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An Appreciation of Shelleyin the Postmodern Age

In his mature years, the great twentieth century poet W. B. Yeats admitted that the primary influence upon his writing had been not William Blake, much in vogue in his youth and remaining so then and now among literary critics, but Shelley. He went on to say that, “regarding those who do not agree that Percy Bysshe Shelley is a very great poet, there is nothing that I can say to them.” In thinking about writing this essay, I have more than once been tempted to follow Yeats’s inclination. Moreover, I am not even qualified as a literary critic, a telling hand-icap in an age of specialized skills and knowledge, but only a failed scribbler, “an idle singer of an empty day”, to borrow a line from Clough, a classicist-modernist beached on the desolate sands of postmodernity. One major consideration, however, has induced me to go ahead with this attempt. This is that Shelley is of special significance today—inasmuch as any writer who is not young and alive right now can continue to have any significance, if only among the small and diminishing minority still upholding a literary tradition—because he stands near to what would be the antipodal extreme to the main elements of postmodern culture and civilization. A consumption-driven, docile, unthinking mass, happily worship-ping the idol of self-gratification erected before them; a corporate hegemony and oligarchy ruling over a civilization in which an all-pervading commercialization has poisoned the fountains of life, and everything is an item to be bought or sold, including matters of mind and spirit, even individuality itself; an educated elite that thinks and feels in diminishingly human terms, and their minds awash in an inform-ation glut that infests the world, and makes the ability to discriminate among what matters and what doesn’t perhaps the most crucially vanishing attribute; a humanity which, except for one of the few healthy developments in postmodern-ity, the environmental movement when truly genuine and not hijacked by the corporate culture, has been long severed from the harmony, physical and spirit-ual, with nature which existed in the past, and nature itself in rapid ebb and dying; conventional thinking and uncritical acceptance of custom or popular belief so prevalent, although in numerous instances masked under a pretense of being other than what it is; to all these things, and others I don’t want to here enumer-ate, Percy Bysshe Shelley stands at the opposing pole, and which is why the thoughts which live within his poetry are so important today, if people would bother to read and understand his work. Now I realize that in writing about Shelley I shall be doing so before a largely unsympathetic audience. That is because within the canon of Dr F. R. Leavis, a primarily unfavourable and dismissive view of Shelley prevails, and I believe that most of the readership of this magazine adhere to that canon. I will not attempt to counter his arguments—as I have said, I’m not a literary critic—but will simply


present a different view of Shelley. By a broad excursion through his works, I will try to some measure explain a poet whose writings have so often been misconstrued and distorted. But if, reminded of the assertion by Yeats quoted at the beginning, explanation is largely futile, my more modest hope is that the reader will look upon this essay in praise of Shelley as simply the confession of an aberration, a depiction of a literary vice or addiction, and not as an attempt at recommendation. Here I am reminded of the words of the recently deceased Hunter S. Thompson, when he said, “I would not recommend drugs, alcohol, and violence to anyone, but they always worked for me.” This then may be regarded as the delineation of an addiction to what it is not entirely inappropriate to describe as the poetic equivalent of drugs, alcohol, and violence. To begin. First, one must return to what is around us now, that is, our contemporary culture and its expression in literature. The salient characteristic of the bulk of writing today, largely amorphous but in this quite distinct, is that it’s dead, inert. This was very astutely anatomized by Brian Lee in Issue no. 9 of this magazine, in his essay “Martin Amis and the Present State of Fiction”. It was this quality of postmodern writing which Eliot, himself still a modernist, preeminently both foreshadowed and represented, and hence his importance in the poetry of the twentieth century. An excellent analysis of Eliot and what he means, is the like-named essay, “What Eliot Means”, again by Brian Lee, which appeared in one of the antediluvian print ancestors of this magazine, before the floods of postmodern night closed over it, Issue no. 8 of The Haltwhistle Quarterly. Eliot, significantly, found Shelley’s ideas “repellent”: Eliot was imbued with the spirit of what was coming, while his contemporary, Yeats, holding quite the opposite view of Shelley, looked backwards, to what was vanishing. Now Shelley, though he could not have imagined our postmodern future (could anyone have, at that time?), knew of states of mind and of conditions similar to it. In a different context, but one in which the effect on the mind is the same, he writes of his protagonist, “… His wan eyes/ Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly/ As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven.” ( Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude ll. 200-202). His longest poem, The Revolt of Islam, written early in his career, may perhaps be considered a failure in its totality, but nonetheless contains numerous passages of splendid verse of a very high order. An analysis or critique of this poem is outside the scope or competence of this essay, and its naivety of purpose (as explained by Shelley in the preface) or of idea, a characteristic of Shelley to which Barrie Mencher confesses a dislike in the previous issue, may indeed strike our jaded, knowing, and sophisticated sensibilities on a dissonant note. In a previous age this kind of naivety might have been called simplicity, and would not necessarily have been seen in pejorative terms, just as the apparent simplicity of the ocean’s surface does not preclude its profundity. This is one of the things that Yeats understood in Shelley. But for the purpose of this essay, that is, Shelley in the context of postmodernity, what is striking in The


