Shelley's Defences of Poetry' Michael O'Neill Durham University

Shelley's Defences of Poetry' Michael O'Neill Durham University

Percy Byssbe Sbelley (1792-1821) was a poet wbo pos- sessed, in his own words, "the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature."^ Yet the greatness of his poetry, this essay will argue, does not essentially reside in his capacity to articu- late his strong libertarian beliefs. These beliefs may be tbe ground of bis conscious intellectual being. Tbey sbow tbe influence of many tbinkers, including tbat ensbrined in tbe Enquiry Concerning Political Jiislice (1793), written by bis fa- tber-in-law, William Godwin. But tbe supposition tbat Sbelley uses poetry as tbe vehicle for the endorsement of a system of ideas is fundamentally erroneous, as be bimself argues in two important places for understanding bis poetics: tbe Preface to Prometheus Unbound, wbere he asserts tbat "Didactic poetry is my abborrence" (232) and A Defence of Poetry, wbere be de- velops a sopbisticated tbeory of poetry's primary appeal to tbe imagination and argues tbat "A Poet . . . would do ill to embody bis own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in bis poetical creations, wbicb participate in neitber" (682).

Sbelley's importance and acbievement as a poet derive from tbe way in wbicb be tests, dramatises, anatomizes and enacts the processes involved in belief or, indeed, doubt. He turns out, surprisingly given tbe terms of bis reputation as a poet hurrying always to exalt principles of liberty, love, and equalit)', to be one of tbe major exemplars of Keats's ideal of "Negative Capability" (Keats Letters 1. 193). Sbelley is often prepared to open bis poetry to differing interpretations, to allow tbe reader's mind to be tbe final courtroom of tbe po- etry's appeal. The Poet oi Alastor (1816), Shelley's enigmatic poem of driven and disappointed quest, might illustrate the dangers of what in tbe Preface is described as "self-centred seclusion" (92). But tbe narrative form prevents any simply moralistic reading from enjoying un-interrogated sway. Told by a Narrator, wbo expresses deep admiration for tbe Poet as a "surpassing Spirit" (714), and wbose unsatisfied longing for communion witb nature tallies witb the Poet's failed attempt

to find an embodied form of tbe "veiled maid" (151) of a particularly vivid dream, Alastor ricocbets between uncon- vinced acceptance of "Nature's vast frame" (719) and de- spairing longing for sometbing beyond "Art and eloquence, / And all tbe sbows 'o tbe world" (710-11). It comes to a close witbout closing off an openness to all tbat resists final closure.

As in many of Sbelley's poems, tbe ambiguities of Alas- tor owe mucb to Shelley's complex response to a precursor poet, in tbis case Wordswortb, wbose solemnly melodious blank verse and themes of solitude and relationsbip witb na- ture in The Excursion and Tintem Abbey provide tbe frame witbin and against wbicb tbe younger poet works. Sbelley's dealings with Wordsworth are not merely antagonistic. He may question aspects of the older poet's creed and perceived ideology. Yet Shelley's poetic remodelling implies the impor- tance of Wordsworth's mode of vision. Wordswortb is prob- ing central questions, even if bis answers do not compel Sbelley's assent. Wordswortb is tbe precursor brought to mind yet redefined in two major shorter poems written the year Alastor was publisbed: "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc." In the former, Sbelley is at once tbe radi- cal atheist of The Necessity of Atheism (1811) and tbe Notes to tbe early Qiieen Mab (1813) wbo contends tbat "Every reflect- ing mind must acknowledge tbat tbere is no proof of tbe ex- istence of a Deity" (81) and tbe visionary individualist wbo redefines "God" in bis unfinisbed On Christianity. Tbere, Shelley reprises a central conviction of the "Hymn to Intellec- tual Beauty" when he writes: "Tbere is a power by wbicb we are surrounded, like tbe atmospbere in wbicb some motion- less lyre is suspended, wbicb visits witb its breatb our silent cbords, at will" (Shelley Prose 251). If "intellectual beauty" is experienced witbin tbe mind, its ultimate source may be in- tra- or extra-human ("visits" and "power" lend support to the latter possibility), and is certainly beyond wbat in A Defence of Poetiy Sbelley calls "tbe determination of tbe will" (696).

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The "Hymn" creates a lyric form that in its longer and shorter lines, and subde rhyming, mimes the coming and go- ing of the "Power" and the waxing and waning of the poet's confidence. It plays its own variations on Wordsworth's theme of visionary loss and subsequent recovery in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Whereas Wordsworth writes a poetry of plangent lament, Shelley, as he switches in his third stanza, say, from deriding orthodox "Frail spells" to launch- ing his own "Frail spell" in the direction of "Thy light alone" (29, 32) displays a beaudfully unprotected abruptness. The unadvertised swiftness of movement from scepticism to self- generated faith is typical of the drama going on in and ani- mating his poetry. In "Mont Blanc" (version A), he again brings Wordsworth to mind, and "The everlasting universe of things" (1) that "Rolls through the mind" seems to partici- pate in the "modon and a spirit" (102) that "rolls through all things" (103) in Tiniem Abbey (quoted from Gill (ed.)). But if Wordsworth celebrates "a sense sublime / Of .something far more deeply interfused" (96-7), Shelley offers a warier, more sceptical view. And yet at the poem's close, responding to his own more deeply sustained sense of the mind's power (shown in the echoes of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" at the close of section 4, echoes that offset the grimmer naturalism of preceding lines), Shelley suggests the dependence of any sense of sense on "the human mind's imaginings" (143).

Shelley is a poet of emotional and conceptual extremes conveyed in verse of great discincdon, force and subdety. He is a poet of desire, of the longing for change, for "some world far from ours" ("To Jane ['The keen stars were twinkling']" 21-22) that is our world redeemed. But he is also a poet who writes compellingly about all that thwarts desire. He is to his fingertips a poet of criss-crossing perspecdves; if his poetry "enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenish- ing it with thoughts of ever new delight" {Defence of Poetry 682), it continually attunes itself to what in the Preface to The Cenci he calls "sad reality" (314). "Two Spirits: An Allegory," for all (or possibly because of) its editorial quandaries, is a quintessential Shelleyan lyric of divided impulses. The poem exists only as a rough draft with multiple cancellations and unclear indications in places of final or near-final choices, but what is manifest is that it has found a precise lyric config- uration of its own, in its stanzaic structure, rhymes, and images. Although the poem dramatizes the clash between caution and idealistic desire, it immediately complicates both positions; the First Spirit warns but sees the lure of desire; the second persists in desire, but sees the dangers he is facing. The poem sets exalted terror against exhilarated commit- ment to "the flood of the tempest dark" (26), and arrives, in its coda, at a fine balance between suggestions of loss and recovery. It ends with a "traveller" (43) who "awakes on the fragrant gra.ss" (47) and "finds night day" (48), just tildng the poem towards a residual trust in the heart's best hopes, even as it characterisdcally puts the reader on the spot, implicidy asking him or her why "day" and "night" should be invested with stable and hierarchical symbolic significances.