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The Case of Shelley
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Although this paper is entitled “The Case of Shelley,” an essay of this length can of course present only the brief of a case—hardly more than a dogmatic statement of the heads of an argument which, given room enough, I would undertake to make plausible through the presentation of evidence. The statement of the case is methodical: that is, it proceeds according to a general theory of literary history which Shelley's reputation illustrates, but which was not derived from the study of that reputation alone. The method is inductive or experiential; and since the implications of the experiential method as applied to the writing of literary history are by no means generally understood, I think I shall get farther in the end if I invest a considerable portion of my space in definition.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 An oral summary of this paper was given at the meeting of English Section II of the Modern Language Association, 27 Dec. 1951.
2 See Newman I. White, The Unextinguished Hearth (Durham, 1938).
3 An oral judgment recorded by his biographer, Christopher Wordsworth, in 1827. We may add the following, recorded respectively by J. J. Taylor (1 July 1826) and W. E. Gladstone (1836): “[Wordsworth] told us he thought the greatest of modern geniuses, had he given his powers a proper direction, and one decidedly superior to Byron, was Shelley, a young man, author of Queen Mab, who died lately in Rome”; “[He] thought Shelley had the greatest native powers in poetry of all men of this age.... Saw in Shelley the lowest form of irreligion, but a later progress towards better things. Named the discrepancy between his creed and his imagination as the marring idea of his works.” For references see the useful collection by Markham L. Peacock, Jr., The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (Baltimore, 1950), under Shelley and Byron.
4 Matthew Arnold, concluding paragraphs of “Byron” and “Shelley,” in Essays in Criticism, Second Series, pp. 143-144, 177 of Macmillan's impression of 1930; Sir Leslie Stephen, “Godwin and Shelley,” in Hours in a Library, ii, 73, of Murray's impression of 1926. The original dates of publication of the passages quoted are respectively 1881 and 1879. Arnold's figure is better known than it deserves; Stephen's is more apt because it parodies Shelley's own most characteristic figures.
5 Most of this material is conveniently collected in Newman I. White's Shelley (New York, 1940), especially in ii, 389-418.
6 Sir Arthur Clutton-Brock, “Introduction” to The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Charles D. Locock (London, 1911), i, xi-xxii. My summary is in large part direct quotation. In my opinion, the essays which most usefully characterize Shelley's poetry are this one, Francis Thompson's (in spite of its florid style), and Andrew Cecil Bradley's “Shelley's View of Poetry” in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London, 1909). A good deal of what follows above to the end of the paragraph is taken verbally from Bradley's essay (pp. 152-153) and from its extension, “Shelley and Arnold's Critique” in A Miscellany (London, 1931), p. 149.
7 “Byron,” in Essays in Criticism, Second Series, pp. 132-133 of Macmillan's impression of 1930.
8 Thomas Steams Eliot, “Shelley and Keats,” in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), pp. 87-88.
9 Clive Staples Lewis, “Shelley, Dryden, and Mr. Eliot,” in Rehabilitations (Oxford, 1939), pp. 15-20, 29-33.
10 The most extravagant general critical judgment I remember is Swinburne's, somewhat earlier than 1895: “... whether we class him as second or third among English poets, it must be in either case conceded that he holds the same rank in lyric as Shakespeare in dramatic poetry—supreme, and without a second of his race” (“Notes on the Text of Shelley,” in Essays and Studies, London, 1876, p. 237). The most extravagant judgment on a single poem is perhaps Saintsbury's: “I... have always thought that A Lament is the greatest thing in English poetry out of Shakespeare; the greatest thing in the entire poetry of the world out of Shakespeare, Dante, and Aeschylus” (A Last Vintage, London, 1950, p. 240). The dictum dates from 1892.
11 “The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry” in Ideas of Good and Evil (London, 1903), pp. 91, 93, 110-111.
12 The Use of Poetry (see n. 8), p. 88; Frank Raymond Leavis, Revaluation (London, 1936, or New York, 1947), pp. 203-204.
