subject-matter of art. Otherwise, they are fragmentary, "the accident of surrounding impressions".53 He views poetic representation, then, in terms of gradations. 52

"As to imitation, poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, but it creates by combination and representation. Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man (art) or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them (Poetry, p. 206). 53 In accord with this principle Shelley opposes didacticism. "A poet . . . would do ill to embody his conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations which participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the effect in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in the cause (Prose, p. 282).

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At one end of the contiuum are the "peculiar errors", or the products of the conditions of moral and intellectual perception in any age. At the other end are the "eternal proportions" that transcend history and ordinary experience. Most poetry is "an alloy" of these polar extremes of representation. And while the primary impulse of all poetry is towards the pole of universal spirit and "planetary music", it is through an intense perception of "costume", one that includes morality but is not governed by its doctrines, that poetry achieves its effects. The range of difference Shelley emphasizes between "peculiar errors" and "eternal proportions" should not obscure his basic conception of the interrelationship of form and spirit, and the implication that poetic representations participate in a single contiuum of literary history. In discussing poesis in the Defence of Poetry, Shelley tends to merge descriptive and normative judgments, and to neglect that detailed application of his principles which would be most appealing to us. Yet, it is relatively easy to see he believes in a thematic criticism that stresses character (with thought and action as qualities of character), and in a critical vocabulary in which the ancient terms of part-to-whole relationship are accommodated to such modern problems as that of the relations of fact and symbol, product and process, the work of art and its context. He employs the traditional norms, wholeness and harmony, in connection with the need for organic unity in art, a unity he vaguely associates with the principles of various kinds of poetry as well as with the nature of the imagination. He develops nothing like a system of genres, but he does suggest that certain properties of poems belong specifically to them and to their general type. His remarks on Plato provide an illustration. "Plato was essentially a poet - the truth and splendor of his imagery and the melody of his language is [iic] the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the harmony of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action.. . ." 5 4 We may glean from this M

Prose, p. 280.

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that the harmony of the forms Plato rejects are harmonies of "shape and action". Plato attempts the harmony of pure thought, a harmony specifically dependent on the imagery of thought. His success is relative to this purpose, the imagery determining the wholeness of his work. It would be difficult to draw any sharp distinction between this type of organization and the organization of the lyric form, on the grounds Shelley implies. But, we might conclude that the imagery of the lyric suggests the presence of shape (or character) and action, if belonging only to the poet, where Plato's imagery suggests only the union of word and idea. Of Milton, Shelley writes: "He mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colors upon a single palette and arranged them in the composition of his great picture according to the laws of epic truth." 55 Wholeness and harmony would appear to be properties of the epic form, the arrangement of colors, as well as of Milton's genius, the "single palette" on which these colors are mingled. An organic interdependence is suggested between genius and the laws of the epic. His remarks on the laws or "true philosophy" of the drama are weighted even more heavily with the idea that wholeness and harmony are properties of the medium of poetry. "For the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions to produce a common effect in the representation of the loftiest idealisms of passion and of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the most consummate skill and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion and unity one towards another." 56 The idealisms of passion and power, which essentially constitute character, are the "common effect" or "spirit" of dramatic art. All the "modes of expression" employed work towards the single end 53 Prose, p. 290. The "laws of epic truth" will be considered later in this chapter. 56 Prose, p. 284. It should be noted that Shelley includes "action" among the modes of expression, meaning probably an equivalent to Aristotle's "spectacle". Aristotle's "plot" would probably be included in "the representation of the loftiest idealisms of passion and of power", but, rather obviously, character replaces plot as the "soul" of drama for Shelley.

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57

of expressing character. And character itself, both in what is done and what is said, has an identifiable individuality, and a harmonious anatomy. It is the distinct and intelligible medium of passion and power. Shelley interestingly compares this "true philosophy" of the drama with modern practice. On the modern stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favorable only to a partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great master in ideal mimicry. (Prose, p. 254)

Apparently, drama has depreciated in capacity for effecting a harmony and unity of diverse modes of expression, though Shelley does not find this necessarily destructive of the form of "highest impersonations". The "accompaniment" rather than the core of drama has corrupted. Shelley's remarks on the actor's mask, however, suggest a break-down of communication between the idealism of the play and the audience. He challenges the intrusion of what we might call "realism"; our interest in what is "permanent and unchanging" in the character is diverted by our attention to the mastery of the actor. The basis of his challenge might seem quite arbitrary. But it does serve to demonstrate once more his conception of organic unity as a fundamental property of the drama, and to suggest that this unity is ideally participated in by actors and even spectators. It is the communication of this unity, comprehending the ®T See Prose, p. 285, where Shelley conceives of the drama as "that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other ...". He would suggest that the drama has quantitative as well as qualitative principles of organization, and that wholeness and harmony operate on both planes at once, on what might be called the external and internal planes of organization.

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diversity of experience, that forms his own dramatic intention in The Cenci. He writes of his historical source: "Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart." 58 It is the responsibility of the dramatist to present the elements of his story as "conspiring to one tremendous end". The story itself is selected because it has the "capacity of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men".59 It had become a matter of popular tradition, and Shelley compares it in this respect with King Lear and "the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus is told". But to record merely the events themselves, which are "eminently fearful and monstrous", is insufficient. He goes on: "The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring." 60 The story, which is potentially poetry in its elements, must be subjected to art, to the medium of the idealizing process, before it becomes a tragic poem. Pain and horror and moral deformity are not eliminated or weakened. They are made into idealisms, into mutually harmonious elements "conspiring to one tremendous end". The norms of wholeness and harmony, then, are generally appropriate to every kind of poem, although the specific generic forms in which they are expressed differ. Yet, the over-riding idea of Shelley's discussion of the poetic medium is less that each work may be considered a discrete example of organic unity than that all works conform to similar principles. This similarity does 59

Poetry, pp. 275-76. Poetry, p. 276. 60 Poetry, p. 276. We must thus reject the interpretation of Daiches, who holds that Shelley's theory admits only pleasure and good, in the literal sense, into poetry. See David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature (Englewood, N.J., 1956), p. 119. 59

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not mean sameness; wholeness and harmony are considered properties of specific poems and kinds of poems. Plato's harmony is not the same as Sophocles' or Milton's. But as all great poems, as well as poets, "participate in the eternal, the infinite, and the one", they are valued less for their wholeness and harmony than for their universality.61 This accounts in part for Shelley's concern for the selection of subject-matter and for the fulfilling of generic "conditions", or possibilities (there was "a national and universal interest" in the story of the Cenci, which prompted Shelley's using it for drama). He implies, also, that each loss of "fit accompaniment" to the drama, especially the banishing of religious institutions, is a genuine, if not debilitating, loss to the kind.62 Conversely, Shakespeare's blending of tragedy with comedy, "though liable to abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle".63 The property of universality is given quantitative interpretation, as that which is capable of containing all things without destroying their distinctness. Shelley is pointing towards a thematic understanding of formal representation in which wholeness and harmony in individual kinds or poems are manifestations of universal harmony, belonging to literature as a whole. Shelley's most direct conception of this principle is as a kind of radiance. Poetry "reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light, stand thenceforward in 61

See Prose, p. 279. This is the idea that the medium of poetry is a single continuum which, like the great world, is universal in nature. 62 That the presence of a number of modes is not itself evidence of dramatic excellence is illustrated in Shelley's comparison of Calderón and Shakespeare. "Calderón in his religion Autos has attempted to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by Shakespeare, such as the establishing a relation between the drama and religion and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by a substitution of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passions." Prose, p. 284. 63 Shelley stresses that in such a blend "the comedy should be as in King Lear universal, ideal, and sublime". Prose, p. 284. He thus maintains emphasis on unity and harmony. The comedy in tragedy must be ultimately drawn within the scope of the tragic events.

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the minds of those who have once contemplated them as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists".64 Its durable effect lies in its reproductive power, "the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall". The self-contained unity of discrete works is viewed as an aspect of an overflowing, generative principle. Essentially, this is a spiritual principle inherent in poetry and not demonstrable in non-human nature. His description fuses his idea of the imagination and his idea of culture, for radiance exists not simply in the freeplay of the imagination in the writer, but also in the effects of poetry. Radiance is for Shelley the basic property of the potentiality for culture in the life of society. As a generative principle, it bears relation to general moral and intellectual conditions. And, in poetry, this relation is a specifically thematic matter. It is in terms of the principle of radiance that Shelley connects modern poetry with the theme of love. They are connected because love is essentially an expression of the human spirit. Poetry does not itself establish morality: it develops the capacity in man for moral action.65 Love, which is the capacity for moral action, he sees as the central theme of modern literature.86 "Love, which found a 84

Prose, p. 282. Shelley's conception of the relation of poetry and love in the Defence of Poetry is one of his clearest arguments. "The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food." Prose, p. 283. The principle of radiance is present here in the description of the attracting and assimilating power, the filling up of the intervals and interstices of thought, whose "void forever craves fresh food". 66 Shelley finds Dante the first great poet of the renovated world, and describes the Paradiso as "a perpetual hymn of everlasting love". Prose, p. 289. 65

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worthy poet in Plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and superstition. At successive intervals Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force." 97 The theme of love provides a sameness or unity within the historical adjustments poetry makes. To be sure this sameness is itself limited to the civilization Shelley chooses to consider, but it seems to him to be an ordering principle of that civilization and its poetry. The word "trophies" draws our attention: "trophies" become the symbol of seeds, while sustaining the heraldic connections of the poetry of love. The seeds thus symbolized are memorials of the hope of the Christian era for a final victory over evil, the "sensuality and force" of the passage quoted above. Shelley is deliberately suggesting that the radiance of art leads into the radiance of apocalypse. There is, therefore, manifold connection between poetic representation and life, ranging from the propagation of apocalyptic hope in an audience to the kind of costume a player wears. The crux of Shelley's discussion lies in his distinction between form and spirit, a distinction not of kind but of degree. The spirit of poetry is its form fully worked out; form is itself merely the minimum conditions of perception and expression under which every poet in a given age works. Character, action, and thought, which are usually brought together in his criticism under the term "human nature", are not produced arbitrarily by the imagination. They appear, instead, as true-likenesses, determined by the poet's selection of details from a given environment. Hence, they necessarily reflect man's moral condition, but such reflection is only subtly didactic. It teaches by opening up new levels of awareness, by creating a new sense of identity in the reader. The history of poetry is thus a gigantic mirror of man's moral history, but a mirror curiously refracted so that it reflects not 67

Prose, p. 289.

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only appearances (virtues and vices) but "eternal proportions" as well. The analogies between life and poetry give way to a kind of spiritual radiance, similar to the agency of love, that makes all things essentially one thing. The authority of poetry rests, for Shelley, most clearly in its historical and psychological relations with human values and aspirations.

IV

Shelley's attempt to discover a sameness within difference in the formal qualities of poetry is chiefly expressed in his idea of the "great poem". This idea, itself an elaborate metaphor, is perhaps the most significant of his contributions to criticism.68 Because it employs both of his major premises in arguing the nature and function of poetry, appeal to social history and appeal to mental faculties, the "great poem" may, indeed, be viewed as the center of his conception of the medium of poetry. The great poem is what the ideal prophetic poet writes.66 In the Defence of Poetry, Shelley writes: "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." And in discussing poetic character he suggests that the revelation of human nature is tantamount to a revelation of the divine. The formula he worked out for man-God relationship is as follows: "the perfection of the human and the divine character is thus asserted to be the same: man by resembling God fulfils most accurately the tendencies of his nature, and God comprehends within itself all 68

It is also the most direct, and perhaps the most penetrating of his replies to Peacock's thesis of the "four ages": Iron, Golden, Silver, and Brass. As we shall see, Shelley adapts this adaptation of the ancient myth very subtly. His chief distinction is that between Mammon (the new industrial symbol of wealth, utility and self) and God (the symbol of poetry and the creative energy of the community). The Defence of Poetry sets out to reform the New Church of Science and Industry. 69 Shelley's direct discussion of the "great" poem itself is brief and elliptical. His whole account of the history of poetry, however, implies the idea of the great poem as a kind of framework. Essentially, it is described as "that great poem which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world". Prose, p. 287.

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that constitutes human perfection. Thus, God is a model through which the excellence of man is to be estimated, while the abstract perfection of the human character is the type of the actual perfection of the divine." 70 Poetry reveals human character in its abstract perfection, presenting a lofty idealism of passion and power. By analogy, the abstract perfection of human character in poetry would be identical with the actual perfection of a poetic God. Hence, the great poem comprehends within itself all that constitutes poetry. When we are told that poetry redeems the divinity in man, we are also being told that poetry redeems itself, by reflecting the perfection of the great poem. In finding it "indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence", Shelley is reasoning from this same analogy between poetry and life. He reasons further. "The corruption or extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished is a mark of corruption of manners and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Macchiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense; all language, institution, and form require not only to be produced but to be sustained; the office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards providence, no less as regards creation." 71 Shelley attempts no causal analysis of the relation between poetry and life. Both involve identical if distinct processes: distinct because poetry is ideal (a refracting mirror) and life actual; identical because their processes are sympathetic. Poetry is a true-likeness of the energies and manners of society, worked to imaginative form. But the key idea of this passage concerns poetry alone, and is derived, typically, by analogy, from Macchiavell's program for avoiding the corruption of political and religious institutions. 72 70

"Essay on Christianity", Prose, p. 207. Shelley is here sympathetically summarizing the views of the Gospels. 71 Prose, p. 286. 72 "As I speak here of mixed bodies, such as republics or religious sects,

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In the Third Book of the Discourses, Macchiavelli discusses the causes of the preservation and destruction of states, concentrating, of course, on the Roman Republic. Although the Republic is a "mixed body", and thus better suited to withstand the corruption of any element within it than governments founded on a single element of power, it is still subject to change through time.73 It, therefore, needs periodic renewal, a change which will restore its original principles. Such change may either be extrinsic, such as absorption into another state, or intrinsic, effected by law or leadership. Shelley, in claiming providence for the poet, is suggesting that poetry, like a republic, is capable of being renewed or restored periodically. The reason is two-fold. First, the poetic imagination "measures the circumference and sounds the depths" of human nature, thereby making every poem the potential repository of all the energy and form present in every other poem written in the same civilization. Second, every poem has the potential capacity to establish "ever-new relations" of pleasure with its audience, whatever changes take place in that audience.74 The reason, in other words, is lodged in the principles of poetry themselves, whether they are taken from the production of poems, or from their effects. Poetry would thus be conceived of as an ideal republic (in the sense of being both hypoI say that those changes are beneficial that bring them back to their original principles. And those are the best-constituted bodies, and have the longest existence, which possess the intrinsic means of frequently renewing themselves.... And it is a truth clearer than light that, without such renovation, these bodies cannot continue to exist; and the means of renewing them is to bring them back to their original principles. For as all religious republics and monarchies must have within themselves some goodness, by means of which they obtain their first growth and reputation, and as in the process of time this goodness becomes corrupted, it will of necessity destroy the body unless something intervenes to bring it back to its normal condition." The Discourses (Modern Library Edition, 1940), Third Book, Chapter I, pp. 397-98. 73

Cf. The Discourses, First Book, Chapter II, pp. 110-14. Shelley defines the laws of epic truth, for instance, as "the laws of that principle by which series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind". Prose, p. 290. This continuing sympathy assumes that the poetic pattern is universal, capable of communicating to men in diverse moral and intellectual conditions. 74

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thetical and a perfect model) which is brought back to its original principles by every act within its bounds. And when poetry, like a republic, is either attacked by, or absorbed into, some other body, it either asserts its principles in defence, or they receive new life in the new form.75 To summarize to this point, we find that the idea of the great poem has two basic parts. First, the great poem stands in relation to actual poems as God stands to man. It comprehends the perfection of poetry, containing within it, potentially, all poetic forms. Shelley conceives of it as having "eternal proportions", but these proportions are limited to the universe they measure: poetic forms are finite in number, but infinite (or eternal) in the variety in which they are expressed. Such a joining of eternity and time, infinity and finitude is clearly implied in the idea that the great poem is the perfection of poetry. The second part of the idea is that the poem has cyclical form. Like Macchiavelli's republic, the great poem has the power of renewing itself, or returning to its original principles. Indeed, such return is seen as necessary for the survival of poetry. Poetry requires perpetuation from age to age, and any cycle of poetry may be measured from that particular cycle's first appearance to its absorption into another. Thus, poetry is never extinguished; its disappearance heralds a new birth.76 The suggestion is that the great poem is identical with every civilization in its course from birth through maturity to decay and death. Its rebirth is an application of the "maxim" Shelley enunciates, "that no nation or religion can supercede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of 75

Shelley's Defence is thus literally an attempt to bring poetry back to its true principles under conditions of attack by "the calculating principle". It is a part of his argument that poetry would be reborn even if submerged in analytical modes of thought and expression; for he conceives of analysis and synthesis as contraries in a single universe, rather than mutually discrete. He would point to Peacock's art as an example. 76 Shelley writes in the Defence of Poetry. "Poetry is a sword of lightning ever unsheated which consumes the scabbard that would contain it." The ever-consumed scabbard is the "calculating principle", the dialectical opposite of imagination. It appears in the history of poetry especially during "periods of the decay of social life". See Prose, p. 285.

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that which it supercedes". To conjecture a formula: every civilization has its own great poem, following a cyclical course, but all such poems are related in linear progression, like links in a chain. The great poem, then, is a mirror of civilization, but a mirror with a special refracting power, a power that transforms whatever it reflects. As Shelley finds of the drama, the refraction modifies the reflection. The matrix of poetry is thus twofold: that which exists internally in the form-making power of the poet and that which exists externally in the conditions of society. We may now turn to a more detailed examination of the great poem. It should be clear that Shelley's idea is an elaborate two-fold analogy, the terms of one part being drawn from mental faculties, and the terms of the other from the history of western civilization. Both parts of the analogy eventually lead to the same place, the point at which poetry is seen as the central form of culture. In terms of faculties this point represents the total subsumption of human acts and desires in the work of the imagination; in terms of social history it represents the total humanization of nature. It is the point at which poetry is merged with religious apocalypse, and the point at which Shelley's philosophy of art achieves its full scope, integrating the Many with the One. We begin by tracing the great poem from the psychological perspective. In the very middle of the Defence of Poetry Shelley compares Homer and Sophocles with the bucolic writers, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, who appear during the waning of Greek civilization.78 Homer and Sophocles have the best of it. It is not what the erotic writers have, but what they have not, in which their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would 77

79

Prose, p. 289.

Prose, p. 286. This is the central portion of Shelley's discussion of the history of poetry.

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have been achieved. For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom through the affections into the very appetites, till all become a torpid mass in which sense hardly survives. (Prose, p. 286)

The connection between the "corruption" of poetry and the "corruption" of society will be explored later. Our main concern here is with Shelley's division of the poetic power into three classes, corresponding to the relative dominance of one of the three major faculties of the mind. The first class may be called the poetry of imagination or intellect. This class arises out of the "core" of poetry, and thus contains within itself the other two classes. The works of Homer and Sophocles belong here. "Sensibility to the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles; the former, especially, has clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions." 79 But their most important trait, "their incomparable perfection", consists in the harmony and wholeness of their work, qualities indicating the mastery of intellect. Their work represents the integration of the faculties, the disinterested freeplay of mind. In them, the formal conventions of poetry reveal their spirit. The poetry of the affections and the poetry of the senses make up the second and third classes of poetic power, the second being understood to include the third. If the bucolics may be taken as representative of the second class, we see that the poetry of the affections is marked by "sensibility to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery", by "sensual and pathetic images". The bucolic poetry is attractive, but it is in "want of harmony". What this want amounts to is suggested in this sentence. "Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odor of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness, while the poetry of the preceding age [that of Sophocles] was as a meadow-gale of June which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which n

Prose, p. 286.

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endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight." 80 The bucolic form traces a single object, a natural scene, or state of mind, or simply an emotion. It expresses this object intensely, even overwhelming the emotions of the audience; and the strength of this poetry would seem to lie in its capacity for arousing similar emotions to those felt by the poet. Yet, the bucolics suffer from their very intensity and singularity. They perceive and express their subject as a fragment, as a piece of the world extracted from the totality of experience. Thus, they lose "the power of sustaining . . . extreme delight." Their poems may be conceived as "isolated portions", or as "episodes", of the great poem, the "eternal proportions" of which are revealed to the imaginations of Homer and Sophocles.81 Shelley fails to develop an example of the poetry of the senses, which might have helped clarify his conception. But the antithesis of the poetry of imagination is not the poetry of the senses, but Mammon, the principle of self.82 In the ascendancy of Mammon, calculation replaces imagination as the chief faculty of the intellect.83 Poetry becomes corrupted at the core. Shelley finds calculation a "poison", which spreads slowly from the intellect to the emotions and the senses, and leaves the mind torpid.84 80

Prose, p. 286. Prose, p. 287. 82 See Prose, p. 293. "Poetry and the principle of self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world." 83 Shelley distinguishes the processes of imagination and calculation, and assesses their influence on culture. "The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate [my italics] the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics.... But it exceeds all imagination [my italics] to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither [sic] Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed. . . . The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society . . . " Prose, pp. 292-93. 81

84

Prose, p. 286.

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What his image suggests with respect to the content of his criticism is, as sometimes happens in the Defence of Poetry, more interesting than the apparent tone in which it is stated. His comments on the bucolic poets will help us here. They possess an intense singularity, and stress individual emotional states, like the exquisite sweetness Shelley attributes to them. They lack strong "inner organs", the power to trace "all the flowers of the field". They express only "isolated portions" of the great poem. The torpid, calculating poet has even less power than the bucolics. His work is "cold imitation"; he "misunderstands" his form; he has little sensibility to nature.85 His relation to the visionary poet would seem purely accidental; his own poems are the ashes of the great poem, entombed in the anatomies of the calculating principle. The imaginative union of objects in metaphor has become merely an arbitrary sign for bundles of different things brought together only according to convention. The ideal universality of poetic representation (i.e., character, action, and thought) is present only as the costume through which is revealed arbitrary groupings. Poetry is thus inverted during the ascendancy of calculation: what is given to the poet by his milieu inspires his poem. It is this state that Shelley sees as producing didactic verse, and examples of caprice and appetite rather than passion and sensibility. It is the state of poetry decribed by Peacock. Shelley's tone implies that the poetry of calculation does not deserve consideration as poetry; but we must be careful to see that he is actually arguing two different points at once, and that his tone blurs rather than helps his meaning. On the one hand, he 85

"In periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces . . . often the very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines which the writer considers as moral truths and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness with which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. . . . And thus we see that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles I I . . . . " Prose, p. 285.

