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from Part II - Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2025
This chapter considers Percy Shelley’s concern with ancient Greek literature through a close reading of ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’. The second half of the poem unfolds a description of the guitar modelled on the representation of the lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. In the course of this account, Shelley presents an instrument which is akin to its ancient counterpart in its bewitching power, but which derives qualities from its environment in a manner quite different from anything envisaged in the hymn. When refashioned through Shelley’s imagination, the guitar acts as a figure both for poetry’s capacity to animate as well as to reflect perception, and for the power of creative appropriations to change the terms on which we relate to ancient literature.
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