13 Red to Wyman in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Part ii, Sec 5.
14 In “Talk on Dante,” The Adelphi, xxvii (1st Quarter 1951), 110-112. He speaks of it as containing “some of the greatest and most Dantesque lines in English,” and after quoting lines 176-205 adds, “Well, this is better than I could do. But I quote it, as one of the supreme tributes to Dante in English, for it testifies to what Dante has done, both for the style and for the soul of a great English poet.” In 1950 he admitted to having obtained “a new and more sympathetic appreciation” of Shelley from a book to which he contributed a preface: English Poetry and its Contribution to the Knowledge of a Creative Principle, by the Italian philosopher Leone Vivante. (Since this paper was sent to the printer, Mr. Eliot's “Talk on Dante” has been reprinted in the Spring 1952 number of the Kenyon Review, xiv, 178-188. My attention was called to both printings by Mr. Russell Thomas, Yale '54.)
15 In the preface mentioned in n. 14.
16 “Our ‘Neo-classic’ age is repeating those feats of its predecessor which we least applaud. It is showing a fascinating versatility in travesty. And the poets of the ‘Romantic’ period provide for it what Shakespeare, Milton and Donne were to the early eighteenth-century grammarians and emendators—effigies to be shot at because what they represent is no longer understood” (Ivor Armstrong Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, London, 1950, p. 196).
17 William K. Wimsatt, “The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery,” in The Age of Johnson, Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker (New Haven, 1949), p. 302.—Mr. Tate (On the Limits of Poetry, New York, 1948, p. 126) confines himself to the last stanza of the poem:
Its passions will rock thee
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.
He identifies “Its” of the first line with “Love's,” makes “thee” a human lover (a woman), and says that the ravens in the second line are eagles in the sixth. The antecedent of “Its” is actually “the frailest [heart]” of the preceding stanza, and “thee” is Love. The “argument” of the last two stanzas is that after lovers have been united, they fall out of love with each other, but unfortunately not at the same time. The weaker of the two (it might be either the man or the woman) goes on loving after the stronger has been released. This hopeless persistence of love on one side makes love generally seem unreasonable and ridiculous. But the literal tenor is never stated; instead the poet starts with a figure which he immediately makes the first term of a second figure. He adopts the old conceit that when a man and woman are in love, it is because the god of Love is nesting in their hearts. (See Mr. Tate's own approving reference to this conceit as it appears in Guido Guinizelli, p. 78 of On the Limits of Poetry: “Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore / Come alla selva augello in la verdura.”) The heart of the stronger lover is called a “well built nest.” The poet addresses the god of Love: “You are always complaining about human frailty, but if what you want is stability, why do you choose the frailer of two hearts to come to first and to linger in longest? You are supposed to be a noble creature, and your nest is supposed to be an eagle home; why, then choose something much more like a raven's nest? [In Shelley's day the English raven commonly nested near the top of a tall tree; the golden eagle—the eagle par excellence—always built its nest on a cliff.] The passions of the frailer heart will rock you as rudely as the storm winds rock the ravens in their nest. Just as the raven, if it stays in its nest after the leaves fall, will be exposed to the bright cold sun and cold winds of winter, so, if you linger in the frail heart, you will be exposed to rational mockery and to laughter.” Mr. Tate says, “Are we to suppose that the other birds come by and mock the raven (eagle), or are we to shift the field of imagery and see ‘thee’ as a woman?” I can hardly believe he would stick to this on reconsideration, for it implies a demand that the circumstances on both sides of a simile must be not merely parallel but identical. In Shelley's poem we have two parallel series of four terms each: on the one side Love, frail heart, mocking reason, laughter; on the other, raven, nest in a deciduous tree, winter sun, cold winds. “Eagle home” in the third line from the end is bitterly ironic. Though this is undoubtedly obscurely stated through condensation, it seems to me far from being careless or incoherent.