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is attacking a type of poetry which seems to him to possess qualities of form that are antithetical to the "eternal proportions" of imaginative poems. On the other hand, he is asserting that poetry itself can never be reconciled to the calculating principle. This assertion causes his absolutist tone and leads him to condemn didactic and "imitative" work. Yet, the very notion that poetry continues, in spite of the foreign purposes to which men attempt to put it, undermines the possibility of a purely calculating poetry. Insofar as it is merely didactic or "imitative", verse is not poetry. But the categories are not mutually exclusive; didacticism and "imitation" can exist with poetry, and must be considered as parts, however harmonized, of the organic form of any poem wherein they do exist.88 It appears that the absolute distinction between imagination and calculation operates only when poetry is to be distinguished from scientific or practical discourse. When the distinction refers to the qualities of poems, the principles become contraries within a single system or continuum, broad enough to contain them both. Shelley is clearly expressing his own political and religious prejudices when he condemns the "calculating" poetry of the Restoration as "hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue".87 He distorts the logic of the great poem to conform to his own limited moral opinions.88 This logic maintains that the spirit of poetry is constant, and that any form or "costume" may make spirit actual, though these forms themselves are diverse and changing. Hence, by logic, the "calculating" poetry deserves to be considered just as poetically genuine (if not as "good") a type of formal organization as the imaginative type. The "creative" process of calculation, however, does not reveal the universal in the individual; it, rather, refracts aberraea

They are considered, in other words, formal "defects". See Shelley's commentary on the didacticism and "imitation" of Spenser and others: Prose, p. 283, pp. 290-91. 87 Prose, p. 285. 88 This is Shelley's principle. "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 conceptions which participate in neither." Prose, p. 283.

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tions from a constant norm. The world calculation represents is, typically, a chaos rather than a cosmos; made up of the ugly and undesirable, instead of the lovely and desirable. But these contrasting terms, if understood as descriptions of themes rather than as value-judgments, are basically the same as those employed in the interpretation of Homer's characters. Homer's characters are, at once, "great and lovely impersonations" and symbols of the "peculiar errors" of the age in which they were produced. And the implication is that changing forms as well as a constant spirit are included within the universe of poetry. Imaginative and calculating poetry, therefore, differ only in the amount of spirit their respective forms reveal. This is the real significance of their contrariety, a significance partly obscured by the presence of Shelley's prejudices, but illustrated in his conception of the great poem. We may now summarize the psychological view of the great poem. First, as constituted by actual poems, the great poem reflects three major aspects or kinds of poetry, and includes a fourth kind, which would be in literal terms a non-poetry, but which is better labeled an anti-imaginative poetry. In order, the three major kinds are the poetry of intellect or imagination, the poetry of passion or affection, and the poetry of sense. The poetry of intellect is conceived of as including, as illustrated by Homer and Sophocles, passion and sense, and the poetry of passion includes the poetry of sense, though not that of intellect. The distinctions refer to the faculty allegedly dominant in the creation of poems. But they imply, as well, distinctions of qualities. The poetry of intellect achieves harmony and unity as well as inten89

The Defence of Poetry has nothing constructive to say of the intention and form of satire. Shelley did, however, think Don Juan was the greatest poem of his age, and he recognized self-consciousness on the part of the poet and the sardonic treatment of men and manners as major ingredients of that work. His suggestion that the form of calculating poetry is chaotic (in the Defence of Poetry) is, then, best conceived of as an evaluation of certain kinds of theme, rather than as a value-judgment on the whole type. See "Julian and Maddalo", Poetry, pp. 189-93 (11. 12030 especially), where Maddalo represents Byron, and see the letter to Lord Bryon, March 23, 1820, Julian Ed. X, pp. 191-92.

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sity, while the poetry of the passions achieves only an intense singularity or partiality of both subject-matter and organization. The poetry of the senses is never developed, but I suspect Shelley would have in mind anacreontic verse, emphasizing sheer pleasure in physical sensation. These qualities are conceived of as genuine elements in poetry, as elements of poetic form distinct from what is intended by the poet or felt by an audience, although it is easy to see there is considerable overlapping in these areas. The fourth kind, the poetry of calculation, is the contrary to the poetry of imagination, and thus includes passion and sense as appetite and caprice. Where imagination finds organic unity and harmony in its objects, calculation finds separateness and arbitrariness (or a mere mechanical reproduction of old forms) as qualities of poetic form. The poetry of calculation is the dark side of the great poem, and is developed by Shelley only as hortatory contrast to the poetry of imagination. Second, the great poem is a reflection of every individual poem, and is implied in every utterance within the province of poetry. Intellect, passion, and sense are involved in some degree in the subject-matter and organization of every poetic expression, and every poem is ideally capable of revealing "eternal proportions" by fully realizing its own form. This is to say that "eternal proportions" may be achieved by any actual work. The key lies in the complete control of the imagination which creates its own universe and expresses the potential identity of every part within it and of every part with the whole. As this complete control diminishes, so part-to-part and part-to-whole relationships diminish, until the universe of the poem becomes a disorganized mass, and every act or thought reflected is either arbitrary or repetitious, or both. And just as the great poem is an orderly universe of poetic form as a reflection of the poetry of imagination, so as a reflection of calculation it is a chaos. And it is from this chaos that a poetry of imagination is reborn, just as it is from the chaos of original language that poetic language arises.90 Thus, the great poem is regarded as determining and determined by every actual See Prose, p. 279.

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poetic expression, regarded as in itself both always the same and always changing.91 The major criterion of value suggested by the great poem as an analogue of mental faculties is the criterion of self-knowledge, which appears as a measure of poets and poems throughout Shelley's criticism. The great poem reflects, in other words, in the four major aspects or kinds of poetry distinguished, four cardinal states of mind and four major poetic themes. Shelley never elaborates these themes in anything like the systematic order achieved by his close literary relation, Blake; but, he is essentially describing the same mental universe as Blake, ranging from an imaginatively unified paradise, through innocence and experience, to an analytical Hell, the contrary of the state of imagination.92 Like Blake, Shelley suggests that vestiges of the original condition of unity are found in each of the succeeding states, so that any actual poem, no matter what faculty predominates in its organization, is, in its potential for ideal perfection, "an episode" of the great poem. The criterion of self-knowledge, though expressed by poets in an indefinite number of ways, is thus the same in every poem. We may now proceed to the second part of Shelley's idea of the great poem, the poem as an analogue of history. Transition to this analogy is provided in his compounding of cyclical movement (in describing poetry) with the figure of an unbroken chain, each link itself a cycle. Shelley manages a version of a poetic chain of being, intrinsically cyclical and extrinsically progressive. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable 91

The great poem may be conceived as a hypothetical form of the natural universe, which, for Shelley, was constantly in flux, but whose changes reflected the law of the conservation of energy. Observation of this conception of nature in Shelley led Whitehead to call him a "Newton among poets". See A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925), pp. 128 ff. 92 See Northrop Frye, The Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Modern Library Edition, 1953), "Introduction", p. xxvii for a lucid summary of Blake's idea of the four "levels of human existence". Frye extends this idea to poetry in general in "The Drunken Boat: the Revolutionary Element in Romanticism", in Romanticism Reconsidered. See pp. 3-16.

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of receiving; it is ever still the light of life - the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time. It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation. (Prose, pp. 286-87) 93

The chain, spanning history, becomes in this passage, by a kind of transmutation, a magnet, the symbol of the faculty of imagination. Both chain and magnet connect "the life of all", and are capable of renewing themselves. But as the magnet suggests specifically an intrinsic power to attract, and thus shape a universe of particles around it, the chain suggests an extrinsic power of binding. The chain extends through time to form poetic history. It specifically "descends" through the minds of "many men", and is "attached" or bound to "great minds". We may imagine these great minds as forming the crucial points of linkage in poetic history, while the many minds occupy the circumference of each link, leading into, and away from, the great minds. What Shelley devises is an image for viewing poetry in its total historical development. The great minds pass on the poetry of their own age to succeeding ages, or reformulate the poetry of the past. 94 Actually, the passing on and the reformulation are identical acts, for both are essentially acts of renewal, renewing the "sacred inspiration" that sustains the life of all. The great minds restore poetry to its original principles, which include the potential identity of every individual and the potential identity 93

The source of Shelley's imagery is Plato's Ion. See Shelley's translation, Julian Ed., VII, pp. 238-40. 94 For example, he writes in the Defence: "The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern with the ancient world." And he finds it salient that "Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion of the civilized world." See Prose, p. 289 and p. 291.

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of the individual with the universe. The many minds, the actual development of poetic language and form between links in the chain, are seen in relation to the great minds, as carrying or receiving influence.96 They modify in their own development of form what the next great mind will catch from the last; but, historically, they have "inspired" (which should be kept distinct from "caused") no great revolution of form, no basic turn in the development of conventions. Shelley is attempting to forge an idea of change and development, while keeping clear at the same time the idea that every new age or link in the the chain of poetic history is essentially identical in what he would call poetic spirit. He makes this statement in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound. "The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change. If England were divided into forty republics, each equal in population and extent to Athens, there is no reason to suppose but that, under institutions not more perfect than those of Athens, each would produce philosophers and poets equal to those who (if we except Shakespeare) have never been surpassed." 97 It may be understood that those "not more perfect" institutions would be English rather than Greek, and that the language and form of poetry would be similarly altered. Still, the performance would 95

The concept of potential identity, the "union of irreconcilable things", is perhaps expressed most clearly in Hellas (1822), 11. 792-95: All is contained in each. Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup Is that which has been, or will be, to that Which is - the absent to the present. It is present also, however, in Shelley's ethical formulation of the principle of equality. See the Defence of Poetry, Prose, pp. 288-89, and the "Essay on Christianity", Prose, pp. 207-13. 96 Shelley conceives of this influence both in broad civilizational terms, as in the case of Dante and Milton, and in terms of specific "ages". "There is a similarity between Homer and Hesiod, between Aeschylus and Euripides, between Virgil and Horace, between Dante and Petrarch, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Dryden and Pope; each has a generic resemblance under which their specific distinctions are arranged." Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Poetry, pp. 206-07. 97 Poetry, p. 206.

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be essentially the same as the Greeks, expressing those "eternal proportions" which teach men self-knowledge. The keys to understanding the great poem as an analogue of history are provided first by Shelley's vocabulary in discussing literary history, and second by his identification of the prophetic poet as a creator of religion. The vocabulary is organic. Periods of development are distinguished in terms of birth or infancy, maturity or flourishing, decay or corruption, and finally death or chaos, from which springs a rebirth. The relation of poetry and religion is put this way: "Poets . . . draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and like Janus have a double face of false and true" (Prose, p. 279). Religion is the basic institution of history and so stands as metaphor for the development of poetry. Both religion and poetry are "connate with the origin of man".98 The "great poem", in fact, in its alternation between imagination and calculation, alternates between the imitation of true and false religion. And it follows that at the source of the great poem is a birth of a society, and that every re-birth of poetry involves a social and religious re-birth. These are the variations of history that poetry mirrors. Shelley accounts for them by transmuting the cyclical form of the great poem into a chain extending backwards from the present to the beginning of time, and by associating each link in this great chain with a reappearance of religious spirit. We may allow at this point for his freedom of application, to say nothing of his inaccuracies, in working out the relation between poetry and religion. His chain of history is frequently tangled and mysteriously doubled, and sometimes it seems to dis98

This identification of poetry and religion is also suggested by Shelley's appeal to the Roman idea of vates. He sees the notion of prophetic poetry clearly as a survival from less civilized times - the Roman poetry fails specifically, for instance, in not being original enough. Among other things, this identification demonstrates beyond question the historicalmindedness (whatever its value as history) of Shelley's thinking about poetry. Sidney had used the appeal to vates for authority; Shelley uses it to define the relation of poets to their environments.

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appear entirely, as in what he calls the "dark ages". In the Defence he is able to note only four distinct links in the chain, and two of these, the Hebrew and the Greek, are roughly contemporary. What he is trying to do ultimately, however, is to connect the modern with the ancient world, to formulate a view of Western poetry which will include as kindred, Job, Sophocles, Seneca, Calderon and Byron. And to clarify his attempt in our own minds let us imagine that the cycles of poetry represented in each link of the chain follow the same formula of birth, maturity, decay, and death, and that within each large cycle (each representing a religion) is included an indefinite number of small cycles describing the same pattern, and each representing a period in which the basic religion of the link is reformed. We shall thus see periods of birth, maturity, decay, and death occurring within each phase of a cycle. And, indeed, if we follow Shelley's account of inspiration closely, we shall find these periods within every important poem of each phase. 100 This scheme reiterates Shelley's search for a single set of criteria for describing poetry, while still suggesting the variety of material that needs to be described. Fortunately, this complication of his scheme applies only to his treatment of "modern" poetry. The Hebrew poetry is conceived of as forming a cycle or link in the great chain that is roughly contemporary with the Greek poetry. And his commentary, or lack of it, on the Hebrew poetry is significant primarily as a missed opportunity. Much of what he says of the shift from classical to modern habits of thought and composition could probably have been prepared for by a 09 See, e.g., Prose, p. 288. "It is an error to impute the ignorance of the Dark Ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle connected with the progress of despotism and superstition." ioo p o r instance, Shelley suggests a cyclical movement of sorts is present in composition. "The toil and delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments and an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions - a necessity imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself . . . " (Prose, p. 294).

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comparison of classical with Biblical literature.101 But his history of poetry actually begins with Homer and the "cyclic poets", and only passing mention is given in the Defence to the poetry of the Gospels.102 We may thus pass on to the Greeks, noting simply that Shelley's careerlong bias against the Judaistic Jehovah was curiously accompanied by a deep respect for Moses, David, Solomon, Job, Isaiah and Ecclesiastes, whose poems he calls "astonishing productions".103 At the birth of Greek poetry, Shelley says, were Homer and the "cyclic poets". The "cyclic poets" are never identified, but would probably include Hesiod and the early transcribers of Greek mythology and religion. They are "the delight of infant Greece . . . the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed".104 They teach ethical community, the potential or spiritual identity of all human beings. The characters of Homer, as we have seen, are said to embody "the ideal perfection of his age", and we are not to doubt but that they "awakened an ambition" in their auditors to become their likenesses. Such sympathetic transformation is basic to poetry generally, but its specific connection with Homer (and with Dante and Milton as we shall see later) suggests that at the birth of any cycle, poetic character (as well as action and thought) is directly related to the whole life of man. As Shelley makes clear, this "life" is interpreted more easily in later times as reflecting an "internal nature"; however, he feels that even such internal nature will "communicate itself to the very disguise", and thus resemble Homer's originals. It would seem that it is precisely because Homer's characters are "ideal perfections", reflecting universal man, that they become the source of a civilization. Like gods they include within themselves the 101

See Shelley's comment on Job in the "Essay on the Devil and Devils", Prose, p. 265. Shelley makes some handsome and some grotesque use of mythography in his own work, but his interest in mythography was governed wholly by ethical and technical purposes rather than scholarly ones. 102 Prose, p. 287. He links Job with Aeschylus and Dante as authors of the "highest poetry", see Prose, p. 279. 103 Prose, p. 279. Prose, p. 282.

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circumference of nature, in effect creating their own universe.105 The dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens write during the maturity of the cycle of Greek poetry. Shelley specifies that the Athenian drama produces "a common effect in the representation of the loftiest idealisms of passion and of power".109 This judgment may of course be assimilated with the one on Homer's characters, and a criterion for poetry as a whole may be deduced.107 But we ought to note that the emphasis here is not on "perfection" of character. Instead, it falls on passion and power. We learn self-knowledge, which is what is gained by identifying ourselves with the universal in Homer's characters, through sympathy in the drama with pains and passions, with "pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow".108 Our imaginations are distended, our affections strengthened, our sense of the world which surrounds us sharpened and corrected. In all of these responses there is implied a conception of poetic form distinct from that associated with Homer. The identity of poet and audience has become indirect; the universe in which the characters function more sharply represents a distinction between internal and external nature, between "ideal perfection" in human spirit and the "unfathomable agencies" of the outside world. The Homeric character tends to include all of nature; the Sophoclean character tends to struggle with nature and with himself. The terms Shelley employs in dealing with the birth and maturity of Greek poetry are purposefully similar because he is concerned with developing a single set of criteria for explaining all forms of poetry. There is, moreover, reason for asserting similarity in the fact that the maturity of Greek poetry at Athens was accompanied by the birth of a new form of poem, the drama. 105

It is important to note that Shelley does not conceive of these characters as static simply nor as active simply. They are both the "column" and the "seed" of civilization, both create and reflect their age, create and reflect their "internal type". The universe they create is a metaphor for the universe of the poem, created by the synthetic imagination out of its own materials (the selective process of perception) and according to its own laws (the wholeness, harmony and radiance of expression). 108 Prose, p. 284. 107 See above, pp. 124-25. 108 Prose, p. 285.

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Shelley suggests that this form above all others is the most capable of relating poetry to the life of society, and that its appearance is a sign of the renewal of Greek civilization as initiated in the earlier poetry.109 Yet, it is also clear that the sameness suggested by the notion of renewal is a sameness within difference. The mature Greek poetry reflects or employs fundamentally social conventions, and a concern for manners, leadership, law.110 And while the drama welds (as partly suggested in Shelley's reference to the use of religious institutions) the society into an ethical community, the presence of crime and error, however harmonized with the rest of the play, indicates a new ethical conception and new problems of poetic form. 111 To focus again on character, there is an external world of "unfathomable" or only partly fathomable operations which man must deal with; the very fact that he cannot control these operations, subdue them or cause them simply by an act of will, differentiates him from the human Gods of Homer who seem perfect in their power of action, however "barbarous" this power is. In its mature phase, we might conclude, poetry reflects a balance or tension between desire ("the internal type we would become") and reality. The decay of the cycle of Greek poetry is illustrated in the Defence of Poetry by the bucolics "who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt". 112 Shelley finds their age corrupt. "Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the Macedonian and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece." 113 The "imperfections" of the bucolic writers are connected with their age, the fragmentation of society into isolated or semi-isolated groups, the suggestion of exile, the hint of luxury, all symbolizing for Shelley a singular 109

Prose, p. 285. Shelley does not specify these concerns, but alludes to their relation to drama both in the Defence (Prose, p. 283), and in "A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks" (Prose, pp. 217-18). nl Cf. Prose, p. 285. The Greek drama presents "the internal type of all . . . we would become". 112 Prose, p. 286. 113 Ibid. 110

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impressionism in their performances. He finds that "the bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts and even in manners and institutions" which distinguished the Hellenistic age. Shelley's emphasis on the bucolic poets' lack of universality and harmony seems also in part to refer to the kind of form they chose, lyric and pastoral poetry appearing more closely suited to their specialized audience than either epic or dramatic kinds. But while this poetry was perceived in their time as "fragments and isolated portions", the poetry itself may be recognized, says Shelley, by later audiences as "episodes to that great poem which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world".114 The decadent ethos, like the ethos of maturity or of birth, is a form of the great poem, a hypothetical reflection of life. It is "hypothetical" precisely because the effects of the form cannot be limited to its age, because its fragmentariness is itself a genuine element of the great poem. The bucolic poems are "immortal creations" because they are episodes of the cyclic poem, and may be thought to acquire universality and harmony as a result of this relation, these qualities being potentially in, if not made explicit by, their verse. Yet, in its decadent phase, poetry reflects the sharp disproportion of desire and reality. From the Greek, Shelley moves to the Roman civilization, suggesting that the Greek decline into calculation, presaged in the bucolics, was also the seed-time of Roman poetry. His statement of the transition, sketchy as it is, is interesting. "The same revolutions (as those in Greece) within a narrower sphere had place in ancient Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of nature and to have abstained from creating in measured language 114

Prose, p. 287. The universality of the great poem assumes a universal audience - a succession of generations receiving "ever-new delight" from each of the poem's elements. Historically viewed, there is a progress in response, while psychologically viewed the response is the same.

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. . . anything which might bear a particular relation to their own condition, while it might bear a general one to the universal constitution of the world." 115 Shelley is anticipating his device to sustain the notion of poetry as an unbroken chain, his device of finding the "true poetry of Rome" in its institutions. This mechanical expansion of the term poetry (he consistently in the Defence identifies poetry in a broad sense with imaginative activity in general) leads to an assertion that Time itself is a cyclic poem; and this assertion may serve us as an illustration of the dogmatic hardening his views generally avoid.118 His basic point, however, is commonplace. The Roman poetry imitates the Greek. Shelley's remark that the Roman poetry seeks a "general" relation to "the universal constitution of the world", rather than a particular one, is perhaps the best gloss on what he means by the imperfect saturation of the poetical element in Rome. Horace, Catullus and Ovid "saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece". Virgil, "with a modesty which ill became his genius . . . affected the fame of an imitator, even while he created anew all that he copied". And Lucretius "limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world".117 The reservation in all of these judgments is that there is no distinctively Roman poetry, no distinctive Roman form or ethos. Lucretius, a "creator" in the highest sense, misses the highest poetic distinction because he fails to seek the "certain order" which belongs to poetry and not to life. His vision would seem distinctive had his work informed rather than been informed by science.118 The "general" relation to the Prose, p. 287. Using social history as an analogy of the development of poetry is a suggestive and flexible critical method only so long as neither history nor poetry is dogmatically conceived as illustrating a single already known truth. To find Time a cyclic poem is to reduce history to a form of thought, and seriously impair interpretation. 117 Prose, p. 290. 118 While Shelley's philosophical premises are not strictly idealist, his judgment of Lucretius suggests an opposition to materialism that cannot be ignored. One plausible explanation is that idealism, placing high value on the pattern and process of thought is more directly assimilated with the hypothetical idealism (refracted reflections) of poetry. For Shelley, Plato is unquestionably a poet, Lucretius, at least partly, a scientist. 116

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world achieved by Roman poetry is present both in the Virgillian imitation, which dislocates the Greek ethical vision, and in the Lucretian extension of poetry into science, which dislocates the spirit of poetry by treating poetry as factual discourse. The integral thought of metaphor, the interpénétration of form and spirit in poetic conventions, these basic elements of the medium of poetry would seem antithetical to such dislocation. One logical implication of this, given the importance of the Greek to the Roman poetry, would be that the whole of the Roman poetry constitutes the phase of the death of the Greek cycle. But while hinting at this, Shelley avoids rigid application, trying even to salvage Rome by pointing out the perfection of its republican institutions. And, perhaps, his refusal to employ his scheme of history as a reductive machine with respect to the Roman poets, whose merits were obvious to him, is the best aspect of his whole discussion of Rome. Shelley's curious handling of Rome is followed by his description of the last great link of the chain of poetry, the civilization of Christianity. "At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the cycle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness but that there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived, which copied into the imaginations of men became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts." 119 The "armies" and the "anarchy" present at the fall of Rome in a literal sense are made analogues for the revolutionary state of poetic forms during this period. It is significantly Christian and chivalric forms which are being initiated, and these forms forge a link between the ancient and modern worlds. The bewilderment, which for Shelley lasted until the eleventh century and was not fully cleared away until Dante, symbolizes the infancy of the modern cycle. The connection between the modern and the ancient world is established in "the poetry . . . of Jesus Christ and the mythology 119

Prose, p. 287.

