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  • Chapter 41 - Shelley: Palinode/Divagation

  • from Part IV - Afterlives
  • Edited by Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Percy Shelley in Context
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025, pp 317-325

  • Summary

    This chapter reopens the case of Shelley’s ‘Defence’, both his famous manifesto and the question of defending (or critiquing) Shelley. The essay addresses Shelley’s vision of the poet; its salience for twenty-first-century readers, critics, and poets; the relation of lyric to law (marked in the famous phrase ‘unacknowledged legislators’); and the status of ‘Man’ as ‘an instrument’ (Shelley’s ‘Aeolianism’). Shelley emerges via philosopher Giorgio Agamben as a vector of ‘the contemporary’. Poet Sean Bonney offers one critique of Shelleyan poetics, theorist Barbara Johnson another. The essay turns to poet and essayist Anne Boyer to explore Shelleyan negation and reckonings with ‘the world’, and turns next to poets Ariana Reines and Christopher Nealon as offering latter-day Shelleyan Aeolianisms – proposing the poet as a medium of imagination and of historical processes. The essay concludes with a poem by the author (McLane), ‘Mz N Triumph of Life’.