Revolt of Islam is its abundance of descriptions of and references to benighted conditions, fallen states, and minds in chains. The poem’s second Canto conveys the sense of a lost and glorious past in juxtaposition to a fallen present: “… the wondrous fame/ Of the past world, the vital words and deeds/ Of minds whom neither time nor change can tame”; the poem’s protagonist wanders “through the wrecks of days departed” and hears the sound of the sorrowing wind echoing through its broken tombs and the ruins of the “dwellings of a race of mightier men”. Of course, being a child of the early years of the Enlightenment, he still entertains the naive hope that this glorious past can be prelude to a more glorious future, saying, “Such man has been, and such may yet become!/ Ay, wiser, greater, gentler, even than they/ Who on the fragments of yon shattered dome/ Have stamped the sign of power …”. Needless to say, all this is so much water under the bridge now, but what is relevant here is his portrayal of his present as a fallen state which manifests chiefly as a mental condition. The narrative of human life is presented by “Feeble historians of its shame and glory,/ False disputants on all its hopes and fears,/ Victims who worshipped ruin …”; it is a world where the natural world has ceased to live for its inhabitants, and

Earth, our bright home, its mountains and its waters,……………………… and those fair daughters,The clouds, of Sun and Ocean, who have blendedThe colours of the air since first extended It cradled the young world, none wandered forth To see or feel: a darkness had descendedOn every heart …

This vital world, this home of happy spirits, Was as a dungeon to my blasted kind;All that despair from murdered hope inheritsThey sought, and in their helpless misery blind, A deeper prison and heavier chains did find,And stronger tyrants …

The narrator admits scant wonder that “men loathe their life”, and that “… they learn/ To gaze on this fair world with hopeless unconcern”. Significantly, he finds that this benighted condition leads to sexual obsession, and talks of “… the hyaena lust, who, among graves,/ Over his loathed meal, laughing in agony, raves.” Shelley’s depictions of fallen states are not limited to The Revolt of Islam by any means, and such occur frequently in his poetry. Here is one which, although evoked while he is contemplating the towers and the palaces of a decadent Venice of the early nineteenth century, I find has a certain contemporary resonance:

Sepulchres, where human forms, Like pollution-nourished worms, To the corpse of greatness cling, Murdered, and now mouldering:

(Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, ll. 146-9)


The sense of a fallen world, indeed: it was in his bones. Part of this sense was particular and not universal, being due to the shadow cast over his time, for those who believed in human progress, by the disastrous failure of the French Revolution. He saw this failure as, firstly, the betrayal of its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity by its partisans into blood-letting, fanaticism, and hate; and then as the usurpation of the Revolution itself by Napoleon, of whom he has the Earth declare, in Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon, “And weave into his shame, which like the dead/ Shrouds me, the hopes that from his glory fled.” With the earlier defeat of Napoleon, he also witnessed the restoration and the resumed legitimacy of the old order. One may observe that this condition of his time is not entirely unlike our own. For we live under the much longer shadow cast by the final failure of the ideals of the Enlightenment, an Enlightenment whose first manifestations in history were the American and French Revolutions, and of whose last diseased offshoot, Soviet-style communism, we have witnessed the recent (in historical terms) demise. Into the vacuum created by the decay and death of these ideals has flowed—what? The new freedom of the savvy, option-rich consumer? Thus, when Shelley describes the atmosphere of his time, it is possible to find a certain resonance for our own, if one thinks in terms of this much larger and longer shadow:

Alas! All hope is buried now. But then men dreamed the age`d earthWas labouring in that mighty birth, Which many a poet and a sageHas aye foreseen – the happy ageWhen truth and love shall dwell belowAmong the works and ways of men;Which on this world not power but willEven now is wanting to fulfill.…Ah, smiles and joyance quickly died,For public hope grew pale and dimIn an altered time and tide,…And in the streets men met each other,And by old altars and in halls,And smiled again at festivals.But each man found in his heart’s brotherCold cheer; for all, though half deceived,The outworn creeds again believed,And the same round anew began,Which the weary world yet ever ran.

(Rosalind and Helen, ll. 601-9, 691-3, 713-720.)

But the sense of a fallen world was deeper in him than as it related to particular circumstances of time and place. One can discern the beginning of a shift to a deeper dimension in The Tower