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and institutions of the Celtic conquerors", the latter being the authors of chivalry and, to Shelley, the successors to Rome.120 The Celts are important in that their mythology and manners provide new conditions for the rebirth of poetic spirit, a provision apparently not made ample enough by the Romans, who, Shelley felt, had merely copied the forms of the Greeks. But, it is Christianity which holds the central position in this revolution. Jesus is said to have been "probably" influenced by the Hebrew poetry, an idea absurd in its understatement. Yet, it is precisely through undervaluing the Hebrew that Shelley prepares the way for a very interesting notion. "Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity in its abstract purity became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity." 121 The primary significance of this assertion is not historical but religious. At the same time, however, it serves as a crucial historical instance of the general maxim he probably borrows from Machiavelli: "That no nation or religion can supercede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supercedes." 122 Moreover, in finding Jesus implied in Plato he cuts off the supernatural associations of the Christian religion, and is thus enabled to compare more sharply the divinity of poetry with religious and ethical institutions. He enhances, by his assertion, both the notion that the great poem is historically continuous, every age leading naturally into the next, and the 120 Prose, p. 288. Gibbon clearly identified the conquerors of Rome as Germanic people. It is, perhaps, significant that Shelley seems to write here in competition with Gibbon, who is elsewhere in the Defence of Poetry included as an example of a "mere reasoner" (Prose, p. 292). Wellek has given some possible sources of Shelley's divergence from Gibbon. See Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, II, pp. 127-28. 121 Prose, p. 288. 122 Prose, p. 289. Cf. The Discourses, Third Book, Chap. 1 (and above, pp. 197 ff.). The "maxim" is implied in Machiavelli's "extrinsic means" of restoring the republic to its original principles, though Shelley broadens the republic to the magnitude of civilization.

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notion that poetry is itself radically human in form, origin, and consequence, and thus the essential truth of religion. Shelley's commentary on the abolition of personal slavery and on the religion of love as "celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world" reveals what he takes to be the thematic center of the modern cyclic poem. Love, the ethical basis of Christianity, had "found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the ancients". And it is the tradition of Plato and Jesus which blossoms forth in the "provencal Trouveurs", Petrarch, and Dante, who understand "the secret things of love". These "secret things" are the "sacred emotions" felt in the identification of self with the object of love, and are metaphors for the revelatory experience of the imagination in the creation of or response to poetry. And Shelley finds the manifold implications of love supremely expressed in the "apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise", and in "the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps, he (Dante) feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause".123 Here is the "true" form of the Christian religion, and the chief reason why "the poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown across the stream of time, which unites the modern and the ancient world". Dante's theme, says Shelley, is precisely that of Jesus and Plato, "the virtue and power of love".124 His work, like the Gospels, is a point of origin on the circle of modern poetry, a point at which poetry is returned to its principles. Dante is an encyclopedic poet, summing up the forms of the ancient poetry and introducing the forms of the modern. D a n t e w a s the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation. D a n t e was the first awakener of an 123 Prose, p. 289. Note Shelley's reading of the allegory. Ideas, the ascension to the Supreme Cause, are read as the vehicle for expressing Dante's actual emotional experience - an inversion of normal procedure. A kind of doubling of allegory is involved, so that ideas and action speak for one another. 124 Cf. Shelley's trans, of "The Symposium", Julian Edition, VII. The idea is analyzed in Neville Rogers, Shelley At Work, pp. 44 ff.

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entranced Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. H e was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning, the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as f r o m a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. His words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all of its divine 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 unconceived delight. {Prose, p. 291) Shelley had described the decay and death of the ancient poetry, the loss of harmony and unity in form, by the image of Astraea departing from the earth, the goddess being the last vestige of an original golden age in an age of iron. 125 A s her name suggests, Astraea departs to become a star; and because she is the most loving of goddesses, she becomes (in decorum with other Shelleian goddesses of love) the evening star. In calling Dante Lucifer, the morning star, he thus suggests specifically the rebirth of ancient forms of poetry, the forms that had been fragmented and then scattered at the death of the ancient world. 126 Dante's poetry gathers these forms into a new system, each thought an 125 Prose, p. 286. Astraea was goddess of justice, but she serves Shelley for poetry because her departure signaled, according to his adaptation of the myth of the four ages, the entrance of Mammon, up from the bowels of the earth where he has found gold. The star symbolism here is notably similar to that used in Adotiais and indeed in most of the poems from 1817 on. 126 Calling Dante a religious reformer and a Lucifer should remind us that Shelley consistently found institutional Christianity diametrically opposed to the religious spirit of poets of the Christian era, like Dante, Milton, and himself. He writes in the Defence: "The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form. . . . The religion of ancestral Europe [will] only not utterly be forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius." Prose, p. 290.

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atom related to a new universe. His meaning is infinite in the same sense that a universe is infinite, a single system containing an inexhaustible series of relationships. These relationships are inherent in the great poem itself; but they are also interpreted as analogues for the "peculiar relations", the circumstantial conditions of perception and expression, which obtain for every individual and for every age. The creation of such a poem thus involves as integral elements the creation of a language and the reformation of religion, language and religion (which is taken here to include political and social institutions as well as all branches of learning) constituting the specific formal conditions of poetry. Shelley's description of the highest poetry which may be viewed as a miniature or "actual" version of the great poem, is identical with his understanding of the epic. Dante is "the second epic poet: that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion and political conditions of the age in which he lived and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development". 127 Homer is called the first, and Milton the third, epic poet, and the reappearance of the epic is clearly the key to Shelley's conception of the historical development of poetry. The interval between Dante and Milton marks the flourishing of the modern cycle, a flourishing made pointedly similar in the Defence of Poetry and elsewhere to that of Athens. 128 Harmony and universality, achieved, as in Shakespeare, through "living impersonations of the truth of human passions", return as properties of poetic form. As shown by the development of the drama, the social rights and responsibilities of man become the basic subject matter. Thus, Dante's epic initiates the phase of maturity of the modern cycle, as Homer's initiated the phase of birth (and hence the entire poetry) of the ancient cycle.129 127

Prose, p. 290. He discusses Athens and the Renaissance together in the Defence. Prose, pp. 284-85, and in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Poetry, pp. 205-206. 189 Theoretically every phase of every cycle should have its own epic poet. 129

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The poetry of the Renaissance, Shelley insists, does not repeat the poetry of Athens, any more than the Gospels repeat Homer or Moses. The modern cycle develops along national lines, and the lines established by the modern languages. Thus, in England, Chaucer who "caught" (from Dante) the sacred inspiration, takes the place of Dante, though it was not until the sixteenth century that Modern English emerged and the religion was reformed. 130 Shelley's scheme, however, is not symmetrically chronological. His history is built on the principle that poetry affects and is affected by the climate of religious and political opinion. The relation between Renaissance Europe and Athens is essentially poetical, reflecting a cultural sameness, or sameness of human nature, underlying obvious historical differences. Interestingly enough, one of the chief signs of this sameness is the obstinate refusal of Christian poets to give up the forms of the pagan religion, even though that religion carries no belief.131 It is a sign complementary to that other sign of the modern epic poem: opposition to the established religion. It is by no means accidental to Shelley that "Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support". 132 Shelley tells us that Milton "stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of him". He finds, in other words, the maturity of modern poetry, at least in England, quite shortlived, for he considers the Restoration a period of decay. His critique of the Restoration poetry and society is based partly on his opposition to the political and religious reaction of the period, a reaction he finds attacked by Milton, as indicated by his remarks on the latter's 130 He writes of the age of Shakespeare: "We owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion." Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Poetry, p. 206. 131 Shelley finds the survival of the Greek mythology one of the great achievements of modern poetry. See Prose, p. 291, pp. 292-93. 132 Prose, p. 290. I have italicized "natural" to stress both the contrast between poetry and dogma, and the fact that Shelley took such contrasts as inherently present in the attempt to explain poetic principles.

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133

treatment of Satan. It is based also in part on his perception of the "Calculating principle", which "pervades all forms of dramatic exhibition". He chooses comedy as illustration of this point. "Comedy loses its ideal universality; wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting; it is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret." 134 Taking Shelley's views more liberally than he himself is able to take them, we find here a catalogue of some of the tools used by poets of calculation. Wit, sarcasm, ironic exposure of weakness, and obscenity are, after all, genuine elements of poetry, and rout out for laughter any prejudice, even Shelley's humane one, which tries to exclude them. We should note that in describing this poetry, he has simply extended the logic used in the contrast of Athenian and bucolic poets. Where the former were harmonious and the latter singular in effect, the Renaissance poets express concord and the Restoration poets discord. Their characters are fragments, suffering what was for Shelley a kind of split-consciousness: feelings of self-complacency and malignity towards others, a selflove which is also self-hatred. In Milton's lofty violation of the established codes of politics and religion we have these same ambiguous feelings brought to universal scope in the characters of God and Satan. The selfish complacency of God and the malignant self-hatred of Satan are part of the imaginative truth Milton discovers.135 133

Cf. Defence, Prose, p. 290, and preface to Prometheus Unbound, Poetry, p. 205. Political opposition is here implied in the religious. 134 Prose, p. 285. The figure of the "monster", obscenity, has neat parallels with Milton's famous figure of Death in Book II who, isolated from every other being, devours the brood of Sin forever (Shelley's "corruption of society"). Milton is, of course, a precise model on which to base an attack on the Restoration. 135 gee Prose, p. 290. Shelley's own opposition of Prometheus and Jupiter as contraries who imply one another is obviously descended from Milton. It is unfortunate for historical criticism that Shelley's only detailed inter-

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Shelley does not fully develop the implications of Milton's contempt for the "popular superstition", and the relation of this contempt to his "unworthy" age. He sees Milton as one with the spirit of reformation common to all epic poets, and as writing in "bold neglect of a direct moral purpose", one of the reasons he was able to discover an imaginative truth. He does not make explicit, however, that the death of the Renaissance, or period of the Restoration, would in terms of his own logic involve a scattering of energies and (because poetry continues) a reshaping of these energies into a new form. Death and rebirth are interlocked in this scheme of history; Milton and the Restoration are historically inseparable. Another blind spot in Shelley's vision is his unfortunate confusion or conflation of Restoration and eighteenth century poetry. The domestic drama, which he lumps with the "classical" and heroic, clearly implies a conception of form distinct from that of either the Renaissance or the Restoration. In his own domestic drama, The Cenci (1819), he indicates at least one major aspect of this distinction. "It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered consists." 136 The story of Beatrice does not raise painful emotions and then ' purge" them, or produce, in Shelley's words, "an exalted calm". It produces rather a strange horror and implicitly a strange attraction, which are in turn not purged but anatomized. Restlessness instead of calm constitutes the "end" of his own domestic tragedy; and this, according to the historical scheme, indicates a new conception of society, where private concerns tend to replace public issues, and a new conception of poetic form, where he history of ordinary individuals replaces pretation of Paradise ,ost must be inferred from his poetry. See Milton Wilson's discussion oi contrariety in Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley's Later Poetry, pp. 92 ff., and Harold Bloom's discussion of Shelley's Milton criticism in Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 51-54. 136 preface to The Cenci, Poetry, pp. 276-77.

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that of national heroes. It is quite possible that Shelley's lack of insight into the distinctive work of the eighteenth century (at least in the Defence) is due to his own intimate relation to that age. The Restoration may thus be seen, in terms of the modern cycle, as at once the death of the phase of maturity and the birth, in Milton, of the phase of decay. It may be conjectured that in turn this phase has its infancy during the 1700's and reaches maturity with the contemporaries of Shelley. One need only compare the imagery of Shelley's own lyrics, the heightening of sensation and the transience of vision, with his estimate of the "intensely melodious" bucolic poets, whose work "overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness".137 Such comparison makes clear, I think, the affinity of his own age with what he calls the poetry of decay. And this identification need not be thought to conflict with Shelley's sense of an "awakening" in his time, for, there being no chronological determinism involved, the rebirth of poetic form, this time of an entirely new cycle in competition with that of Milton and Dante and Jesus, is possible at any time. There is certainly reason to believe that Shelley thought of himself as a herald of a new cycle.138 But the logic of his criticism must remain silent on this point, for it holds that the renewal of poetry is potentially ever-present. The phase of decay, then, extends from Milton and the Restoration, when it is born, to Shelley's own time, when it flourishes; and all those who have claimed Romanticism to be a sickness are merely dogmatizing a Romantic view of literature. Character, action, and thought become individualized, reflecting a competitive world where equality of both rights and interests seems natural. In tragedy a kind of casuistry of feeling becomes an essential feature, whether aroused by Milton's Satan or Shelley's Beatrice.139 It is noteworthy that it is Satan rather than 137

It is part of Shelley's recognition of the relation between his own age and that of the exiled bucolic poets' that he models his own Adonais on the laments of Bion and Moschus. 138 Ironically, it was a pirated edition of Queen Mab, which embarrassed him, that became an important book to the new Working-class movement. 139 See Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Poetry, p. 206.

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Adam or the Son that Shelley considers the hero of Paradise Lost, for the elevation of Satan is not simply expressive of religious or anti-religious doctrine, but symbolic of his whole view of poetry. Milton is conceived of as the sourcebook, as it were, of all Romantic poets; and the reading of Satan as hero is a symbol of the specific way Shelley took his own age and his own work. The rebellious hero of superior energy, who turns destiny at least partially to his own purposes, is indeed kin to the exiled prophetic poet who hopes to inspire his age. The full import of Shelley's view of poetry can be understood and acknowledged only when, as here, it is expressed to the full extent of its limitations. Yet, the irony of this is a sign of health. He does not view the poets of his age as the epigoni of history. Instead, he makes historical awareness a tool for clarifying the special conditions under which the poets of his age must work.

V

In his view of poesis, of poetic language and representation, Shelley tries to accommodate to one another "making" and "seeing", form and significance. These are the contraries within the product and process of poetry that his idea of the great poem is meant to harmonize; and the harmony he sees there is visionary. That is to say, the great poem is a harmony that must be imagined to be perceived: it is the ideal perfection of any individual poem, the completeness of imagination; it is also the ideal perfection of the history of poetry, the radiance through which a literarycultural environment works on the individual poet. It is vital to grasp the dualism of this visionary perfection because it is by constructing two perspectives which are at the same time distinct and mutually supporting that Shelley avoids the emptiness that often results from such visionary abstraction. He is able to define poetic form, for example, by finding its cause both in the play of imagination and in the cultural "endowment of the age"; for he makes clear by analysis that the process of play and the process of endowment are really the same

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actions seen from opposed points of view. They are both processes of relationship, of assimilation and integration, and are intelligible only if both partners of the relationship (the mind and its object, the poet and his language, the individual and his age) are capable of acting on one another. Given this sameness of principle in acting, the individual imagination and the poet's environment become analogous though distinct agencies in the production of poetic form, and representative of some common human spirit which poetic forms embody. Poetry is one thing, yet, its source and manifestation are always plural. It is for this reason that the significance of a poem is never separable from its formal properties, and that these properties themselves reveal meaning. In a perfect world there would be no distinction between form and significance, between the imagination and history. The world in which the great poem needs to be imagined, however, is to Shelley imperfect. A n d it is mainly with the imperfect materials of introspection and literary history that his criticism deals. In these materials he sees that it is man who stands at the center of literary experience, man as "pre-eminently an imaginative being", but man also as the actor and patient of history, struggling with and being defeated by the moral and physical conditions of his existence. The great poem is the stereoscope for this vision, helping us to see together and as essentially alike the Homeric hero (himself nearly all imagination) and the Sicilian shepherd (nearly all pathos), the struggling King Lear and the defeated poet, Adonais. It provides us with a view of human character as the "intertexture" of nature and condition, motive and destiny, and establishes in the gradations of this intertexture a viable system of poetic conventions or types. The chief literary source of these images of man to Shelley is the epic poem. Homer, the writers of the Gospels, Dante, Milton are his heroes of revolution; they define man for their own time, what he has been and will become, and in so doing reveal glimpses of what he always is. Without the evidence of the epic poets, the great poem is unimaginable. Shelley's idea of the great poem, in other words, is a metaphor

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of his own perceptions of actual poetry, the radiant completeness of his discoveries about the conditions under which poets work and about the effects of this work on the cultural environment he knew. It is certainly unfortunate that he does not say more about language and representation, but what he does say affords a firm basis in observation for his deeper psychological and historical insights. If the luminosity of the great poem is somewhat unearthly, it is because the words and objects of literature are themselves too dense to transmit a much sharper light.

III.

POEMA

I Shelley's criticism provides us with only a few examples of his interest in literary technique. He uses the prefaces to his poems primarily to defend their themes, his reviews largely to comment on social issues, and his Defence of Poetry to define the general principles of art in an intellectual and social setting expressive of empiricism in science and utilitarianism in politics. His interest in technique and his ideas about the kinds of effects poetry achieves must be inferred in large part from his own practice. Generally, this practice affirms that Shelley believes in an idea of art as an experiment in style as well as in theme, and that his own stylistic experimentation implies a number of interesting ideas about the formal qualities of poems. Starting from his broad classification of poems into the three traditional types, epic, drama, and lyric, we shall trace in this chapter what Shelley's own work tells us about the formal and stylistic principles he seems to have employed. One of the most important of these is his attempt to merge traditional stories and poetic forms with highly refined patterns of imagery, a merging which, in its most successful appearances, leads to emotional satisfaction of a highly intellectual sort. Pleasure and instruction tend to be compounded in his thinking into the joy of self-knowledge, which he takes to be the fundamental end of all poetry.1 1

In the Defence of Poetry Shelley maintains that "in the drama there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and selfrespect". That this self-knowledge, whether revealing "good" or "evil", is joyful is implied in his linking of the tragic emotions ("sorrow, terror, anguish, and despair") with the form of "highest pleasure". Moreover, he

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To set forth this conception of effects more clearly, let us examine his summary of "the functions of the poetical faculty". "The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order, which may be called the beautiful and the good." 2 Pleasure and instruction are ingredients of both aspects of the function of poetry. Poetry provides the reader with "new materials" of knowledge in the sense that it "creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration".3 And the order poetry creates may be recognized as "the beautiful and the good", a recognition which suggests that poetic instruction is essentially contemplative. The same materials and order arouse pleasure in that they "create a being within our being", or the contemplative model of all that the reader "loves, admires, and would become".4 Instruction and pleasure are thus relevant to the individual spectator or reader, but their relevance is essentially contemplative, and is determined, one might conclude, by the communication to the reader of heightened states of awareness. The key to such feelings and conceptions in Shelley's summary lies in his emphasis on activity. As poetry itself creates "new materials", so, also, it "engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange" the new materials it creates. The creative activity of the poet would appear to inspire creative activity in the reader. This is probably the significance of his citing "power", as well as knowledge and pleasure, as one of the objects of poetry. In another place in the Defence, as we have seen, he makes clear what the nature of this power is. "Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and asfinds the great poem "a fountain overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight". This clearly suggests the merging of pleasure and instruction in the effects of poems. See Prose, pp. 285, 292, 291. 2 Prose, p. 293. 3 Prose, p. 295. 4 Prose, pp. 295, 285.

