9/11/07 - English Literature - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Is it possible to write about death? Or arbitrarily, is it possible to write death? Poetry is obsessed with consolation and recuperating life. Among the Romantic poets, only Shelley grapples with death directly in his poetry. He is a unique poet, with an imagination unrivalled by contemporary poets. Radical and political philosophy are the objects of his discussions, and he does this by combining the power of imagination with the power of death.

Shelley draws equally between two intellectual traditions: the Enlightenment and the Romantic. Both were well established by the time he wrote his poetry. He was linked to both by (a) rationalism and scepticism (Enlightenment) from Hume and Godwin, and (b) irrationalism and organicism (Romantic) through Coleridge and Schlegel. According to the Enlightenment view: language is arbitrary signs of thought; history is contingent, with gradual improvement (Godwin); politics are radical, and about maximising representation; and writing is satirical irony, where content determines form. Conversely, the Romantic view is this: that language is the informing principle of thought; that history is necessary and in decline since the time of the Ancients; politics are quietist, problematising representation; and the writing is 'philosophical' irony, where form and content are mutually determining.

But Shelley cannot be pigeon-holed into either category. He has an Enlightenment scepticism and hatred of religious orthodoxy. He maintains the belief that humans can improve their own lot, so writing can change political circumstances. But also he believes that reason alone cannot do this; he thinks there can be an excess of rationalism. He believes that history is in decline, and thinks we have lost the sense of our roots, of organic unity. He thinks that we need to recover it through poetry. Shelley therefore moves to a Romantic idea of improvement.

So can poetry express imagination without the philosophical enquiry of Coleridge, or the quietude and passiveness of Wordsworth?

Shelley wrote his "Ode to the West Wind" while on war commission, after a time of great massacres and confusion amongst the police and military forces. He was furious about this, and the poem is a response to the massacre (his other responses are less direct). He can be read as a fatalist, but it would not be wholly true. The appearance of autumnal Paris is a source of inspiration to Shelley. The lyre is associated with Romantic poetry. There is an expression of powerful consciousness through the wind and lyre of the reawakening of spring. It shows originality; the ode is "to" the west wind, rather than "on" the west wind. It was a traditionally Greek or Roman trope to treat the wind as a deity. While Wordsworth and Coleridge were known for their lack of personification, Shelley's paganism is quite controversial. But he is sceptical of transcendentalism in the Wordsworthian sense and he takes on a sense of time in terms of death and regeneration which has little to do with individuals or consciousness. Shelley is obsessed with death, with the fundamental belief that the principle of all life is within matter itself. So he is a materialist, but also an idealist. He disconnects materialism from mechanism: reality is not like a machine. He takes this idea from Lucretius, the idea that a purely material universe may not run on things that are mechanical by nature.

For Lucretius the universe is wholly composed of atoms and void. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Matter is like "invisible winds."

"Therefore I say again and again, there are unseen bodies of wind, since in deeds and ways they are found to rival great rivers, which possess a body which can be seen. […]"
[Lucretius, De rerum natura, (‘On the Nature of Things’) 1st C. BC, Book I]

The soul is composed of atoms that reform outside the body after death; life is even dependent on death.

"For so many first-beginnings of things in so many ways, smitten with blows and carried by their own weight from infinite time up to the present, have been accustomed to move and to meet together in all manner of ways . . . . that it is no wonder if they fell also into such arrangements […]. [T]he world was certainly not made for us by a divine power: so great are the faults with which it stands endowed. […] Therefore, when I see the grand parts and members of the world being consumed and born again, I may be sure that heaven and earth also once had their time of beginning and will have their destruction. […] [T]he earth is diminished and is increased and grows again."
[Book V]

The last line states that the principle of life is death. The tendency of the universe is towards decay (we see empires falling throughout history).

"So therefore the walls of the mighty world in like manner shall be stormed all around, and shall collapse into crumbling ruin […] nature does not supply as much as is necessary. Even now the power of life is broken, and the earth exhausted scarce produces tiny creatures, she who once produced all kinds […]."
[Book II]

Atoms are clustered together, according to Lucretius, because of "swerving." He offers no explanation for swerving; it cannot be comprehended. In Shelley's poem is a simplification of Lucretius' theory. The wind pulls apart and creates at once. There is a central paradox in the poem: it is an affirmation of the power of imagination affecting political change, yet it assumes that human nature is fundamentally passive. Shelley is optimistic but restricted to non-violence. The power of imagination is life the decaying power of the wind, the power that is within everyone. The old order must decay to allow a new society to be reborn. Shelley can be linked with feminism in a proto-feminist way, as beings are subverted into a dispersal of atoms, rather than based on a phallic central view like Wordsworth. This puts Shelley in contact with the female concern of birth. He comes to terms with something critics say Romantics deny:

"[‘The Triumph of Life’] warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence."
[Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured: 'The Triumph of Life'," in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (1979)]

Shelley internalises death and the full negativity of life. But he is not politically nihilistic. Shelley attached unjust systems of life.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
[‘Ozymandias,’ 1817]

In Ozymandias Shelley is deceptively ambivalent. Lucretian imagery is still at work: in the sands of history sweeping away the vanity of kings. Their vanity is therefore atomised and dispersed. This is usually described as Shelley's way of escaping temporality, and suggests we see the poet as an immortal being also. But this is a misconception.

"[T]he mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness […] when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet."
[A Defence of Poetry (1821), Norton II, pp. 798-99]

Here are the Lucretian winds once more, and they are even decaying poetry. Poetry and poets are therefore not immortal in the eyes of Shelley.

In conclusion, in his desire to affirm materiality and political change, and to do this as an imaginative being, Shelley uses a non-transcendental and non-radical form of Romanticism. Chaos of order must exist in order to create enlightenment. This view leads to something new: the rejection of both the Enlightenment view of historic progress and of the Romantic view of historical decline. It is a decay and rebirth system. This power of contingency is a secret power of creation and destruction, symbolised by winds. There is a power in Shelley's work that is strangely impersonal, but it is explained by this Lucretian theory. Shelley attempts to redefine the human. He is thus the only Romantic poet to directly discuss death.