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similating to their own nature all other thoughts and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food." 5 Here, pleasure and instruction are merged in the new materials and order produced by imaginative power, a power which exists in the source of poetry, the free-play of the poet's mind, and in the goal, in the imaginative recognition of form by the reader. The joy of self-knowledge, which unites pleasure and instruction, means, fundamentally, the participation in the attracting and assimilating process of the imagination. The reader reproduces the creative process of the poet.6 Now, Shelley makes clear that the relation between poet and reader is governed not only by the fact that they possess the same mental faculties, but also by their common relation to a medium. The creative process does not take place in a vacuum, but in a context of words and forms which reflect the time, place, and milieu of the poet. The relevance of words and forms is not restricted to these categories, for, when they are organized poetically, they become idealisms rather than copies of their age. Yet, even as idealisms, words and forms control the effects of poetry.7 They are the materials and the order to which the reader responds, or in which he participates. The agency of the effects of poetry is, therefore, not simply the imaginative process shared by the poet and his reader, but also the idealisms of poetry themselves. In addition to their connections with the particular powers of the poet and the particular conditions of his milieu, the idealisms of poetry are related to generic types: the lyric, the drama, the 5

Prose, p. 283. In the preface to The Revolt of Islam Shelley assumes the establishing of this relation to be the "business of the poet". See Poetry, p. 33. 7 This control, of course, is related directly to the poet's imaginative power - but a power to employ words and forms. H e writes: "How far I shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of Poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom, is that which . . . I expect to be taught by the effect which I shall produce upon those whom I now address." Poetry, p. 35. The same emphasis on words and forms leads him to write in the Defence of Poetry: "Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet." Prose, p. 280. 6

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epic. In the Defence of Poetry Shelley seems to distinguish each of these types according to the intention of the poet and the problem of selection each intention entails. The dramatic poet selects "the brightest rays of human nature" in order to reveal, through the prismatic mirroring of his medium, "living impersonations of the truth of human passions".8 The lyric poet, on the other hand, is pictured as "a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why".9 Here, the poet's mood creates or selects the materials of representation, and his aim is simply the creation of pleasure through the expression of his mood. Shelley's description of the epic or visionary poet basically combines the contrasting intentions and selecting principles behind the drama and the lyric. The "laws of epic truth . . . by which series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind" are, essentially, an extension of the selecting principle of the drama.10 They simply provide a broad, civilizational framework for the revelation of "the truth of human passions". Yet, Dante's visionary Vita Nuova is described as "the idealized history of that period and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love", and the Paradiso is called "a perpetual hymn of everlasting love".11 In these works the intention and selecting principles of the epic or visionary poem are joined with those of the lyric. The significance of Shelley's recognition of generic types for 8

Prose, p. 285. Prose, p. 282. The failure to see that Shelley is only describing the lyric poet here has led Wellek, among others, to find the nightingale image utterly out of keeping with his emphasis in the rest of the Defence on the moral function of poetry. The critics forget that Shelley specifies that the relation between poetry and morality is indirect, and contingent upon the exercise of imagination, not upon the intention of the poet per se. See Prose, pp. 282-83 and Wellek, II, p. 125. 10 Prose, p. 290. 11 Prose, p. 289. 9

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his conception of the effects of poetry is twofold. First, it means that effects are achieved in different ways. In the lyric the reader recreates the poet's emotion in terms of the objects selected by that emotion. In the drama the reader responds to "living impersonations", and to the universal humanity they represent. The response to the drama is much less circumscribed. Second, it means that effects may be traced to the formal requirements of poetry, to the medium of the poet's intention and selection. In the lyric these requirements are generally fulfilled by the imagery selected to communicate emotion, imagery reflecting the process of the poet's thought. 12 In the drama the formal requirements are generally fulfilled by the story or narrative, which reflects the passionate conflicts of characters who are conceived of as true-likenesses. 13 The specific evaluation of poems in terms of their effects involves for Shelley evaluation of imagery and narrative.14 Because visionary or epic poems essentially combine the principles of the lyric and the drama, there are no special formal requirements connected with them. But the visionary poem is clearly the central form of literature to Shelley, and comprehends the other forms in the same way the great poem comprehends the language and objects of poetry generally. It comprehends lyric structure in organizing incident, character, and thought as

12 Shelley connects the "intensely melodious" poetry of the bucolics with their sensibility to "natural scenery". In commenting on the verse of the provençal trouveurs he writes: "it is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of the beauty which we contemplate". Imagery is thus the chief medium of response to lyric poetry (if we consider the objects rather than the means of representation). See Prose, p. 236 and p. 289. 13 See, e.g., the preface to The Cenci, Poetry, pp. 276-77, and above, pp. 120-22. 14 There is little specific evaluation in the Defence of Poetry, perhaps, because Shelley planned a second part to that essay, which would have had for its object "an application of these principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry and a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and opinions and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty". Prose, p. 296. Shelley's prefaces, reviews, and poems, however, provide sufficient evidence of his critical concern for the formal requirements of imagery and narrative.

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representations of moral and intellectual states of being.15 The emphasis here falls on the pattern or system of imagery developed in connection with the poet's intention. The visionary poem comprehends dramatic structure in tracing the process of emotional and intellectual struggle, as exemplified in the ascent, struggle, and collapse of the poet's vision which mark the form of Shelley's "Ode to Liberty." 18 The emphasis here falls on narrative progression or movement developed in connection with the verisimilitude of the subject. Indeed, the fact of this comprehension may be seen as the immediate source of Shelley's lack of sustained interest in genres as such. If lyric and dramatic forms are both contained in the visionary poem, there is no need to treat them as isolated classes within poetry. A single set of criteria will do for all types of poem. In Shelley's prefaces and reviews, he shows a regular interest in the moral meanings or themes of poetry. The moral and intellectual condition of his own time comes in for direct comment in almost every one of these writings. But this thematic interest does not preclude his taking account of action and plot, his seeing literary works as stories as well as patterns of imagery implying moral meaning. He conceives of poetic form as an ideal reflection of human nature, the central feature of which is character.17 And the revelation of character is accomplished equally by imagery and narrative.

II

One must conclude from reading Shelley's verse that his conception of imagery was much more complex than his prose statements make out. Yet, we might take his comment to Godwin on his own special powers, as a basic description of the principles underlying his use of images. His special powers are "to appre15

See, for example, the preface to Alastor, where Shelley calls his poem "allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind". Poetry, p. 14. 16 See below, pp. 181-82. 17 See Prose, p. 284, and above, pp. 132 ff.

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hend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole".18 As Professor O'Malley has stated it: "this . . . summarizes his two essential, complementary aims as a psychological and philosophical (or religious or mythmaking) poet - to record on the one hand delicately discriminated sensory, emotional, and moral perceptions; and on the other to comprehend even the finest, least common observations and insights within a synthesis of human awareness." 19 It is part of what Shelley means when he defines the imagination as "the perception of the value of . . . quantities (thoughts, objects of thought) both separately and as a whole",20 and when he calls the imagination, following Bacon, "the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge", and the faculty that perceives "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world." 21 Imagery serves, in other words, the philosophical and religious purpose of "seeing" unique individuals in the general mass of experience, and of "making" a single intelligible body out of diffused and various individuals. The single Form that dominates experience, a Form Shelley usually calls habit, becomes a multiplicity of individual forms; and it is from such multiplicity that the poet builds his pattern of radical unity, where things are valued "both separately and as a whole". When we understand "seeing" and "making" as complementary aims, we understand better the lines in Epipsychidiort where the division of "pleasure, love, and thought" does not consume them; instead, "each part exceeds the whole". Such division creates "minute particulars", or, in Shelley's phrase, "an atom 18

Letter dated Dec. 11, 1817, in Poetry, p. 158. Glenn O'Malley, Shelley and Synesthesia, p. 174. My purpose in this section is to discuss some of the theoretical implications of Shelley's technique, and I have relied heavily on Professor O'Malley's interpretation of that technique - the ablest interpretation I know. 2 ° Prose, p. 276. 21 Prose, pp. 278, 279. O'Malley suggests that Shelley's practice reveals a fusion of his ideas of metaphorical language with the notion of the physico-spiritual analogy of the senses. See Shelley and Synesthesia, p. 17. 19

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of the eternal". These parts are valued for themselves; yet, it is easy to see that discriminating them also makes possible a kind of total vision, an expanded awareness of the single Form that life wears or spirit creates. There are multiple relations between his "analytical" tendency in image-making, and his attempt to construct comprehensive designs both in individual passages and in whole poems. His practice points toward ways of harmonizing rather than dividing such categories as matter and mind, time and eternity.22 In his statements about imagery, Shelley's concern is mainly with sources and general function. In the Preface to Prometheus Unbound he finds the function of imagery is "to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence".23 The imagery of Rosalind and Helen (1818), according to the Advertisement, is to inspire an "ideal melancholy", the state of mind attributed to the poet during composition.24 And in that poem even the irregularity of the meter is traced to the ebb and flow of emotion in the poet. In Chapter One I tried to make clear that the notion of "idealism" meant something more than a simple picture of thought. As evidenced by poems like the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc, it means as well an arrangement of sensory phenomena so that the object perceived and the act of perceiving it interpenetrate. The process of perception is as important to the poetic image as the content. From this point of view both the "ideal melancholy" of Rosalind and Helen and the "moral excellence" of Prometheus Unbound are states of mind that are also processes of selecting and organizing sensory details. And perhaps the main function of imagery to Shelley is to engage the reader in these processes. Rosalind and Helen, a sentimental tale made out of the back22

An opposite view, emphasizing Shelley's failure to harmonize these categories (a view that overlooks, I think, important elements of his poetic style), is presented in R. H. Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, Chapter Four, passim, and Milton Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry, pp. 12326 especially. 23 Poetry, p. 207. 24 Poetry, p. 167.

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washes of The Revolt of Islam, illustrates the process of ideal melancholy rather too uncomfortably. But the esthetic of relaxed lyricism it implies is balanced in Shelley's thought by the idea of dramatic fitness. He writes in the Preface to The Cenci: "In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion. It is thus that the most remote and the most familiar imagery may alike be fit for dramatic purposes when employed in the illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels to the apprehension that which is lofty. . . ." 2 5 The development and illustration of passion by images entails an idea of the appropriateness of speech to character, whose feelings are revealed by the way his mind works. The "natural" language of strong feeling is identified primarily by its manner and not its content. In addition, Shelley suggests that the imagery embodies feeling, that the familiar and the remote in content, for example, are symbolic forms of experience. They are not only vivid pictures of life, but also "idealisms" communicating a pattern of experience or meaning. The Cenci often suffers from Shelley's failure to carry out this principle. For example, Count Cenci is less effective than Jupiter, whom he resembles, not because his story is taken from "sad reality" rather than myth, nor even because his story requires a more "realistic" response. He is less effective because the process of radical evil his speech and action describe and embody tends to be self-contradictory, incompletely imagined: his icy rationality and clear sight into what makes other people morally and psychologically vulnerable conflict with the melodramatic bloodlust he frequently expresses. Shelley, on the other hand, does not spoil Jupiter by making him appear less than majestic. When Jupiter drinks to celebrate his impending victory over man's spirit (which turns out to be a delusion), he says: Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins The soul of joy, ye ever-living Gods, 25

Poetry, p. 277.

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Till exultation burst in one wide voice Like music from Elysian winds. (Ill, i, 30-33)

When Cenci drinks to firm himself up, as it were, his address to the wine is sheer sensationalism: "As if thou wert indeed my children's blood/Which I did thirst to drink" (I, iii, 76-77). Jupiter's vein-circling nectar embodies the systematic diffusion of moral and intellectual error connected with his character and reign. Cenci's charm-working wine confuses the workings of his sadism with simple drunkenness; and this image is incapable of satisfying his "other" character, that marked by highly conscious and complicated forms of behavior. If the dramatic imagination is to "assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion", then it must work by satisfying formal and descriptive needs, the requirements of poetry and the requirements of life. In Shelley's view, the "idealism" harmonizes figurative expression with actual observation. This seems to be the burden of Rousseau's contrast in "The Triumph of Life" of his method of writing with that of "the great bards of elder time": their living melody Tempers its contagion to the vein 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.

01. 274-81) The perfection of form, which is to Shelley a "living melody" tempers or harmonizes with the circumstances of life: satisfies the actual without loss of intelligible form. Rousseau confesses to a poetics of thorough self-expression, and his writing leads back into the actual emotion that prompted it. His personal confession is a form of action, and while having strong claim to reality appears to be both personally and poetically self-defeating. The attempt to harmonize figures of imagination with actual observations is present in nearly all of Shelley's later verse. As one might expect in a prophetic poet who claims participation in

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his themes, the attempt is often part of Ms struggle to resolve ethical and metaphysical or religious difficulties in his subjects. It seems to have been of vital importance to him that imaginative figures be as naturalistic as possible, that they convey psychological information about the poet's experience. The figure of inspiration and its collapse in the "Ode to Liberty" provides a good example.26 In the first stanza he pictures his soul rising like an eagle "in the rapid plumes of song . . . hovering in verse". He is wrapt (or rapt) by the Spirit's whirlwind and enlightened by "the ray / Of the remotest sphere of living flame". The image is too detailed, the motifs of light, song, and flight too emphatic, to be dismissed as "simply" conventional or traditional. His convention is rather a kind of psychological realism. Inspiration is a morning image, and at the end of the poem the night of withdrawn spirit is suggested in the figure of a dying swan: "As a brief insect dies with dying day / My song, its pinions disarrayed of might, / Drooped." In addition to these contrary figures for inspiration and its collapse, there is an association throughout the poem of light, song, and flight with Liberty. "A glorious people vibrated again / The lightning of the nations: Liberty . . . gleamed." He is not trying to "clothe" an abstraction so much as to "realize" a state of expanded awareness (which is surely one of his meanings for Liberty) through a merging of distinct descriptive details, like light, sound, and flight. These details reappear in association and in various forms whenever "Liberty" appears in the historical survey of civilization presented in the Ode. In these lines he begins his summary and appeal: Come thou, but lead out of the inmost cave Of man's deep spirit, as the morning-star Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave, Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame. (11. 256-60)

Liberty as the morning-star, one of those remote spheres of living flame whose light has been associated with the deep voice of in26

Poetry, pp. 603-10.

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spiration, is asked now to light the way for Wisdom, which is itself sun-like, and whose chariot-flight is experienced as the sound of winged fire. One can be uncertain of the success of this imagery without ignoring the fact that the material association of these descriptive details is being used to suggest a resolution of the political and moral theme: how to make Liberty a blessing and permanent reality for man. The image of inspiration is designed literally to make clear vision possible, to communicate the necessity of heeding an interior voice. A similar fusion of figurative and descriptive material occurs in Adonais, and a failure to see this process clearly has led to much misunderstanding of the poem.27 The great burden of Adonais is to identify the dead poet with the One, his mother Urania, who is also symbolized as Venus, the morning and evening star. The descriptive form of this theme is the equation of the dead poet's body, dreams, and poems with unextinguished life: flowers, stars, and heavenly music. The comprehension of these multiple forms in the single form of the poet is symbolic of his union with eternity or the One. He is the expression of divinity. The same symbolism works to identify the speaker of the poem, both in his own person and in the stylized projection of himself as mourner. The special mourner receives four stanzas, an unusually long treatment of a simple pastoral convention. No doubt, Shelley uses the lines to confess, Rousseau-like, his own special suffering. Yet, it is precisely the fusion of the convention with the confession that makes the lines work, that charges them with a meaning that illuminates the meaning of the whole poem. The mourner is an example of death-in-life (Adonais joins the living dead), a worshipper of Urania who has too little poetic power of his own to be effectual, one whom Urania, herself, cannot identify (1. 303). His phantom-life is precisely contrary to the real eternity the dead Adonais has achieved: hence, the iconography of stanza 33 is built out of the very motifs (although now subdued and 27

See O'Malley, Shelley and Synesthesia, for a summary of critical "problems" and opinions, and an illuminating analysis of the poem: Chapter Five.

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emphasizing relative failure) that symbolize the union of Adonais and the One: His head was bound with pansies overblown And faded violets, white and pied, and blue; And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew, Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew He came the last, neglected and apart; A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.

Shelley works out the mountain shepherd's disguise carefully. The flowers are "overblown" and "fading", and thus not "incarnations of the stars" (1. 174) as are the flowers strewn on the grave of Adonais. His "light" spear is encircled by "dark ivytresses", and if this is an allusion to the mourner's discipleship to Dionysus, it is to the mild, solitary, and sacrificial aspects of the god. The mourner's "song" here is reduced to the vibration of his grief: he is one "who in another's fate now wept his own, / As in the accents of an unknown land / He sung new sorrow" (11. 300-02). The fading flowers, the muffled song, the shade implied in "the forest's noonday dew", are all weak or vestigial forms of those symbols of Adonais's regeneration. The irony of this weakness that implies a secret strength (an appropriate irony because moral regeneration in the poem depends on the recognition that our grief at the poet's death distorts the truth of his immortal nature) is clinched by the image of the stricken deer. The image inverts the fate of Adonais, who has not been the object of a hunt, but has been a hunter victimized by the subhuman. 28 The conventional figure of the mourner is not merely a vehicle of Shelley's self-pity, but an idealism fully integrated with the structure and meaning of the whole poem. In stanza 47 of Adonais Shelley achieves this kind of integration by building an intellectual figure out of the material of flowerstar-song analogy. 28

For Adonais as victimized hunter, see stanzas 17, 27, and 36.

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W h o mourns for Adonais? Oh, c o m e forth F o n d wretch! and k n o w thyself and him aright. Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth; A s f r o m a centre, dart they spirit's light B e y o n d all worlds, until its spacious might Satiate the void circumference: then shrink E v e n to a point within our day and night; A n d keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink W h e n h o p e has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.

The analogy is broken down into generic form, in keeping with the abstractness of the rhetorical appeal. Most simply, the star motif becomes "light". Hints of the flower and song motifs appear in the injunctions to "clasp . . . the pendulous Earth", to "dart", and to "shrink / Even to a point" (all attenuations of the flower motif); and in the description of the going out of spirit as the expression of the "panting soul" (a vestige of song). Underlying all of the motifs is the symbolism of Urania, who is Venus-light, a Benediction ("most musical of mourners"), and a nourishing Beauty ("in which all things work and move").29 The "spirit's light" of the mourner, to whom the lines are addressed, is ultimately a reflection of Uranian love, expressed in stars, flowers, and song. Such love identifies the mourner with the great power of Urania, although here, as in the earlier stanzas on the mourning mountain shepherd, the identification is subtle and skillfully attenuated. The skill of the subtlety is explained by the context. Stanza 47 is midway between the recognition (stanza 42) that Adonais is "made one with Nature", and the climactic assertion (stanza 52) that "The One remains", that the human condition itself, especially as represented in the mourning poet, has an ultimate bond with the heavenly (Uranian Venus) light of eternity. Stanza 47 marks a turning of attention away from the enthroned Vesper, Adonais (stanza 46), to the mortal souls who ought to see Adonais as an example. The situation demands an "invented" figure, one that will retain touch with the symbols of Adonais's regeneration, but will place the act of regeneration within the condition 29

The great powers of Urania are summarized in stanza 54. O'Malley's discussion in Shelley and Synesthesia, pp. 137-38.

See

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of mortal power. In short, the mourner's regeneration depends on an intellectual recognition nourished by the imagination and sustained by love. The "invented" figure is the geometric pattern of centercircumference; and "spirit's light" is an abstract image of the imagination. The unstated meaning of the pattern is that center and circumference are the same; they imply one another in spite of all the gigantic difference between the panting soul of mortality and "that Power . . . Which wields the world with neverwearied love, / Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above" (11. 377-78). The poet's light mirrors the workings of this power in his quest to know Adonais and himself aright. His spirit's "spacious might" which feeds the void is precisely analogous to "the burning fountain" and "the fire for which all thirst". Moreover, the "point within our day and night", which appears superficially abstract and vague in import, actually describes the great power as it appears to mortal vision, describes Vesper, the evening star and eternal home of Adonais. Shelley's "invented" description of the process of self-knowledge, then, is fused with the basic symbolism of the poem. And we can only suppose from his practice in Adonais that he considered imagery a form of communication in which a fusion of figurative and descriptive expression works to harmonize physical with moral or metaphysical levels of awareness. Shelley's commentary on the sources of imagery reveals his inclination towards a poetry that fuses physical with moral awareness. He writes in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound: "Poetry is a mimetic art. It creates, but it creates by combination and representation. Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them: one great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study." 30 Images are not records of the unapparent 30

Poetry, p. 206.

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(although they can "strip the film of familiarity"), but analogies that satisfy formal and descriptive needs. He views mimesis as a process of prismatic mirroring, where portions of things are cast into a pattern of true-likenesses, this pattern, or spectrum, itself having analogous relationship to "the mind of man" or "nature". The problem of mimesis is in the distinction between "natural" experience and the "study" of authors. Shelley tries to deal with the fact that literature is a genuine source of imagery while retaining emphasis on the autonomy of the poet. He says that a great poet is "a masterpiece of nature", a metaphor that conveniently disposes of the dilemma of "originality". Literature and life are equally sources of those "portions" that "new" poetry combines into wholes. The newness of imagery is thus at once radical and relative. It is radical in the degree to which the new poet asserts his autonomy in building idealisms, or satisfying formal needs. But it is relative in that the new poet must adjust his literary sources to "the contemporary condition". He must balance inventiveness with veri-similitude, and find a technique for fusing formal beauty with descriptive accuracy.31 The songs of the Fourth and Sixth Spirits in Act I of Prometheus Unbound give us some insight into Shelley's thinking about poetic analogy, and how the poet makes use of sources. Additionally, they illustrate his statement in the Preface that the imagery of the poem is drawn "from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed".32 The Fourth Spirit sings: On a poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept; N o r seeks nor finds h e mortal blisses, But feeds o n the aereal kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. H e will watch f r o m d a w n to g l o o m 31

Shelley wrote to Medwin, April 16, 1820: "Strictly, I imagine every expression in a poem ought to be in itself an intelligible picture." From Letters, ed. by F. L. Jones, II, p. 184. 32 Poetry, p. 205.

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The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality! One of these awakened me, And I sped to succour thee. (11. 737-51)

The merging of intellectual and sensible forms provides not only the subject of the Spirit's song but an identification of spiritual awareness as well. Each of the first three sentences reflects the blending of distinct levels of awareness or consciousness, which the fourth sentence defines as the process of creating "nurslings of immortality". These are emblems of mental typology, forms of order produced out of what Wordsworth calls "wise passiveness". That they are "more real than living man" suggests an irony of image-making, where the created form is both the object of the poet's love and care and something permanently different from him. The Spirit, awakened by one of the nurslings, comes to comfort Prometheus who is, ironically, the giver of the power of art to man.33 This irony, however, results from a perception of different conditions of being, and the Titan comprehends both, being both in nature and above it. The poet, on the other hand, can transcend ordinary, natural perception only by means of inwardness. He reaches a state of heightened awareness not by asserting his own identity, but by assuming a kind of complete physical openness. He sees an identity between distinct things: between the yellow bees and shapes of his thought (which is a wilderness), the lake-reflected sun and the dream-reflected spirit.34 He affirms the natural world and its limitations (he 33

Prometheus's response to the comforting spirits reflects the fact that their comforting is unproductive. "How fair these airborne shapes! And yet I feel / Most vain all hope but love" (I, pp. 807-08). 34 In Act m a similar situation is described in Prometheus's speech on the creative life associated with his cave and grove. There, "the gathered rays which are reality", are cast from the mind and suggest the unified light or spiritual community behind the phenomenal variety of things. See III, iii, pp. 6-64.

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neither seeks nor finds "mortal blisses") by rejecting the restrictive consciousness of himself as observer. And the merging of external nature with the operations of the human mind is the record of this innocence. The song of the Sixth Spirit is a brief allegory that reflects the inversion of values that defines the reign of Jupiter, and reveals, in addition, the precision of Shelley's handling of tenuous material. Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing: It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air, But treads with lulling footstep, and fans with silent wing The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear; Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of aereal joy, and call the monster, Love, And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he w h o m now we greet.

The psychological insight that desolation is intricately connected with hopes, that it works through a "false repose", and that it is known by means of an opposition between sleeping and waking life, is finely rendered in the sustained image of the angel or "daemon". The source of the image is literary; it is based on the description of Love in Agathon's speech in The Symposium.35 Shelley has clearly "confused" Desolation with "the monster, Love" (a phrase which neatly puns on the English word for the Greek "daemon"). The verbal and psychological "confusion" points to the moral confusion of Jupiter's reign, and thus to Shelley's deliberate mastering of his source, making it descriptive of his own psychological observations. Even the "Platonic" word, "shadow", is consistent with his context in Act I where men pursue "shadows idle of unreal good". Here, it refers primarily to man's consciousness of his dream of Desolation, a consciousness suggesting the fragility of hope. To chance a generalization from these songs, we can say that the often-remarked tenuousness of Shelley's subject-matter is the deliberate medium of his larger thematic and structural aims. 35

See the discussion of this source and Shelley's applications of it in Neville Rogers, Shelley At Work, pp. 48 ff.

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The description of abundant spiritual life and rarefied physical phenomena in Prometheus Unbound is part of his attempt to focus on human consciousness, and to suggest that the state of expanded consciousness he called love could be made the basis for ethical reform. His artistic problem was the recreation of unfamiliar things and processes of thought; and he sought to make these things and processes clear by employing large, symbolic patterns, such as the very opposition of Prometheus and Jupiter, as the structural principles of his imagery. The reader, by exercising his imagination in responding to the imagery, would become familiar physically and morally with the full perceptiveness of the state of love. Interestingly, this conception of love is essentially esthetic. It implies our awareness of the manifold unity underlying the various descriptive motifs of the verse. Mary Shelley, in her Note to Prometheus Unbound, records a comment of her husband's that demonstrates his view of the architectonic function of imagery. In the Greek Shakespeare, Sophocles, we find the image . . . 'Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought.' If the words 'odous' and 'pianos' had not been used, the line might have been explained in a metaphorical instead of absolute sense, as we say 'Ways and means', and 'wanderings' for error and confusion. But they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet; and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert, or roams from city to city - as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse, was destined to wander, blind and asking charity. What a picture does this line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface. 36

Mary Shelley is correct in noting that this shows "at once the critical subtlety of Shelley's mind". The reading given of the line of Sophocles (however vague his use of the term "metaphorical" is) indicates clearly that to Shelley, allegorical implication is not an ideological function, or 38

Poetry, p. 273.

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a simple translation of figure into sense. He sees a "world within a world", an imaginative identification which is just in all particulars: that the mind is not presented simply by Sophocles in terms of the external universe, but literally becomes the universe, possessing its form, its movement, its obstacles. We might wish to call this kind of identification, following Dante, anagogy, or simply metaphor itself; the label does not matter, really, as long as we see that Shelley views the image as an order of being in its own right, which shapes the emotion it carries. Nature and the mind are analogues for one another not because the poet wishes to be factually accurate, or makes use of poetic licence, but because the words and pictures suggested by the words have the quality of imaginative, formal, truth about them. The struggle to perceive this truth is perhaps the chief theme of Shelley's criticism. His statements on the analogical operation of imagery lead to the blending of the categories of the sublime and the beautiful. As Socrates does in The Symposium, Shelley views the apprehension of beauty as an awakening to a state of rapport with something great and autonomous, beyond what is governed by the individual will. Wonder and terror are blended with pleasure, an indefinable unity blended with a unity of distinct parts. Indeed, the failure to distinguish the sublime and the beautiful is caused by his grouping them together as complementary effects of poetry. 37 The grouping is fundamentally associated with the image of the radiant form, clear in outline, yet, like "spirit's light", volatile in movement. In the final analysis, however, what Shelley calls the beautiful is absorbed into the sublime; for it is in terms of the involvement of the reader in the image and in its relation to its source in the mind of the poet, an involvement which seems to me intelligible only as a form of the sublime, that the effects of poetic imagery are discussed.38 37 Melvin Solve traces this blending of the beautiful and the sublime in part to eighteenth century sentimentalism. See Shelley: His Theory of Poetry, pp. 177 ff. 38 I mean by "involvement" the sort of experience Shelley records when he says of chivalric love poems: "It is impossible to feel them without

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To sum up: the image is the basic unit of Shelley's thematic criticism. The structure of the image determines the structure of his poetic thought. Images evoke thought or states of mind by presenting unfamiliar analogies, "minute and remote distinctions of feeling". What makes these unfamiliar, however, is less that they have not before been observed than that they organize perception in a new way and to an uncommon degree. The analogies deliberately confront habitual responses and break them down, in order to call the mind to a richer, more complete experience, one which objectifies and attempts thus to fulfill human desire. The confrontation and the calling are simultaneous; the struggle to perceive and the pleasure in perceiving become parts or aspects of the same experience. The image is thus an imaginative design of unlimited potential identities, containing rather than copying nature. Similarly, the image possesses rather than merely hands over the poet's emotion and thought. While Shelley traces the gestation of the image from its external and internal sources (nature and the mind), he consistently sees the image as an indirect or "ideal" expression. Its pattern is an abstraction, a symbolic form of experience, which serves to bring to* gether the poet and his reader. Ill

Shelley's comments on narrative and the kind of effects achieved in tragic and comic fictions tend to reflect his thematic bias in becoming a portion of the beauty which we contemplate." Prose, p. 289. Perhaps the clearest evidence of his linking of the sublime and beautiful is suggested by his comments on some columns near Pesto, Italy. "Perhaps we ought not to say that this symmetry diminishes your apprehension of the columns' magnitude, but that it overpowers the idea of relative greatness, by establishing within itself a system of relations destructive of your idea of its relation with other objects, on which our ideas of size depend." Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, Feb. 25, 1819, Julian Ed. X, p. 31. Interestingly enough, he analyzes "symmetry" (usually considered a property of beauty rather than sublimity) in terms of its overpowering effect on the usual modes of perception. His perception of symmetry becomes an involvement in the "system of relations" symmetry establishes within itself.

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the criticism of poetry. Sometimes this appears in his treatment of narrative as the allegorical setting forth of states of mind. The preface to Alastor opens with the suggestion that the Poet-hero's experience, charted in his dream and quest, is "allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind". The sub-title to the poem, "The Spirit of Solitude", implies that this allegory has universal, moral connections. 89 But his thematic bent is revealed, perhaps more importantly, in his insistence that poetry teaches self-knowledge. The center of audience attention is consequently character; the spectator of a tragedy "beholds himself . . . stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, or would become". 40 Shelley does not spell out the nature of this identification, but it appears to be close to empathy, and to place emphasis on both the emotional and ideal qualities of the experience. The tragic character is not simply observed as a likeness to oneself, but desired (or feared) as a model of one's own desires (or fears). The relationship between character and audience is imagined as direct, and to know the character means, to some extent at least, to participate in him. Under these conditions narrative tends to be interpreted in thematic terms because these are the terms employed by characters in explaining or describing their own fates. In the Defence of Poetry Shelley makes the following important distinction. A p o e m is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts w h i c h have n o other bond o f connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of h u m a n nature as existing in the m i n d of the creator, w h i c h is itself the image of all other minds. T h e o n e is partial and applies only to a definite period of time and a certain combination of events w h i c h c a n never again recur; the other is universal and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of h u m a n nature. Time, which destroys the 39

Poetry, p. 14. Another example of Shelley's conscious allegorizing occurs in the preface to The Revolt of Islam, Poetry, p. 32. 40 Prose, p. 285.

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beauty and the use of the story of particular facts stripped of the poetry w h i c h should invest them, augments that of poetry and forever develops n e w and wonderful applications of the eternal truth w h i c h it contains. H e n c e epitomes h a v e been called the moths of just history; they eat the poetry out of it. A story of particular facts is a mirror w h i c h obscures and distorts that w h i c h should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror w h i c h makes beautiful that which is distorted. (Prose, p. 281)

It is clear that he is distinguishing a story from a poem along lines similar to those used by Aristotle in his distinction of history and poetry. A poem is more philosophical than history because it presents what is characteristic and universal rather than what actually happened at a certain time or place and under certain conditions. But Shelley's distinction has a further relevance than this, one that is not readily assimilated with Aristotle. This relevance, which to my knowledge has escaped scholarly notice, is to his concept of narrative in general. 41 In the midst of his distinction between history and the more philosophical poetry, Shelley provides us with a distinction between types of history or story, between "epitomes" and "just history", the latter really amounting to narrative poetry. The crux of the argument lies in the metaphorical handling of "Time". Time is first used as one of the bonds of connection between the essentially "detached facts" of stories. Here it is a sign of impermanence, of accident, of the associative processes of the mind. Then, in the middle of the paragraph, time becomes the destroyer of the beauty and value of stories of "particular facts", but the preserver of the "eternal truth" of poetry. It is viewed first as an accident, a minimum "bond of connection", and then as an authority, which "develops forever wonderful and new applications" of the truth of poetry. Shelley's succinct definition, "a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth", thus assimilates 41

Most commentators have read this passage simply as an approximation of Aristotle. Shelley has been credited, however, with having little or no interest in stories or narratives, and, consequently, his idea of narrative structure has never been discussed as part of his theory of poetry. For statements representative of scholarship on this matter see Daiches, Critical Approaches, pp. 117-22, and Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry, pp. 217-18.

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poetry as fully with history ("just history") as with philosophy. Stories stripped of poetry are false stories; their "particular facts" are connected by an illusory time. On the other hand, stories made "according to the unchangeable forms of human nature", and which contain a "germ of a relation to . . . the possible varieties of human nature", are eternally true. And this is to imply they are also historically valid.42 Shelley's is a secular "Platonism" which understands the vertical assent to the unchangeable forms as a process of psychological and historical unveiling, truth residing within facts rather than beyond their reach. When it is seen that Time is being used dialectically, as an illusory bond between events and as a real bond between successive revelations of human nature, it is possible to appreciate Shelley's handling of the notion of cause and effect. It was basically because poetry was more probable, more capable of treating events as necessarily connected, that Aristotle found it more philosophical than history. Shelley sees cause and effect as one of the accidents of, or illusory connections between, "detached facts". For him a man dealing with particular facts, as distinct from a prophetic poet dealing with them, constructs ideas only out of distinct and separate impressions. The idea of necessity, like all other abstract ideas, is a construction of the mind, and is thus doubtfully attributed to the relation between distinct and separate events.43 Such attribution arises from habit, and habit is to Shelley another word for accident. It is in this sense that cause and effect becomes 42

I have underlined "possible" to mark a distinction between Shelley and Aristotle. Shelley assimilates poetry with history precisely because poetry takes in all possible, not merely probable, varieties of motive and action. Where Aristotle would differentiate between types of action, Shelley would see in every act an implication of all other acts. 43 In the Defence of Poetry Shelley repeats the opinion that "we know no more of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events". This is the rationale behind his including cause and effect as one of the "bonds of connection" between "detached facts". A s merely a "constant conjunction of events", cause and effect may be viewed as a symbol of the mind. The imagination, on the other hand, conceives of effects as particular instances of a universal cause. See Prose, p. 281.

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a characteristic element of what stands opposed to poetry. On the other hand, he recognizes a "true form" of cause and effect when he finds that poetry contains, characteristically, a "germ of a relation to whatever motives and actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature". True cause and effect lies in the relation of the universal to the individual. Effects, it would seem, are "true" only as deductions from general causes. Now, whereas in Plato these general causes are assigned to an abstract world of Forms, in Shelley they are assigned to the psychological and culture-seeking processes of human intellect and feeling. Cause is found, for instance, to be a function of the imagination itself, which is so constituted as to have a natural need for order. Moreover, imagination is the faculty that emancipates us from time (considered as sheer sequence) by bringing together distinct experiences. It is this two-fold conception of time and cause and effect that stands behind Shelley's distinction of stories of particular facts from poetic stories or "just histories".44 Narrative poetry, then, is properly considered "just history" in that it established a kind of ideal time, an ideal, or intrinsic, relation between the beginning and end of action. Shelley typically states this relation in terms of the motivation of character and the consequences of his motives.45 In the preface to The Cenci he writes: "The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring." 48 The sufferings and crimes catalogued in the story are 44

Shelley's argument in effect repeats the thinking in the fragmentary essays considered in Chapter I above. He uses scepticism (the notion of cause as no more than a constant conjunction of events) to expose dogmatic faith. He then asserts that scepticism (the basis of which is the scientific version of the calculating faculty) is itself limited since it cannot account for imaginative (as distinct from habitual) truth, or the values that reside within poetic stories. 45 Prometheus, for instance, is described as "the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends", Poetry, p. 205. 46 Poetry, p. 276.

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made intelligible, if painful and tragic, by the contemplation of moral deformity. Shelley writes of Beatrice: "Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonored by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been a wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character. . . ." 4 7 Clearly, he thinks that the tragic outcome of The Cenci is essentially shaped by the fall of Beatrice into "pernicious mistakes". Shelley discusses narrative, then, in terms of the fates characters shape for themselves. The individualism implicit in these terms is of key importance because it not only controls what he has to say about tragic and comic narrative, but helps to define the limits of his criticism of narrative structure. Shelley has little or nothing to say about any but the central characters and events of stories. He is interested in heroes and false-heroes or impostors, and treats them not in relation to other social types, but as individuals with universal traits. This creates a limitation on his ideas, for it tends to withdraw character and action from their social setting, despite his own clear effort to see poetry as a social art. The individualism helps also to account for his boldness in casting out cause and effect as a principle of narrative structure. At the same time it clarifies Shelley's critical intentions. He wants to reveal the internal, psychological dimensions, to emphasize the part played by motivation, in the formal qualities of narrative. In viewing true causation as the relation between the general and the particular, between motive as the source of action and event as the product, he attempts to solve the problem of why characters appear to be both free in their actions and chained to their destinies. He proposes the actual identity in fiction of the internal and external worlds, the recognition of which is the form of selfknowledge he took to be the chief end of poetry. By considering heroic character only, Shelley fastens on a coherent if partial method of explaining his view. In the formu47

Poetry, p. 276.

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lation of the history of poetry, he recognizes a difference between the drama of the Renaissance and that of the period which followed.48 The former was "universal and sublime", the latter, fragmentary and disorganized. Two reasons are offered for the superiority of the Renaissance drama: first, the depth to which it reveals character, and second, its capacity for making an audience aware of its common interests and values as a community. Restoration drama, on the other hand, treated character in superficial terms and tended to individualize its audience, appealing to the interests and values of special groups. Shelley felt in his own time a resurgence of the spirit he found in the Renaissance, but as the prefaces to The Cenci and to Prometheus Unbound make clear, this spirit was emerging in a new mode. The Prometheus seeks out "the highly refined imaginations of the more select classes of poetical readers", and The Cenci will fulfill its purpose in the casuistry of the individual's imagination as he puzzles over the paradoxically "innocent" guilt of Beatrice. The common interests and values of society, which seem taken for granted in the Renaissance, are reconstructed in terms of individual response in Shelley's day. And this individualism is identical with that involved in his concentration on the heroic in character. By conceiving of the hero as a universal type, he makes him available to every man. And only the hero, considered as a leader who stands above his society in Renaissance drama, and apart from society by virtue of specific interest or talent (such as poetry) in Romantic drama, provides Shelley with a common denominator for dealing with narrative principles in general. The leader is the natural and acknowledged focus of community values. The man of talent or specific interest is the natural focus of individuals. But the two kinds of hero are one in the capacity for revealing the logic of decision and the confrontation of desire with circumstance.49 48

See Defence of Poetry, p. 285, and discussion above, pp. 163-65. It is this logic, which contains the moral relevance of narrative, that is Shelley's ground for rejecting the traditional version of the dénouement of Prometheus Unbound. "I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the suf-

49

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In turning to specific instances of his conception of narrative structure, it should be emphasized that he tends to treat both comic and tragic forms in their romantic aspects. He is interested in the opposition of heroes and their contraries, false heroes, and in the pattern of the quest. Alastor is an example here. The poem is a narrative of a tragic quest. The Poet, enlightened by nature, envisions in his sleep an image which unites everything he desires (11. 140-91). All his energies flow out towards the image as he searches the natural world for its likeness. But it soon becomes apparent that the vision which incorporated the values of life for him is also, paradoxically, leading him to his death (11. 296-307). The vision itself is not death but a symbol of fulfillment which stands in opposition to the natural world. It generates the irony of the gap between desire and reality. The natural world wins out as the Poet is passively absorbed into the sunset (625-671). But the bitter lamentation which closes the poem makes it clear that the irony of the gap has not been drained off, that the loss of a "surpassing Spirit" leaves only "pale despair and cold tranquillity" (11. 718-20). What is produced is melancholy. As Alastor is a typical form of tragic narrative to Shelley, so "The Witch of Atlas" is typical of his view of the comic. The Witch, beautiful, immortal, self-sufficing, lives wholly in the realm of innocence, essentially untouched by the limitations of the natural world.50 In a deftly executed series of stanzas, she ferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if w e could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary." Poetry, p. 205. 50 This is clearly the implication of stanza I. The Witch is prior to error and truth, or evil and good, and prior to the merging of time and change, characterized, remarkably, as "incestuous": Before those cruel Twins, w h o m at one birth Incestuous Change bore to her father Time, Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth All those bright natures which adorned its prime, A n d left us nothing to believe in, worth The pains of putting into learned rhyme, A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain Within a cavern by a secret fountain.

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creates her own vision of desire, the ministering Hermaphrodite, which proves her to be less a contestant with nature than, humorously, nature's perfect artisan. The Witch is not contrary to nature, but above it. She must dismiss the nymphs who wish to worship her, for while creatures of innocence, they are creatures, within the natural cycle, and disappear with the passing of the natural forms they inhabit (11. 209-240). The Witch must create her own creature which she accomplishes with the production of the Hermaphrodite (11. 321336). 51 She then begins her curious, prankish quest which takes up the remainder of the poem, and in which she distributes "sweet visions" to the dreams of mankind. The relation of the quest to the creation of the Hermaphrodite is very difficult to identify. They seem discreet units of the poem. But there is one way, I would suggest, that they may be brought together. As the Hermaphrodite defines the power of the Witch as divine, so the quest defines her human relevance. The world of mutability has been dismissed with the withdrawal of the nymphs, placing the Witch beyond nature. In the quest, the world of mutability returns, but the terms of change have been reversed. The scattering of her visions (what she denied to the nature-bound nymphs) changes the world of men to her pattern (11. 497-664). The visions are portions of her (one charm allowing the recipient to mingle with the Witch's spirit), and distributed according to "the naked beauty of the soul" (11. 569-76). At one point death and the grave themselves are defeated as symbols of misery and isolation (11. 601-616). The narrative of the quest exists to point 51

Ll. 321-28: Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow Together, tempering the repugnant mass With liquid love - all things together grow Through which the harmony of love c a n pass; A n d a fair Shape out of her hands did flow A living Image, which did far surpass In beauty that bright shape of vital stone Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion. The Hermaphrodite is an artistic form, a "corresponding anti-type" to the harmony of love in the Witch. It is a "living image" not an ironic negation of the Witch's power. For a somewhat divergent interpretation, see Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, p. 197.

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the desirability of the Witch's victory over change (a victory which is one with her own nature). It exists, too, to affirm the integration of the Witch with the human spirit in its capacity for throwing off self-inflicted tortures and entering into the realm of innocence, over which her Eternity presides. What is produced by the poem is a kind of exhilaration, a mood quite compatible with Shelley's statement in the Dedication that the unveiling of his Witch can make only for idolatrous love.52 The narratives of Alastor and "The Witch of Atlas" are in part the figuring forth of states of mind.53 This allegorical principle, however, is regular in neither. Shelley's characters are almost always more than personifications. Their actions tend to stand for principles of action, but only to the degree that these principles are patterns of motivation whose actual fate is undetermined. They are patterns of process. The distinction here is clearly one of perspective and emphasis, but it is as important to Shelley's theory as his organic vocabulary. He wants to stress a progressive pattern in which character is modified as it is developed, but modified from within, as well as from without. Action is seen as the progressive identification of character. Its beginning is the exposition of undetermined energies, usually involving opposition or conflict; its middle is the struggle or quest to unify or clarify these energies; its end is the illumination of character through the fate it has shaped. In Alastor the Poet's fate is ironic in terms of desire, but fully consistent with his early identification in the poem with the forms of the natural world. In "The Witch of Atlas" the irony is drained off by the sheer fulfillment of desire, and by the reader's pre-occupation with the Witch's perfection. Much of that poem's comic effect derives from the deliberate refusal in poet and sympathetic reader alike to view the Witch seriously 52

"The Witch of Atlas", 11. 47-48, Poetry, p. 372. Baker has read Alastor as an allegory of (in Shelley's words) "that Power which strikes luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences". See Poetry, p. 15, and Shelley's Major Poetry, pp. 53 ff. H e identifies the Witch as a representative of Love or Intellectual Beauty. See p. 213. 53

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54

from any perspective but her own. With these examples in mind, we may see that Shelley's basically romantic formula for narrative tends to be divided into tragic and comic forms according to the role irony plays. And this role is determined largely by the perspective from which we view the central character. In the comic satires, "Peter Bell III" (1819) and Swellfoot the Tyrant (1819), the false hero becomes the center of interest. The hero is false precisely because we cannot take seriously his point of view. In Swellfoot the setting is laid in a Swinish Hell, presided over by Famine. The "hero" opens the play with an apostrophe, in the high style, to this "supreme Goddess". He thanks Famine for creating his bloated body, even as it terminates in his pointed head, "emblem of a pointless nothing" (11. 1-17). His character and fate alike are almost totally prefigured here. The "Swellfoot system" is based on delusion in the appearance of luxury and "state necessity". The delusion, "the pointless nothing", is what is gradually unfolded to the pig population. Swellfoot's government attempts to quell reform by testing the innocence of the Queen's motives (she is the emblem of reform to the pigs) through use of the "Green Bag". It is a rigged test since the poisonous liquors in the bag, allegorically falsehoods and bad intentions, can only produce vermin, the symbol and judgment of nastiness. 55 The Queen, luckily, reverses the scheme by pouring the bag's contents over King and Court, reducing them to their real natures (Act II, sc. ii). This reversal is improbable, but it is consistent with the recognition early in the play that Swellfoot is an impostor, and that the power he holds 54

There is an urbanity in Shelley's handling of some details, especially in his awareness that the plane of existence occupied by the Witch is, in human terms, a form of extended hyperbole. This is evident, for instance, in his comment on the Witch's air-borne pranks (she has just gathered "the armies of her ministering spirits" together in order to hear "all that had happened new / Between the earth and moon", 11. 457-80): "these were tame pleasures". 55 See I, i, pp. 346-57. Queen lona Taurina, whose troubles with King and Court are modelled on those of Queen Caroline, will be tested specifically for sexual incontinence (II. i. 80-85), a detail which, in its suggestion of gossip, fits the comic handling of the themes of fraud and calumny.

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over the fate of both the play and the pigs is raw delusion. His transformation to vermin is securely developed out of his mistaken but consistent decision to use the Green Bag against the Queen. He, in effect, identifies himself with its contents. 56 The boisterous effects of Swellfoot the Tyrant are missing in "Peter Bell III", the tone of which is mild scorn. Peter is an impostor-poet whose fate is dullness, and is the successor to Wordsworth's Peter Bell, and by extension to Wordsworth himself. According to Shelley's Dedication to "The Witch of Atlas", Wordsworth has presented a Peter, who, when stripped, is "a fellow / Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate / Into a kind of sulphureous yellow".57 It is this Peter who is the overt subject of Shelley's poem. Peter's mind is powerful and individual. A n a p p r e h e n s i o n clear, intense, Of his m i n d ' s w o r k , h a d m a d e alive T h e things it w r o u g h t o n .

(11. 309-11) But his mind's virtue is ironically his weakness as a man. Turned in on himself he becomes isolated from the sympathies of others, and develops a willful scorn of their suffering. Thus, at the poem's climax, he announces "Happiness is wrong", and finally gains the plaudits of the isolated Selfhood represented in Hell's population (1. 573). This is the Damnation following upon the Sin of moral eunuchry, the failure to identify himself with the pains 58

Carlos Baker gives an extended account of the political allegory of the poem, Shelley's Major Poetry, pp. 173-81. I wish to add this: that the allegory of these "low" satires, no less than their verse-form and diction, employs a public idiom. The idea of making England a country of pigs is, to be sure, attributable to the interruption of Shelley's recitation of the "Ode to Liberty" by a herd of pigs being brought to fair at San Guiliano (Aug., 1820). But he was also making use of a public metaphor in a poem decidedly political. The metaphor, "the swinish multitude", coined by Burke in his Reflections (1791) was an emblem used with great irony and popular success by Paine and other reformers during the long period of governmental restrictions on civil liberty from 1793 to 1820. See the commentary on some public metaphors of the period in Edward Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 89-90. 57 "The Witch of Atlas", 11. 41-43, Poetry, p. 372. There is a full discussion of the relation between these t w o poems in Bloom, pp. 166-71.

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58

and pleasures of others. As a final, Double-Damnation, Peter's poetry becomes dull, losing the strength of individuality it had before he became fashionable. The dullness is the last phase in the failure of vision, a process which, in Peter's case, stretched over the nineteen years Wordsworth took to produce his ancestor. The effects of Shelley's poem, like the effects of Swellfoot the Tyrant, rely upon our scorn for, and ridicule of, the state of existence and point of view chosen by the mock-hero, and upon our sympathies with the opposite state and point of view. The ridicule and the sympathy are not brought ready-made to the poems, but developed in terms of the narratives, where delusion is seen to expose itself as delusion. The process of ridicule and sympathy consists in letting a limited point of view, which parades as a comprehensive one, come into direct contact with "facts" it cannot control: the Devil in "Peter Bell III", and the Spirit of Liberty in Swellfoot the Tyrant. In this sense comic satire, for Shelley, is a parody of tragedy. In Shelley's comedies the action tends to be viewed, by both author and spectator, from above, from the station of the Witch with regard to the natural world of good and evil, and from this natural world with regard to the "Hells" of Swellfoot the Tyrant, and "Peter Bell III". The Cenci places us within "sad reality". 50 Here, the melancholy of Alastor is broken up into extreme pity for innocent suffering, and horror at criminal deformity of character. Beatrice falls through the perversion of her character to58

"Peter Bell III", 11. 313-17: But from the first 'twas Peter's drift T o be a kind of moral eunuch, He touched the hem of Nature's shift, Felt faint - and never dared uplift The closest, all-concealing tunic. 59 In his dedication of the play to Leigh Hunt, Shelley writes: "Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they are the dreams of what ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been." Poetry, pp. 274-75.

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wards that of the Count's. He forces her, through overt act and continuous psychological pressure, to accept his premises on the nature of desire and will. These are the premises of selfhood, which finds integrity in nothing, and includes in the character of the Count, sadistic pleasure in another's suffering. He seeks to possess her spirit.60 The reversal of the play, the murder of Cenci, is only one indication of the success of his perversion of Beatrice, and is, by itself, insufficient evidence of her own spiritual fall. Pity for her innocent suffering seems to overbalance the horror of her revenge on her father. But the logic of revenge and selfhood works on in the play. Her moral fall is established firmly in the fifth act where her false testimony leads to the physical and psychological torture of Marzio, the hired murderer of the Count.81 At the end of the play, Shelley tries, without great success, to revive the dignity of Beatrice by stressing her fortitude in the face of death. In this manner, we may conjecture, he attempts to raise out of the "casuistry" of our responses towards Beatrice an "exalted calm". But the casuistry remains dominant, a fact Shelley was aware of when he composed his preface.62 The innocent energies spent by Beatrice in resisting her father become the guilty energies of revenge; and no amount of pathos, attached to her exposed position as the victim of harsh and corrupt justice, can obscure the fact that she has accepted the moral corruption of "sad reality". We have in The Cenci not simply the irony of a victim overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, but also the irony of the loss of innocence. Shelley felt that The Cenci, like all tragedies, was capable of "teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself".63 It is clear that a portion of this knowledge consists in the recognition of the vast potential for moral fall and spiritual waste in human character. This recognition is ironic because, it appears, the very energies which 60 61 62 83

See The Cenci, II, i, pp. 105-28 and 181-86, Poetry, The Cenci, V, ii, pp. 77-168, Poetry, pp. 325-26. See Poetry, p. 276. Poetry, p. 276.

pp. 291-92.

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attract our sympathies arouse also our "antipathies". The potential for moral fall is also the potential for moral strength. 64 Tragedy "teaches" us by making us aware of this paradox. 65 The same idea underlies his remarks about tragedy in the Defence of Poetry. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life; even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. 66 Good and evil passions are, apparently, intermixed, in tragedy. What the spectator gains is not a moral lesson, but an increase in his power to feel and to conceive. Hence, tragedy does not censure crime as horrible, but, as it were, half-unites the spectator to the crime through pity for the criminal. Crime and error are made parts of the human condition of fate, and are consequent, potentially at least, on every act of moral choice. Hence, men cannot "cherish" error "as the creation of their choice". The moral logic of tragedy presents a "sad reality", in which men participate but which their wills cannot control. The tragedy of 64

Perhaps Shelley's most telling description of this condition occurs in "The Triumph of Life" (1822), 11. 228-231, Poetry, pp. 512-13. And much I grieved to think how power and will In opposition rule our mortal day, And why God made irreconcilable Good and the means of good.. . . 05 Shelley writes in the Defence of Poetry: "It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense - the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle: tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain." Prose, p. 292. 66 Prose, p. 285. For a divergent, and, I think, superficial interpretation of this passage, see Daiches, Critical Approaches, p. 122.

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a good will (which Shelley allows Beatrice before her murder of her father) is precisely its inability to prevent crime and error. In The Cenci, as in Alastor, we perceive a gap between what is emotionally or morally desirable and what happens. In both works this gap is ironic, but ironic in different ways. In Alastor the gap is cosmic rather than personal, or, perhaps personal only to the degree that the Poet-hero himself is personally an abstraction of humanity. There is a mystery in "the web of human things, birth and the grave" that is insoluble to the Poet, given even his own mysterious resources. His incapacity to fulfill his desires is predictable, for while he is "a surpassing spirit", he surpasses other men, not his tie to nature; and it is essentially with his own nature that he struggles. The story of his struggle is the ironic process of his self-defeat, and it produces an effect of melancholy. The Cenci, on the other hand, presents the gap between desire and reality as the result of a contest of personalities and wills. The process of self-defeat is recorded in the manner that Beatrice discovers the means of power, of self-protection, and superiority. She learns to manipulate others, to make arbitrary judgments of what is best for them, and to assert her own righteousness. She falls in love with the reality she thus "creates", and suffers a loss of her innocence, her "surpassing spirit". Beatrice finds the "ill world where none are true" (V, iii, 68) a justification of her own falsehoods and crimes, and perceives in her guilt not moral law but a mask arbitrarily created by her judges. Her will, tragically, becomes her only standard of conduct. Our response to this "sad reality" is double, mixed, confused. We see the melancholy logic of the loss of innocence, the necessary self-defeat. But we see also the meaninglessness of this logic as an antidote to error. Moral superiority looks very much like a quality of self-assertion, and seems as compelling in an evil as in a good person.67 This doubleness, in which moral ideas are part of the esthetic effect, is a complication of the relation between desire and reality. The gap between these two states is juxtaposed with the irony of their confusion. We become 87 See the very interesting discussion of this in Milton Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry, pp. 91 ff.

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aware that reality is little more than a form of desire to the characters of the play; and if the tragedy teaches us that this is a distortion, it gives us little that is positive with which to compare it. This is what Shelley implies when he speaks about the "casuistry" of The Cenci. IV When Prometheus is compared to Satan in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, the idea of casuistry is again the focal point of discussion. The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which, in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and truest motives to the best and noblest ends. (Poetry, p. 205)

Satan "engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry". The perniciousness has a double reference: to Satan himself (and by extension to the moral scheme of Paradise Lost) and to the quality of our response to him. We shall take up Satan presently. The perniciousness of our response is clearly our willingness to "excuse" Satan's faults when measured against the wrongs he suffers. The measuring itself, the casuistry, is not pernicious, but simply the result of sympathizing with the pains of characters caught in "sad reality". Such casuistry becomes pernicious when we reject the doubleness of response, the need to balance "faults and wrongs", confusion of aim and logic of event. Such rejection is pernicious both morally and esthetically. But here a subtle distinction is implied. If we remember that Shelley, in the De-

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fence of Poetry claims the moral superiority of Milton's Satan to his God, then we see that the perniciousness of excusing Satan is really only a condemnation to moral reason, to a Hell of enlightenment.68 It is the poetic perniciousness, however, not the ironic, moral one, that occupies the center of Shelley's argument in the Preface. Satan's moral state, for all its alleged rationality, is less poetically satisfying than that of Prometheus. Our response to Satan is poetically pernicious because it reduces the experience of conflicting desires and goals, where logic and confusion have opposed but equal places, to the single-minded logic of argument: Satan's faults cannot be greater than their cause, which is his suffering. The reverse of this argument, or a single-minded confusion, is that "something worse" that Shelley finds engendered in the minds of the Orthodox: that Satan suffers because he is at fault. This doctrine is aroused by the didactic elements in Paradise Lost, elements Shelley thought Milton succeeded in subordinating. Casuistry as a response to tragic action has, then, an integrity that arises out of the balancing of conflicting attitudes. Yet, it is plain that the sustaining of such balance is only a part, and probably a subordinate part, of our response to Prometheus. The Titan is a more poetical character than Satan both negatively and posi68

"Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of . . . Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonors his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged a violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil" (Prose, p. 290). Note that Shelley's point is that both God and Satan are evil, but that God is more so. His analogy of Satan's purpose with the pursuit of excellence is indefensibly misleading.

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tively. Negatively, there is no temptation, apparently, to reduce our experience of Prometheus either to simple logical argument (codes of moral conduct) or to prejudice (whether sympathetic or not towards his defiance of God). As the benefactor of mail, he is obviously sympathetic. This negative release from oversimplification is also implied in the positive reason for the Titan's superiority to Satan. Positively, he frees himself from "sad reality", from the tragic limitations of (in Byron's phrase) "unallied existence". His character comprehends not only the conditions of nature and experience but the conditions of paradise and innocence as well. In this, Prometheus is "more poetical" because his story takes us back to creative origins, to an act of being where desire and reality are unified rather than confused. A helpful analogy of the comparison of Prometheus and Satan is provided in Shelley's comparison of Falkland to Mandeville in his review of Godwin's novel, Mandeville (1817). Again the focus is on poetical casuistry: Mandeville is Godwin's last production. The interest of this novel is undoubtedly equal, in some respects superior, to that of Caleb Williams. Yet there is no character like Falkland, whom the author, with that sublime casuistry which is the parent of tolerance and forbearance, persuades us personally to love, while his actions must forever remain the theme of our astonishment and abhorrence. Mandeville challenges our compassion, and no more. His errors arise from an immutable necessity of internal nature, and from much of a constitutional antipathy and suspicion, which soon sprang up into a hatred and contempt and barren misanthropy, which, as it had no roots in genius or virtue, produces no fruit uncongenial with the soil wherein it grew. Those of Falkland arose from a high, though perverted conception of the majesty of human nature, from a powerful sympathy with his species, and from a temper which led him to believe that the very reputation of excellence should walk among mankind, unquestioned and undefiled. (Prose, p. 309)

Falkland, we catch from Shelley's tone, is a "more poetical character" than Mandeville. He inspires casuistry; Mandeville, compassion only. There is struggle in Falkland, a sense of conflict between the energies of character and limitations of circumstance. Mandeville's character, on the other hand, "produces no

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fruit uncongenial with the soil wherein it grew". Falkland, clearly, may be assimilated with Satan as a representative of human desire chafing with arbitrary and external restraint. As such, they are appropriate tragic figures in the Cencian mould, the perspective of "sad reality". But what Shelley calls attention to, in the comparison of Satan and Prometheus, is that Satan fails to go beyond this status. Prometheus, "impelled by the purest and truest motives to the best and noblest ends", accepts restraint in the form of self-discipline without being perverted by it, and foresees an inevitable reversal of conditions. The very name Prometheus guarantees, as it were, this reversal, whereas Satan, the Accuser, must ever be defeated. And this defeat, which leads to casuistry in us, is at least partly self-imposed.69 Shelley's point is certainly not that Satan is not a hero, but that his heroism is fragmentary, given to self-waste through self-assertion. He has superior energies, yet, this energy, by itself, is incapable of harmonizing the irony of lost innocence with its own capaciousness. The energy, instead, remains potential, unrealized in ends and incomplete. As Harold Bloom suggests, Satan is an analogue for Prometheus in terms of the Ore symbolism worked out by Blake. But the analogy is partial, not whole. The potential return of Jupiter, at the end of Prometheus Unbound, is not the same thing as his inevitable return. Prometheus Unbound does not end with a state of desire alone, but with desire unified with objects. As it stands, the potential irony of Jupiter's potential return is made consonant with joy, not a muted criticism of joy.79 The critique of Satan is an indication that Prometheus Unbound is written in the tradition of Paradise Lost and that the poem extends Milton's vision to new fields. It is Paradise Regained with two mighty differences. First, Shelley's saviour is as Satanic as he is Godly, and much more clearly human in desire and goal. There is much less evidence of a "doctrine" of salvation, or a transcendent Truth to which the shows of this world may 69

Shelley discusses this topic with great verve and irony in his "Essay on the Devil and Devils", Prose, pp. 264-74. 70 Cf. Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 48-54.

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be compared. Second, Shelley has fused the temptation and the passion into a single scene and act, dissolving the dichotomy of Reason and Energy, that Blake found so strong in Milton. In Prometheus Unbound there is a release from sobriety, a promotion of intellectual joy, and it is this that Shelley implies is the highest effect of poetry. The Prometheus is called a lyrical drama, and as such combines the principles of narrative and imagery I have discussed separately above. With all apologies for the bareness of the outline, let me summarize some of the qualities of this combination. One quality is the special integration of thought and action, or of mental processes and the sequence of events. The poem can be read as a pattern of imagery describing different states of the soul. Part of the pattern is the contrariety and parallelism of characters, like Prometheus and Jupiter; of functions, like those of the messengers, Mercury and Panthea; and of emotional states, like hope and fear. And these oppositions supply a thematic key, as it were, to the central opposition of the poem, that of different orders of reality: the unregenerate order of selfhood and self-defeat, and the regenerate order of love and selfknowledge. But the poem can also be read profitably as an unfolding of events. The first Act is like a succession of waves; three times Prometheus reflects on the past and contemplates the future, trying to find meaning in his suffering and in his defiance. While every wave simply returns him to these conditions, the waves of memory and contemplation come in an order of increasing strength, bringing an increase in both suffering and intellectual clarity. The Phantasm of Jupiter, a creature of the Titan's forgotten curse, brings sympathy with pain and an awareness of past error. Mercury, the creature of Jupiter's present will, is a "thoughtexecuting minister", and tempts Prometheus to compromise. This increases the suffering of restraint (though the Titan's inner peace is undisturbed) and lays bare the fact that Prometheus knows no secret truth by which he could release both Jupiter and himself. He cannot, in other words, take comfort in revenge. The third and final wave is embodied in the Furies, who are the

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creatures of "the all-miscreative brain of Jove", and emblems of an appalling future. They compell in the Titan the suffering of evil, and clarify the fact that good by itself is ineffectual, that strength by itself is wanton. They destroy his inner peace by showing him the ultimate bankruptcy of self-assertion and the enigma of self-sacrifice. It well may be that the regeneration of the Titan's will occurs after the curse on Jupiter is recalled. But it should be plain that there is change or development in this Act, whether a strict change of will or not. Prometheus is forced to reflect on increasingly impersonal objects. His wish to end pain, arising out of self-reflection and memory (I, 303-05), turns to reasoned argument on evil minds as the cause of pain and evil (I, 380-94). This argument is connected with his still personal reflection on his friendship with Jupiter, and the latter's disloyalty. It is in turn replaced by an utterance of moral suffering that arises out of an imaginative contemplation of the general moral condition of mankind: (to the Furies) "Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes; / And yet I pity those they torture not" (I, 632-33). His desire to end pain and to hope for good has had increasingly to cope with objects outside of himself, with the actual conditions of things. He is left at the end of the Act with the apprehension of the vanity of everything but love (I, 807-08). The point in the Act at which the Titan's will is regenerated matters much less than this point at the end of the Act where he has arrived, without fanfare, at self-knowledge. For his final hope of love is the form in which self-knowledge comes; it is the final stage in a process of learning to cope with a reality beyond the self and its desires, a process which has eliminated in turn the comforts of self-pity, self-assertion, and self-sacrifice. It is indeed the wisdom of suffering. The special integration of mental processes and events, of imagery and symbolic action, is, then, one of the chief qualities of Shelley's attempt to fuse lyric and dramatic principles. A second quality is the achievement of what he took to be the highest end of poetry, the joy of self-knowledge. Joy is so obviously important to Prometheus Unbound that

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many writers on Shelley have simply overlooked the subtle relations worked out between this oracular intoxication and the painful process of knowledge in the poem. Yet, these figure largely in the question of Jupiter's potential return, and in the nagging question of the problem of evil. Once these relations are grasped it is hard to agree with Mary Shelley that her husband "believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none".71 Jupiter's potential return and the potency of evil are vital to the conception of Prometheus Unbound. In the quest for knowledge of the origin of evil in Act II, as well as in the comfort-stripping process of Act I, the main characters are forced to look outside the desires and abstractions of their own person. What Asia and Prometheus see has both an internal and external nature and meaning. They see externally the condition of things: pain, exile, fragmentation, the concrete particulars of "Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change". They see internally into the separated self, learning by will that evil resides in acts of will. Their final knowledge, however, is neither of evil nor learned by the will. Rather, it is the oracular knowledge of love, of the shapeless spirit and deep truth, that inspires their relationship and, hopefully, inspires as well the universe. The oracular knowledge, in other words, is revolutionary and uncontrollable, and the struggle to know precisely the moral conditions of things is a necessary preparation for the oracle, but not its cause. It is, finally, the very freedom and indeterminacy of the deep truth (a freedom like that of the poetic imagination on the one hand, and like that 71

Her Note to Prometheus Unbound, Poetry, p. 271. Although most of Shelley's commentators in this century have regarded Mary's statement as too facile, nobody has proposed the probable truth that his position is very close to being the reverse of the one she attributes to him. The defect in nature which makes all imperfect is closely connected with the action of our wills. In Act IV of Prometheus the will is "ill to guide", but "mighty to obey", a sun surrounded by "all mean passions, bad delights / And selfish cares, its trembling satellites". This suggests to me that the will is strong and even effectual, but by no means necessarily good; that under "normal" lapsarian conditions it competes with the oracular power of love, which is the power of effecting good. Our will is the "cold, common sun" as compared with Love, the Sun of Life.

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of the proto-natural Demogorgon on the other) that makes evil a continuous potentiality. The revolution described in the poem does not eradicate evil, but only suspends it, as it were, in an atmosphere of joy. Perhaps the most pointed illustration of Shelley's work on the relation of joy to self-knowledge is found in the narrative consequences of his rejection of the catastrophe of the Prometheus Unbound of Aeschylus. According to Shelley, the lost play proposes "the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis".72 Shelley, in averting such a catastrophe, makes the secret so long sought by Jupiter a delusion. Because, that is to say, Jupiter lacks self-knowledge, he "invents" the secret out of the materials of his suspicion. Demogorgon, who is associated with revolution, change, the revolving world itself, becomes the final affirmation or "offspring" of Jupiter's desires. Like Satan, Jupiter is inevitably defeated by his attachment to selfhood, and attachment to the conditions of things (the Mammon of this world) which must ever change. In this sense, Jupiter can never be reconciled with Prometheus, who possesses self-control, and sees the potential vanity of all conditions and occasions. Accordingly, Shelley's Prometheus withholds nothing from his adversary (except his own soul), has no secret knowledge to disclose to him. An interesting device here is that Fate, also associated with Demogorgon, is made external to the characters, but plastic and "shapeless".73 In Aeschylus, Fate, in the form of the secret, is internal to the characters, but fixed. It can be maneuvered but not modified. The Aeschylean Titan is ruled by it as much as Zeus is. Shelley was "averse" to this view of the story because it failed to develop Prometheus, the champion of mankind, out of a Satanic attach72

Poetry, p. 205. Panthea. "I see a mighty darkness / Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom / Dart round, as light from the meridian sun. / - Ungazed upon shapeless; neither limb, / Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is / A living spirit" (II, iv, 2-7). Demogorgon is plastic as spirit is, but it seems that, as in Goethe's Walpurgis-nacht scene, spirit and matter are analogues for one another. 73

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ment to Fate, and towards that prophetic freedom which foreknows the spirit but not the exact form of events. Essentially, to know fate is to "know thyself aright". The play by Aeschylus, Shelley implies, could only have ended in an assertion of "the unfathomable agencies of nature", and, therefore, in a kind of casuistry. His own play, as the brilliant colloquy of Act IV amply testifies, leads to a knowledge that is also rapture. It seems but a short if significant step from the higher awareness evoked in Prometheus Unbound, in which tragic action is both exploited and transcended, to the upper-air exuberance of the comic poem, "The Witch of Atlas". The "unveiling" of Asia and the Witch leads to similar values, to similar intellectual and emotional apprehensions. Both are visions of the harmony of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, love and justice. This does not mean that Prometheus Unbound is unconscious comedy, but rather that it approximates a kind of complete poetry, comprehending and unifying at least some of the principal generic types. In the stripping of moral and psychological comforts, and the quest for moral and metaphysical knowledge, its action is clearly that of tragedy. But from the end of Act II on this action is blended with the sort of comedy Shelley called, in writing in the Defence of King Lear, "ideal and sublime", a comedy appropriate to passionate and profound discovery.74 The transfigured Asia anticipates the Witch, who, in her quite different context, looks casually on Asia's "diviner day", and lives the routine of miracle. Moreover, the mock-heroes, Peter Bell and Swellfoot, are rather clear caricatures of the deluded Jupiter. One of Shelley's principal dramatic difficulties in Prometheus, the plausibility of the overthrow of Jupiter, deserves, therefore, to be considered less as melodrama than as high and serious comedy, the final stage in the exposure of an impostor.75 It seems certain that the play does not operate on the principles of tragedy alone. Working towards a kind of complete poetry, which will be a 74

Prose, p. 283. The process of exposing Jupiter begins, of course, in Acts I and II where he is not only recognized as a tyrant but also as a slave of his own selfhood. See I, 1-11, 400-05, and n , iv, 105-11. 75

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finite mirror of the "great poem", Shelley appears justified in aiming at the highest effect he recognized, the joy of self-knowledge. V The integration of lyric and dramatic principles in Prometheus Unbound illustrates in the most profound way Shelley's conception of poetic structure and effects. In one sense, the hero's action and the poet's thought are identical, the hero becoming the substance of the poet's apprehension of life. Yet, the imagery of the poem does not simply transmit Shelley's emotion; it has a substance of its own, sometimes "more real than living man". Undoubtedly, such super-reality is invested in the imagery by the poet's imagination. But the words and forms have a past and a present, a literary and social environment of their own as well. And the technique of Prometheus Unbound is more an imaginative adjustment to the environments of words and forms than a personal utterance. Shelley finds the image to be the particular form in poetry that apprehends, and so redeems, feeling. And one of his recurring intellectual efforts is to hold together the absoluteness of the apprehension of value and the relationism inherent in his analysis of the mind and experience. The effort is suggested in the poetry in the theme of struggling perception, in which minute discriminations are made part of a philosophic and artistic whole, and is suggested in the criticism where, for example, Milton is described both as the inspired singer of "unpremeditated verse", and as the calculating artist who arranged his materials "according to the laws of epic truth". The image similarly must be viewed as true and valuable in itself, and true and valuable in relation to the emotional, intellectual, and artistic functions it performs. Shelley's ideas of narrative and characterization exhibit the same inner complexity. He works in his poems for psychological realism, for an accurate description of the way minds interact and interpret experience. His lucid summary of the history of the Cenci affair, and its "national and universal interest", shows us

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his concern for verisimilitude, and helps clarify his focus on passionate life as the primary subject of tragedy. The process of selecting motives, or of discovering the disability of motives, in a context of increasing crisis, sets the structure of many of his narratives. At the same time, he sees his characters as types, their actions as instructive. The concept of moral allegory is too narrow to describe these types, but part of the effect of "The Witch of Atlas" comes from the subtle handling of her genealogical connection with Love, and part of the effect of Alastor is foretold in the hero's decision "to seek strange truths in undiscovered lands" (1. 77). These are themes that help define the nature of characters and their actions. They help control the meaning of action, and although they are an indirect form of knowledge (and hence not didactic, according to Shelley's argument), they are moral as well as esthetic in effect. It is in a work like Prometheus Unbound, where the various strands of his conception of poetic structure and effect are integrated, that we see most clearly how he sought to harmonize in practice the pleasure of art with the knowledge communicated by the poet through the art-object. He appeals to the unity of idea and power, of the creative act and the regenerate Man. Intellectual questioning, as in Asia's search for the origin of evil, becomes the substance of a quest. Literal and spiritual "senses" are inseparable. Shelley is a moralist, but in the broadest meaning of the term. He exploits Radical and Platonic doctrines and images as the materials of his vision; but that vision has a significance beyond its materials. For Shelley, the good life and the greatest poetry arise from a struggle to balance disparities and from a patience to know the oracular.

CONCLUSION

I The goal of any literary criticism, whatever its scope and methods, is the explanation of works of art. Shelley's theory is no exception. So far my purpose has been the reconstruction of what his theory is. It is now necessary to appraise it as a critical instrument, to judge what contribution it makes to our understanding of literature. Judging Shelley, even by his own standards, is not easy. He exhibits, too frequently, a peculiar capacity for casting doubt on his own principles; his insights and his eccentricities seem bound together by a wierd self-afflicting logic. For example, he makes large strides towards the definition of poetic intensity, the select and refined moment of "passion's golden purity"; but he disappoints us by often associating beauty with simple "loveliness" and "sweetness". Similarly, his penetrating analysis of the way poetry administers to love, "the secret of all morals", seems too obviously connected with the metaphor of the "naked and sleeping beauty" that he calls the spirit of poetic forms, or with his preference for the doctrine of free love. His tastes and his prejudices are not irrelevant to his ideas, and those tastes and prejudices often seem shallow. But the substance of Shelley's thought is not shallow, and we are misled if we believe that a catalogue, however extensive, of his oddities and errors explains either his ideas or his personality. The difficulty in judging him lies deeper than that: it concerns his very awareness or ignorance of the need to limit his principles, to make his principles yield

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concrete results. To resolve this difficulty we must raise the whole question of his metaphorical method of criticism and the specific forms into which he presses his argument. A review of the main features of the theory here might help us to grasp the nature of these philosophical issues. Perhaps the most cogent summary of what it means to Shelley to be a poet is his estimation of his own personal powers. To cite the passage again: "I have long believed my power consists in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind." He goes on to say he plans to do something, "whatever it may, which a serious and earnest estimate of my own powers will suggest . . . and which will be in every respect accommodated to their utmost limits." 1 Above all, these remarks show his faith in the connectedness of things, in relationships that are the basis of his art as well as his subject-matter. Their nature is the accommodation, if not the logical reconciliation, of differences. The poet is different from the "herd of mankind", but his sympathies are with "the living beings which surround us". Genius and humanity combine and "perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man". In other words, the particular difference of the poet is the symbol of the ultimate sameness of all men. The accommodation of differences runs all through the remarks: sentiments and contemplation, distinctions of feeling and universal conceptions, external nature and "living beings", apprehension and communication, sublimity and imperfection, "an earnest estimate of . . . powers", and "their utmost limits". It is precisely because he believed in the possibility of a new prophetic poetry that he believed also in the need for finding his 1

Poetry,

p. 158.

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own limitations. He had to know them in order to know "the present, intensely, as it is".2 The building of comprehensive knowledge out of an analysis of himself, his environment, and a criticism of "received opinion", is the link between his assertion that poets "participate in the One" and the assertion that poetry has a living, contemporary relevance. His emphasis on intellectual clarity is an attempt to penetrate both an easy scepticism (like that of Peacock's "Four Ages") and an easy faith. It suggests his belief in the complex idea that it is in the passionate recognition of limits, which yields, at best, tentative knowledge, that the One is most intelligible to man. Such passionate recognition produces hope that resembles despair, a view of historical probabilities as mainly ethical opportunities.3 It reproduces the limitedness of the prophetic imagination itself, the necessary limitedness of form. Without order, or form, there is no imagination. Its principle is synthesis, and things are valued for their integrity, both in themselves and as parts of a whole. The autonomy of imaginative process, however, is an autonomy of relationships: between sentiment and contemplation, apprehension and communication, the moral and the material world. The process itself expresses the "permanent analogy of things by images", for it constructs both image and permanent value. Yet, the contingency of fact and perception remains. It is, for Shelley, as if the nineteenth century prophetic poet earns his vision of the One by attention to the fluctuations and contrasts 2

That poetic prophecy is unintelligible without intellectual honesty and self-knowledge is a recurrent theme of the poetry, expressed most notably, perhaps, in the handling of the "curse" and the "secret" in Prometheus Unbound (see especially I, 262-311). The Titan's foreknowledge is a species of self-knowledge; he foresees the spirit but not the form of events. 3 For a recent discussion of the revolutionary spirit of the period and especially its failure, see Meyer Abrams, "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age", pp. 42-60, in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye, English Institute Essays (New York, 1963). Although Abrams appropriately chooses to focus on Wordsworth, it is the Defence of Poetry that defines the terms and limits of revolutionary optimism for poets during the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Shelley and Peacock are not the first to debate the uses of poetry, but they are the first to set the debate within the terms and assumptions of the doctrines of Utility.

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of experience, to the materials of a knowledge that is tentative by its very nature. The same structural ambivalence, as reflected most generally in the contrast between intrinsic and descriptive, or extrinsic, order is present in Shelley's theory of poesis. Character is revealed both by "accidental vesture" and "eternal proportions"; and a story is both a "catalogue of detached facts", and a "creation . . . according to the unchangeable forms of human nature". Ambivalence is present in his conception of the great cyclical poem itself, and here it has special consequences: the great poem is at once wholly potential and wholly actual. Potentially, the great poem is the completed imaginative vision of human life, the mind returned to a unity with existence that is endlessly creative. Actually, the great poem is the never-finished work of many minds, of men struggling with the partial illuminations and errors of their particular lives in their particular environments. It reflects, in other words, the very psychological and historical perspectives that Shelley uses in criticism. He recognizes the problem of seeing the great poem as at once the idealism and the history of poetry. And his solution does not, certainly, resolve all the difficulties. It constitutes, in fact, a negative appeal. He views idealism and history, the potential and actual states of poetry, as implying one another in their very opposition. They are not reconciled by logical appeal to some higher entity than poetry, but defined as mutually supporting and interdependent. Their opposition is not a contradiction but a contrariety: the type of difference that implies, tentatively, an ultimate identity. The great poem is the tradition of poetry that every new poet must work against, and is at the same time the spirit, or community, of poetry which every new poet must serve. The model, as well as the vehicle, for such implied identity is the metaphor, that image of life which is at once truthful and Utopian. The potential state of the great poem is not really translatable as its actual state; rather, the two states are convertible. If one sees the great poem as a completed vision, the self unified, then one must also see, if only in shadow, the fragmentary and distorted vision, the self as personality. An endlessly creative

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unity is the redeemed form of mortal selfhood, yet redemption and damnation in poetry have strikingly similar characteristics. What this implies is that to define poetry as an idealism, or as an oracle, leads directly to the contrary awareness that poetry is self-expression, and that its values are inseparable from the life of the artist and his environment. The criterion of universality is converted into the criterion of intense feeling. Shelley does not reconcile these views by logic, but identifies them through metaphor. For the same process of producing contrariety takes place, only working now in the opposite direction, if one sees the great poem not as a completed vision but as the unfinished work of struggling, limited men. In this perspective, each new poet apprehends a distinct meaning in life, appreciates new possibilities of form. Yet, to define poetry as insight, or originality, or intensity, leads to the contrary awareness that significance is itself a matter of contexts, and to a definition of poetry that relates it to the values of its culture. The special, selective, order perceived by the poet turns out to have far-reaching, or tentatively, universal implications. The sides of Shelley's metaphor embody mutual contrasts, and this fact suggests that the way to accommodate such differences in a single theory is to effect a free and balanced interplay and competition of ideas. His idea of the great poem provides this interplay and competition with a simple framework that is neither arbitrarily eclectic nor deterministic in implication. Shelley's conception of the technique and effects of poetry are largely implied by his conceptions of the poet and the poetic medium. Pleasing and instructing are bound up with the imaginative power transmitted from the poet to the reader, from literature to life. The reader engages essentially in imaginative re-creation; thus, pleasure and knowledge come as species of power, as forms of perfected and expanded awareness. Poetry does not operate through a suspension of disbelief, but through a radical hope, the germ but surely not the whole truth of which is reflected in the poet's requirement of sympathetic reading and the reader's requirement of sincere writing. For Shelley this meant a displacing of habitual feelings by severe attention to objects, and

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the production of feeling from intellectual perceptions. This process functions in tragedy for instance, when the shock of reversal reduces us to a kind of elemental clarity that is knowledge and sympathy at once. Because Shelley thinks imaginative, or creative process and poetic effect are nearly identical, he makes only very loose distinctions among the kinds of poetry and the techniques appropriate to them. Indeed, his own best poems (Prometheus Unbound, Epipsychidion, Adonais, and "The Triumph of Life") are all examples of older "kinds" which have been modified in structure and put to new uses. In them he tries to harmonize form and theme not primarily out of allegiance to decorum, but rather out of a concern to transcribe a life that is lived at least partly in symbolic dimensions. Therefore, he works less from presuppositions about "genre" than from conceptions of imagery and narrative, elements more or less present in all poetry. Imagery traces the activity of the mind, acts of perceiving and interpreting; and narrative defines, above everything, the intent of character. His view of plot, therefore, is psychological; he often succeeds in finding its rhythm in the swift turnings and long delays of reflection, and in changes of emotional commitment. In his best poetry he achieves what he finds so vital in Sophocles: "a coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought". It is the power of poetry that is at once impassioned and enlightened that he hopes to communicate to his readers.

n Ambivalence, or tension, between spirit and form, potentiality and actuality, the One and the Many, recurs in all three areas of Shelley's poetic theory. It is their seminal characteristic. In his tracing of the process of poetic creation, as in his treatment of the history of poetry, he goes a considerable way towards demonstrating that these opposed terms ultimately imply one another, like the interchangeable poles of a magnet. But the striking thing about his conception of the poetic magnet is that the poles

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are true opposites, not false ones; real and not simply apparent alternatives. The idea of implied identity does not cancel out the idea of opposition. To think about poetry, for Shelley, meant recognition of the contrary qualities of its nature. And this recognition led him to a criticism built on opposed and competing perspectives, a criticism organized by metaphor in order to supply the widest possible range of contact between competing ideas without compromising their distinctness. His psychological and historical perspectives are each as viable as the other in explaining evidence, and the evidence uncovered through the agency of one perspective is frequently converted into the terms of the other. His principles, in other words, are almost wholly contextual in meaning. The principal example is the idea of the great poem, the idea in which so much of Shelley's critical thought is condensed. The great poem is (psychologically) the spiritual source of prophetic inspiration, and it is (historically) the technical source of poetic forms and conventions. It is (historically) the yet unfinished work of all poets on behalf of a dream of paradise or a kind of unified consciousness, and it is (psychologically) the fragmentary record of moments of intense, if limited, insight into the "indestructible order", formal and ethical, of language and representation. His principles are defined only by the totality of their applications. Metaphor, or, abstractly stated, the ambivalence that implies identity, is the key to this method of definition. And if the unity of his principles is to be found in metaphor, then the cost of this unity is ultimately the blindness of poetry itself. His metaphorical method leads him to identify the highest reaches of philosophical criticism with its object, the poem. It leads him certainly in the Defence to that point in argument where confirmation loses its edge and becomes simply assertion. But if Shelley creates a religion of poetry, he does so in full awareness of what he thought the fate of religion usually is. Hence, he makes his faith in poetry absolute only in contrast to other faiths, eternal and secular, and retains, by and large, a wholesome awareness that criticism, even a religious variety, is still the act of judging what is made by men within the order of the made. True, he seeks

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to broaden this order by identifying the essence of human action as "creation"; but his attempt is qualified by the recognition that criticism cannot "explain" poetic creation because it is itself included within the domain of poetry. He seeks to reform, or amend, and not to reconstitute our ideas of this domain. Shelley fails, then, to explain the nature of poetry; yet, his failure is not disastrous. His metaphorical method, and especially the "higher view" of poetry it generates in the Defence, is subject to abuse; it tends to encourage persuasive definitions, evasive generalizations, and circular argument. And in Shelley's case it is relatively clear that with each new application of the term "poetry" he sacrifices a little more of its precision and usefulness. But his analogies are usually informative rather than tautological. Sometimes, as with his identification of the theme of love as the guiding spirit of modern poetry, they open up fresh and exciting critical possibilities. His own discussions of Dante and Milton (for all their heterodoxy), of the function of imagery in Prometheus and The Cenci, of the use of myth in Hellas, and of the relation of poetry to morality in the Defence argue convincingly that his use of a metaphorical criticism yields practical results. He does not believe in a criticism where all distinctions are meaningless, nor does he exclude matters of fact and technique. Attention to these matters is hardly Shelley's strongest point as a critic; however, it is unwise to think on the basis of his relative neglect of them that he evades technical observations. The experimental nature of much of his verse in fact argues the contrary. Like most important theories, Shelley's is properly valued for the insights it contains, even though these leave many critical questions unsolved. When we examine the critical questions he has asked, either explicitly or tacitly, we can see with some clarity his limitations as a critic. Let me remark here that these limitations place him securely within his age; they are the limitations, or "difficulties", of Romantic criticism in general. First, Shelley, like Schiller and others of his time, advances an idea of man as Homo Ludens. Man is "pre-eminently an imaginative being". His ideas and his actions have their origin in the mediating activity of play, in the

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effort (often, of course, a serious and tragic struggle) to find or produce harmonies between himself and his environment, his desires and the reality of things. The values of life, in this view, are not static; they are rather organic processes that must be participated in to be known. Poets, as the most sensitive of life's participants, become the oracles and prophets of these values. Yet, the knowledge they transmit is limited by the very form, the very harmony their "creative" play of mind has released. The harmony they bring about is, therefore, always a synecdoche, at best, a symbolic form of experience. If the poet can transcend his senses to interpret the reality they report, he cannot transcend his own mind to render pure judgments of reality. The objects he produces are thus ambivalent; they are real and valuable because they are, as it were, "natural" expressions of organic processes of thought. But they are also fragments of reality and transitory in value because of their bond with an individual mind at a certain place and at a certain time. While Shelley's awareness of the ambivalent characteristics of Homo Ludens is, perhaps, a critical achievement in its own right, he tends to presuppose rather than analyze the assumptions on which the idea is based. Chiefly, he uses the idea to set his argument on the social consequences of art. Homo Ludens, in one sense, is simply the serious implication in Peacock's humorous definition of art as a plaything. By finding that all values as well as all forms of knowledge have intimate relation with the imaginative play of the mind, Shelley discovers a persuasive argument for showing the function of art in humanizing and revitalizing culture. He is less satisfactory in showing what in fact the experience is that art apprehends, if only symbolically, and why we tend to regard it as valuable. Shelley's second major limitation as a critic is indeed implied in his attempt to explain the nature of esthetic experience. He resorts, like other critics of his time, to a description of faculty psychology. He assumes that the laws of poetry must be found in the principles governing the poet's intention. His description is essentially dialectical: he opposes imagination and calculation (and, in moral terms, love and selfishness) as the governing

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principles of experience in general, and esthetic experience in particular. Reason, memory, will, emotion, and sense are all related to one another and modified by the agencies of imagination or calculation, which are at base simply two terms for describing what it is to think. Ostensibly, at least, thought is either imaginative or calculating, and the apprehension of value is wholly a form of imaginative thought. Shelley's Platonic reasoning becomes problematic when he is forced into the paradox of asserting the dualism of imagination and calculation, and yet asserting the primacy of imagination. The logic of such primacy is that calculation is only a perverted form of imagination after all, and that the differences between them must somehow be accommodated. In large measure, Shelley's problem is identical with that implied in Coleridge's distinction of imagination and fancy. Both men attempt qualitative distinctions of things that appear to be different only in degree. Shelley, I think, goes farther than Coleridge in quantifying his comparison. Imaginative thought and poetry are "more unified" and "more lively" than the thought and poetry of calculation because they assimilate more experience, and are richer in implication. Shelley does not attack "associationism" (the mode of mere Fancy in Coleridge) as a description of imaginative process; he finds it, instead, one among several ways in which the imagination works. For him, the dead, the fixed, and the definite (as well as the mechanical) were, potentially, fertile material for poets. Association was simply a lesser form of synthesis. But if Shelley gains in catholicity by this extension of the meaning of imagination, he suffers a loss in degree of precision. His view of the dynamics of the mind is too broad to be used, as Coleridge uses his, as a clear alternative to the traditional systems of thought in literary criticism. Both men believed that the laws of poetic intention were the formal principles of poetry, the principles governing plot, character, and theme. The formulation of these principles, however, owes little to Shelley. A third major limitation of Shelley's criticism is found in his attitude to history, an attitude that governs a good deal of his

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thinking about the value of art. His view of history, like his view of the mind, is essentially an attempt to accommodate contrariety. History is on the one hand a process of cultural growth, ruled by obscure "natural" laws (biological, geological, economic) that affect the disposition of human energies below the level of conscious will. On the other hand, history is a cyclical process that displays the rise and fall of human wisdom in meeting and mastering its environment, and makes its center the exploits of human heroes. The values of poetry reflect both descriptions: in the case of the former, the poet seizes on emerging life, on new forms of expression, and seeks to identify the direction of social change; in the latter case, the poet celebrates ripened life and the "eternal proportions" in the forms of expression, and sees the new man as a type of the original. Poetic values, in other words, are both normative and universal; they are explained both by historical contexts and by qualities that recur throughout history. Shelley's attempt to accommodate these two views, to find germs of identity in their differences, is philosophically ambitious as well as stimulating. But clearly he has raised more problems than he solves. His practical criticism gives lucid testimony to the difficulty of application in his attitude to history and poetic value. Shelley preaches the integrity of moral and artistic purposes, and the subordination of all elements to the living idealism which is the work itself. Yet, a conservative poet like Spenser ought not to "affect a moral aim" (the content of which is probably a product of the limited opinions of his age) for, in so doing, he ignores the growing presence of the new society in favor of older, "decaying" forms. The liberal Milton, whose aim is so obviously moral as to lead him to a "philosophical refutation" of the orthodox system, supplies the model Spenser ought to have discovered. The model is the revelation of the original Man, the "eternal proportions" of human action and thought. And Milton's liberal morality seems a natural portion of this model, while Spenser's conservatism seems an affectation. There may be a germ of truth in Shelley's diction (the defender of the past differs from the prophet as the archaic differs from the radical image, and there is inevitably a

CONCLUSION

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kind of "affectation" in allegory), but the disguised politics looms large. Moreover, Shelley's nearly exclusive interest in the character of the hero leads him to oversimplify the elements of action and circumstance in drama and narrative. Interested so in the clarification of the hero's motives, and despite the strength of his own social and historical awareness, he virtually removes the hero from his social and historical context. This tendency alone almost disables Shelley from seeing that comedy, with its strong social reference and "typical" characters, is more than a simple inversion of tragic norms. It leads also to his consistent failure to distinguish between the hero's "philosophy" as a function of the work and that "philosophy" as a projection of the writer's own view of life. His sense of dramatic irony tends to merge with his sense of the ambivalent values of knowledge and action generally. The presence of these major difficulties, however, ought not to obscure Shelley's achievements as a critic. First, he offers (like Wordsworth and Keats) an important re-interpretation of the ancient doctrine of inspiration. He conceives of inspiration as actual experience, as much a part of phenomena as the ordinary, "natural" experience analyzed by empirical philosophy. The inspired poet combines sensuous receptivity with inwardness, the object of his sight with the peculiar image hidden in the Baconian cave of his thought. Moreover, Shelley emphasizes this combination as an act of form-making, and represents the poet as Homo Ludens, seeking some reconciliation of his hope for permanence and his recognition of severe limitations. The most important result of this for practical criticism is the discovery of the process of art to be itself a poetic theme, a significant part of the "matter" of poetry. All poems are found to suggest in part the processes of their own invention, and to symbolize that most inclusive of categories, the creative act. Ultimately, there is no distinction between art and spiritual revelation. A second achievement, shared with Coleridge, is the doctrine that the specific language and rhythm of a poem is intrinsic to its formal purpose. Part of a general insistence on organic form, this idea is perhaps especially interesting in the Defence of Poetry

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CONCLUSION

when it is used to defend the "vanity of translation", and to claim that Plato's style as much as his ideas reveals his philosophy. Such a claim undercuts the Aristotelian distinction between what is appropriate and what is true in argument by asserting a kind of functional determinism. It is also, tacitly, an incidental defense of the integrity of method and purpose illustrated by his own essay. Closely related to his view of language and rhythm is a third achievement, his idea that characters reveal their "internal natures", their "eternal proportions", primarily by the manner in which they act. Manner modifies the substance of action. This idea is premised on the inadequacy of the traditional moral reading of character, which, on the one hand, obscured the "eternal proportions" by erecting a view of justice that suited only the particular circumstances of an age (either the poet's, or the reader's, or both), and, on the other hand, obscured the actual "life" of a character by projecting onto him an artificial or abstract role and meaning. While Shelley tends to abuse his insight by condemning other poets for "affecting a moral aim", he actually outlines a relatively new understanding of allegory. Dramatic or narrative action is conceived of as having metaphorical equivalence not simply to abstract ideas, but more importantly to the processes of consciousness, including those connections of present with past literature. Poetic "impersonations" are, in effect, mythic figures: fusions of a distinctive personal consciousness with a traditional literary type. The critical definiton of character is achieved by psychological and literary "unveiling". The fourth of Shelley's achievements as a critic is his analysis of our response to tragedy, an analysis that arises directly out of his own concentration on the psychology of action. He finds that tragic characters, from Milton's Satan to Beatrice Cenci, arouse a kind of casuistry of the passions. We love the person but despise the moral flaw that is his tragic fate; we admire his moral energy but are saddened by the uses to which it is put. The focus of the casuist critic is alternately the perversion of good motives by evil or indifferent circumstances, and the justification of crime by the

CONCLUSION

231

superiority of heroes (in knowledge or quality of feeling) to the conditions of their tragedy. The two elements of the response collide. The perversion of motives suggests victimization and the supremacy of fate; the justification of crime suggests moral victory and the supremacy of motives. Clearly, this conception implies the sensationalizing of tragedy, the playing out of passion in the tear-ducts, the moral extremities that are commonly found in the formulae of sentimentality and melodrama. But Shelley saw casuistry of the passions as leading to intellectual awareness. It "teaches the human heart knowledge of itself". Such knowledge, Shelley profoundly believed, originates in an expansion of awareness, a grasp of subtle and remote as well as familiar values, a completeness of perceptual attitudes. In defining this sublime or pernicious casuistry, he has given us a considerable tool for investigating the literature of the entire nineteenth century. The fifth and last of Shelley's major critical achievements is his conception of the great poem, dialectical in function and cyclical in form: a poetic universe governed by intrinsic laws and yet dependent for renewal on the innovations of particular poets. The great poem is the central belief of his criticism. It makes compatible the personal and traditional aspects of poetic form, the sense of change and the sense of constancy in poetic themes, the value of intensity and the value of universality. The conception reaches past Shelley's application of it to the history of ideas and literary types. Its best use in criticism is probably as a way of envisioning the interrelationships of literary works, a way of establishing a literary community. As such, the great poem is a parallel conception to T. S. Eliot's idea of the "ideal order of existing monuments", and to Northrop Frye's hypothesis of a total "order of words".4 The conception is obviously subject to abuse: for example, as a "selective tradition", or as a "reductive scheme" for transforming critical questions into religious, political, sociological, or psychological problems. Yet, properly em4

T. S. Eliot, "The Function of Criticism"; Northrop Frye, Anatomy Criticism, p. 17. Frye himself is author of this parallel, see p. 357.

of

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CONCLUSION

ployed, it can throw light on some of the most important implications of the study of literature. All of Shelley's critical achievements, like his limitations, bear the stamp of the particular intellectual and political trends of his time. They represent those instances when he was able to bring some of the most significant issues of his age into sharp focus. Without diminishing the emphasis of his contemporaries on the psychological process of art and the autonomy of the artist, he maintains a balanced view of the imagination as an informing or perfecting power, as distinct from personal will as it is from abstract reason. And without retreating from either the premises of individualism or the hopes of social reform, he envisions a literary and cultural tradition that not only supports the work of new poets, but clarifies the value of their innovations. Indeed, the debate Shelley waged with Peacock defined some of the basic assumptions and problems of nineteenth century English poetics. Whatever the cogency of Shelley's ideas today, it cannot be doubted that for his own radical and revolutionary time his conception of the value of poetry as a higher or universal Utility was both appropriate and profound.

INDEX

Abrams, Meyer, 17n, 24-25, 27, 35n, 114, 220n. Addison, Joseph, 26. Aeschylus, 154n, 214, 215. Affections: poetry of, 143-44, 147. Allegory, 129-30,192,200-01,217, 230. Analogy: as critical method, 13 (see Criticism): in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", 81-82. Aristotle, 32, 193, 194. Audience (see Effects and Style): division of poet from, 52, 53; relation of Character to, 192. Augustine, Saint, 56. Bacon, Francis, 31, 58, 67n, 6869, 111-12, 177. Baker, Carlos, 17, 18,19, 38, 43n, 51n, 78, 98n, 193n, 202n. Barrell, Joseph, 42n. Beauty: as poetic value, 54-56, 74, 190; as Spirit, 81-83. Berlin, Isaiah, 60n, 64n. Berkeley, George, 17, 54n, 59-67 passim, 110. Blake, William, 22, 97, 128, 149, 210.

Bloom, Harold, 20-23 passim, 8In, 83n, 86n, 87, 88n, 90n, 98n, 116n, 166n, 199n, 202n, 210. Bostetter, Edward, 2In. Brett, G. S., 63n. Bradley, A. C„ 16, 119, 126. Buber, Martin, 21. Bucolics (Bion, Moschus, Theo-

critus), 142, 143, 156, 157, 167. Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 117, 153. Calculation (see also Utility): poetry of, 144-45, 146-147; of Restoration poetry, 165; as ethos of Rome, 157-58. Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 135n, 153. Cameron, Kenneth Neil, 46n, 48n. Casuistry: as poetic effect, 166, 167, 230-31; in The Cenci, 197, 204,206-07; in Prometheus Unbound, 207-09, 210. Catullus, 158. Chaucer, Geoffrey, 164. Christianity: doctrines of, 17, 139; Shelley's attitude to, 41-42, 65n; and myth, 95-96, 98; as era of poetry, 159-68. Comedy, 198, 201, 229. Cornwall, Barry (Brian Procter), 31. Clark, David L., 21n, 37, 65n. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: as influence on Shelley, 16; as philosopher, 24; "France, an Ode", 44n; Biographia Literaria, 66, 7On, 101; The Friend, 67n; "Eolian Harp", 71; compared with Shelley, 227, 229. Criticism: the criticism of, 11, 12, 218; Shelley's method of, 24, 25-37, 57, 130, 219, 224-25; his historical perspective, 35-37,

234

INDEX

126; his psychological perspective, 35-37, 54; his attitude to, 49; his thematic bias, 131, 135; his emphasis on individualism, 196-97. Dante Alighieri, 95, 98,129, 150n, 151n, 154, 159, 161-63, 164, 190, 225; Paradiso, 136n, 174; Vita Nuova, 174. Davie, Donald, 113, 115. Drama, 22, 123, 124, 132-34, 139, 174-75,211. Dream, 15,119; in "Mont Blanc", 85-86. Drummond, William. See Empiricism. Effects (see Style): as category of criticism, 25, 26, 171-76. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 321. Empiricism, 18, 54n, 57-70, 72, 171. Enthusiasm: poetic and religious, 23; Platonic, 23-24. Eolian Harp (see Inspiration), 7172, 75; in Alastor, 77. Epic, 132, 140n, 163, 166, 17476 passim. Evil: in Shelley's ethic, 15, 16, 94-97; in The Revolt of Islam, 52; in The Cenci, 179-80, 20304; in Prometheus Unbound, 211-12; the imitation of, 11920. Fogle, Richard Harter, 17, 25n, 178n. French Revolution: and The Revolt of Islam, 43-46. Frye, Northrop, 36n, 149n, 231. Genre, 131-37, 171, 173, 174-76. Gerard, Albert, 80n. Gibbon, Edward, 160n. Gisborne, John, 41. Godwin, William, 46n, 64, 176, 209-10. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 214n.

Great Poem, The, 103-04, 138-68, 221-22, 224, 231; as central critical doctrine, 38; as the "spirit" of poetry, 65; historical phases of, 169; cardinal themes of, 169. Grabo, Carl, 17n. Hebrew poetry, 153-54. History: literary, 22, 25, 30n, 12627, 131, 138, 197; Shelley's idea of, 29-30, 46, 100, 227-29; as Providence, 93; relativism of, 127; as analogue of Great Poem, 141, 142, 149-68, 221-22; as poetic theme, 168, 181; "just" and "false", 193-95. Homer, 125-26, 142, 143-44, 147, 154-55, 163, 164. Horace, 158. Humanism: Shelley's, 12, 13, 14, 45, 65-70 passim, 93, 103, 232. Hume, David, 54n, 57-58, 59-68 passim, 110. Hungerford, Edward B., 116n. Hunt, Leigh, 203n. Idealism: philosophic, 15-16, 17, 63-64, 119; poetic, 75, 121, 128, 139, 168, 221; in Alastor, 7781 passim; in The Cenci, 134; in Adonais, 183-84; as imaginative form, 117-18, 173, 178, 180, 186; in drama, 124, 132-33; as characterization, 132, 139. Imagery: Shelley's use of, 17, 19; in Defence of Poetry, 25, 26, 32-37 passim, 145, 150-51, 162; in Alastor, 78-80; in Prometheus Unbound, 129; as structural element of poetry, 175-76, 176-91, 216, 217, 223; in visionary poems, 176; in "Ode to Liberty", 181-82; in Adonais, 182-85; as symbolic form of expression, 185, 191; in Plato, 23. Imagination: as synthetic process, 13, 56, 70-76, 77-91 passim, 99100; prophetic or visionary, 17,

INDEX 19, 20, 21, 53, 58, 72-73, 85, 88-91, 95-100, 103, 120, 219, 220; creative, 26, 28, 33, 43, 66, 68, 95-116 passim, 119, 120, 123, 173, 177, 220, 222-23, 22526; poetry of, 143, 147; symbolized in Adonais, 185; compared with Calculation, 227; relation t o Fancy, 227. Inspiration, 21, 22, 33, 35, 41, 229; in " H y m n to Intellectual Beauty", 82; in "Ode to Liberty", 181-82. Intellectual System, 64-66, 68 (see also Empiricism). Intensity, 34, 125n, 128, 131, 222. Intuition, 14, 17, 20, 22, 23, 59, 86-87; in " M o n t Blanc", 84n, 86-87, 90. Irony: as feature of Shelley's thought, 22, 187; in Peacock, 27-31 passim; in Shelley's poetry, 183, 198, 200-01, 204, 206, 210. James, D. G., 14n. James, William, 58n. Job, 153, 154n. Johnson, Samuel, 48. Jones, Frederick L., 28n. Kant, Immanuel, 50n, 54, 62, 7172, 73n. Keats, John, 117, 229. Language, 22, 168-69; nature of poetic, 104-18. Locke, John, 54n, 110. Love: as ethic, 18, 43-44, 53; as function of imagination, 56; as theme of Shelley's poetry, 78, 80; in Adonais, 184; in Prometheus Unbound, 188; in Witch of Atlas, 199-200; as central theme of modern poetry, 13637, 161-62, 225. Lucretius, 158. Lyric: as poetic type, 132, 174-75.

235 Macchiavelli, Nicolo, 139-40,160. Malthus, James, 45. Mathews, G . M., 88n. McKeon, Richard, l l n , 24, 32n, 35, 55n. Medwin, Thomas, 22. Metaphor: in Defence of Poetry, 26, 32-37 passim, 193-95; as radical f o r m of poetry, 109-12, 117-18, 145, 168, 189-90, 22122; of the G r e a t Poem, 138, 221-22; political, 202n. Milton, John, 95, 98, 132, 135, 151n, 154, 162n, 164-66, 167, 168, 216, 225, 228; Paradise Lost, 207, 208, 210-11. Morals: relation to poetry, 32-33; leadership, 43-46; in The Revolt of Islam, 49-53; in poetic characters, 126; in tragedy, 20506. Myth (see also Christianity), 18, 23; poetic as distinct f r o m dogmatic, 94-98; as basis of literary form, 128; as literary implication, 130. Narrative: of The Revolt of Islam, 49-51; as structural principle, 175-76, 191-207, 216-17, 223. Nature: as physical or external world, 15, 16, 20, 33, 43, 4748, 67, 72, 74-75, 76, 83, 120, 121, 149n, 155, 187-88, 198; as imaginative pattern, 48, 51-53, 64, 69, 83, 89-91; as "genius" in art, 49-50; as " c o m m o n sympathies", 49; in Alastor, 77-81; as source of art, 106, 108; human, 123-24, 130, 137, 165, 194; as analogue of mind, 190; in Witch of Atlas, 199; as perspective of comedy, 203. Necessity: doctrine of, 18, 43 , 52, 63; in Peacock, 30; in Alastor, 80. Notopoulos, James, 17, 18n, 38, 96.

236

INDEX

O'Malley, Glenn, 19, 25n, 33n, 65n, 77n, 78n, 105n, 177, 182n. Organicism: of poetic form, 146, 148, 229; of Shelley's critical vocabulary, 152; as philosophic view, 226. Orpheus, 33. Ovid, 158. Paine, Thomas, 46n. Peacock, Thomas Love, 109n, 126, 127, 128, 130, 138n, 141n, 145, 191n, 220n, 226, 232; Nightmare Abbey, 27; "Four Ages of Poetry", 27-31, 220. Petrarch, Francesco, 161. Plato, 15, 16, 17, 23-24, 27, 32, 37, 56-57, 67n, 75, 76, 96, 131, 135, 159n, 160, 195; style in, 230; The Republic, 16; theory of ideas, 54-55; Phaedo, 96; Ion, 150n; The Symposium, 188, 190. Platonism: in Shelley, 15-19, 23, 54-56, 57, 100, 112, 119, 194, 217, 227; as critical method, 32, 37, 39, 57. Pleasure, 33, 34, 53, 99, 107-08, 111, 173, 190, 222. Pope, Alexander, 95. Prophecy: as element in poetry, 91-101, 102, 114-16. Prophet: as poet: 138, 140, 145, 152, 168, 181, 194; in Prometheus Unbound, 214. Psychology: and Shelley's criticism, 128-29, 142. Pulos, C. E., 56n, 65n, 83n. Radiance, 122-23, 135-36, 137-38, 190. Radicalism, 18, 30n, 42-53 passim, 217. Reform, see Radicalism. Representation, 34, 35, 104, 11831, 168-69, 175-76. Revery, see Dream. Rhythm, 105. Rogers, Neville, 17, 18n, 55n, 56n, 188n.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 44, 182; in "The Triumph of Life", 180.

Satan, 162n, 167, 231; and Prometheus Unbound, 207-11, 214. Scepticism (see also Empiricism), 15, 18, 195n. Science, 22; in Shelley's thought, 16, 30, 43, 68, 97. Shakespeare, William, 134, 135, 215. Schiller, Johann Friedrich, 225. Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 26. Shelley, Mary, 48n, 189, 213. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. —.Poetry: Adonais, 65, 98, 116, 167n, 182-85, 223; A lastor, 43 n, 46n, 53n, 56n, 76-81, 82, 107n, 129, 176n, 192, 198, 200-01, 203, 296; The Cenci, 105n, 11213, 134, 166-67, 175n, 179-80, 195-97, 203-04, 205-07, 225; Epipsychidion, 19, 29n, 81n, 98-100, 116, 177, 223; "An Exhortation", 94n; Hellas, 41, 94, 13On, 151n, 225; "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", 22n, 23, 77, 81-83, 91, 178; Julian and Maddalo, 113; "Letter to Maria Gisborne", 28n, 113; "Mont Blanc", 67n, 77, 83-91, 94n, 178; "Ode to Liberty", 114-15, 176; "Ode to Naples", 118n; "Ode to the West Wind", 20, 77; Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant, 28n, 201-03; Peter Bell III, 28n, 62n, 201-03; Prometheus Unbound, 14n, 23, 2930, 33n, 39, 46n, 98, 116, 118n, 119, 123n, 129, 130n, 151, 163n, 164n, 165n, 167n, 178, 185-89, 195n, 197, 207-09, 21015, 216, 217, 220n, 223, 225; Queen Mab, 43, 46n, 71, 95, 97, 167n; The Revolt of Islam, 43-53, 94n, 105, 106n, 115n, 116, 173n, 192n; Rosalind and Helen, 178; "The Sensitive

237

INDEX

Plant", 113; "The Triumph of Life", 97, 116, 180, 205n, 223; "The Witch of Atlas", 113, 198200, 202-03. —, Prose: Defence of Poetry, 21, 24-37 passim, 48n, 56n, 65, 7076, 82-83, 92, 100, 104-05, 10708, 109-10, 111, 117, 118, 122, 125, 126, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 141n, 142-47, 149-51, 15368, 171-72, 173n, 174-75, 192, 194-95, 205, 208, 220n, 224-25, 229, 232; "Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks", 156n; "Essay on Christianity", 65, 112, 139, 151n; "Essay on the Devil and Devils", 154, 210n; "Essay on a Future State", 76n, 91n; "On the Banquet of Plato", 23, 55n; "On Life", 6369 passim, 85, 110; "A Refutation of Deism", 90n; "Review of Godwin's Mandeville", 209; "Speculations on Metaphysics", 37, 54-70 passim, 86n, 110; "Speculations on Morals", 37, 107n. Sidney, Philip, 16, 74, 119. Solve, Melvin, 15, 16, 17, 119, 190n. Sophocles, 135, 142, 143-44, 147, 153, 189. Spenser, Edmund, 146n, 228. Sterne, Laurence, 30n. Sublime, The, 190. Swift, Jonathan, 30n. Symbolism: Shelley's use of, 17n, 18-19; in The Revolt of Islam, 51-52; in Alastor, 80; in "Mont Blanc", 87-91; in the Defence of Poetry, 162; in Prometheus Unbound, 179-80; in Adonais, 182; Platonic, 18, 19-20; as poetic style, 42, 223. Style: Shelley's idea of, 22, 10506, 112-18, 171; in Adonais,

182; in Prometheus Unbound, 186-87, 215; in Shelley's criticism, 222-23. Tasso, Torquato, 94n. Technique, see Style. Thompson, Edward P., 30n. Tradition, 25, 103, 111, 231-32. Tragedy, 192, 198, 205-06, 229, 230-31. Universality: as poetic value, 22, 26, 34, 42, 75, 130-31, 135, 145, 157, 222; of the Great Poem, 103, 169; in Homer's characters, 154-55. Urbanity, 113-16. Utility: as social principle, 30, 10809, 171, 220n, 232. Virgil, 158. Voltaire, 44. Vision: theme in Shelley's poetry, 76-91. Vivian, Charles H., 83n, 87, 90n. Wasserman, E. R„ 17n, 18, 20, 21, 22, 63n, 84n, 85n, 86n, 87, 90n, 98n. Wellek, Rene, 12, 63n, 75n, 160n, 174n. White, Newman I., 18, 28n, 51n, 62n. Wilson, Milton, 17n, 18, 19, 96n, 98n, 166n, 178n, 206n. Woodman, Ross G., 33n, 47n, 98n. Wordsworth, William, 44n, 105n, 117, 187, 202, 203, 229; as influence on Shelley, 16; compared with Shelley, 23; Lyrical Ballads, 114. Yeats, William Butler, 17n, 129n. Young, Edward, 106. Zoroastrianism, 51-52.

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