of Famine, written in Italy in 1820. Here, the metaphor evoked would have been familiar to the founder of the religion he had disavowed, and strikes close to the immemorial fault line upon which the world has been erected. It is not made clear in the poem whether the “Tower of Famine” referred to is meant as an actual structure or a figurative one—typical of Shelley’s rapidity of thought, and why he infuriates critics—but it is pictured as built upon or standing amid “the towers and sacred domes”, “the bowers of solitary wealth”, and that because of its presence everything around it is dimmed, “so that the world is bare”; he then concludes the poem by likening the image to “… a spectre wrapped in shapeless terror/ Amid a company of ladies fair”, which becomes a mirror of and absorbs their beauty and “the life of their sweet eyes”, so that, like those who gaze upon the Gorgon, they are turned to stone. If Keats can be called the great poet of acceptance, Shelley is the great poet of non-acceptance. Keats accepted life and the world as it is; Shelley did not. Andor Gomme, in his essay “The Last of Old England” in Issue no.13 of this magazine, quotes Leavis on Keats: “… that strong grasp upon actualities—upon things outside himself, that firm sense of the solid world, which makes Keats so different from Shelley.” (Revaluation, p. 261) Now I’d contend that Shelley had a perfectly clear idea of the actual world and of things outside himself, as any reading of all his significant work (see Appendix at the end of this essay), as opposed to selective examples to prove a point, should show. Immediately violating my just stated injunction (as lack of consistency is one of the numerous sins imputed to Shelley, I, as his advocate, should properly manifest the same), I would suggest that the Letter to Maria Gisborne, Part Three of Peter Bell the Third, and, on another level, Act One of Prometheus Unbound, should show that, in the American vernacular, he knew ‘where it’s at’. On the other hand, I’d agree with Leavis that a “firm sense of the solid world” he had not. He lacked that sense because, even though he knew quite well what this world was, he ultimately did not accept it. This duality may have, to some, a surface appearance of inconsistency; rather, it is complexity (masking as simplicity in many cases) defying simple categorization. In the poem above cited, Letter to Maria Gisborne, although full of minutely observed and wittily crafted depictions of actual things and persons—especially lines 193-253, on London and his circle of friends—he also writes to his respondent,

………………… – and how we spun A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun Of this familiar life, which seems to beBut is not: – or is but quaint mockeryOf all we would believe, and sadly blameThe jarring and inexplicable frameOf this wrong world: …

(Op. cit., ll. 154-160.)


If one were to make a count of each of the adjectives used in his works (a task fit for a computer, not a human), I feel pretty certain that ‘strange’ would be at the top or very near it. A sense of the world’s strangeness was always with him. This is most unequivocally described in the sonnet “Lift not the painted veil”, in which the person alluded to is thought to be Byron, but perhaps more aptly characterizes himself. The world of ordinary life is described as an illusion, “a painted veil”, behind which hope and fear are continually weaving the shadows which the world calls substance. The figure in the poem is depicted as seeking “things to love”, but finding nothing in the world “the which he could approve”. He moves among “the unheeding many”, striving for truth, and, “like the Preacher”, never finding it. This poet of the Romantic Age, in a very pure and radical form of a general characteristic of the period, was ever seeking something other than the common and familiar life around him, some ideal situated elsewhere, not in the here and now. Sometimes he sought it “… in whatever checks that Storm/ Which with the shattered present chokes the past” (Epipsychidion, ll. 211-12); or, and in the same poem, he was one of those “… to whom this world of life/ Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife/ Tills for the promise of a later birth/ The wilderness of this Elysian earth” (Ibid, ll. 186-9); again, the ideal might be in neither the past nor the future, but in what made it seem “… as if the hour were one/ Sent from beyond the skies,/ Which scattered from above the sun/ A light of Paradise” (To Jane: the Recollection, ll. 17-20); yet again, it may lie in the perfection of ideal beauty, here an attribute of one of his female figures, a beauty which made

The bright world dim, and everything besideSeemed like the fleeting image of a shade:No thought of living spirit could abide,Which to her looks had ever been betrayed,On any object in the world so wide,On any hope within the circling skies,But on her form, and in her inmost eyes.

(The Witch of Atlas, ll. 138-144.)

But now follows an apparent contradiction of this characteristic of Shelley exemplified in these excerpts. This is a poet who is nothing if not manifold and to a superficial view in certain ways contradictory, one of the reasons he has hardly been a favourite of critics, and why out of this manifold and seemingly conflicting nature can come a correlative ease, through drawing upon one of his aspects, of constructing a negative critique and appraisal. Critics, with their limiting strictures and reprovals! Like many writers —though perhaps not so many in these deconstructionist times, and I may well be in a distinct minority—one can easily wish for a return to simpler and more innocent days, somewhat like the age imagined at the beginning of The Witch of Atlas, which was presumed to exist, Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth


Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,Error and Truth, had hunted from the EarthAll those bright natures which adorned its prime,And left us nothing to believe in, worthThe pains of putting into learnèd rhyme

(Op. cit., ll. 49-54.) But then, as one can’t very well go back to Homer’s Greece or to Elizabethan England, one must make do with a great deal written about literature, and not much of it now written worth the name. As I said, it is possible, on the surface, to contradict the previously stated view of Shelley that he could not accept the world as it was—and not just the world created by humanity, as I shall later indicate—and that indeed readings of his poetry can give many examples of an empathy with the natural world of an intensity and depth shared by few other poets. At the beginning of Alastor; Or, the Spirit of Solitude (the first major work of his coming of age as a poet), he invokes the “great Mother” (Nature), vowing that he had loved her, and her only, and all the ways in which she manifests, by virtue of which love he asks her to now favour his “solemn song”, awaiting her breath so that his strain

May modulate with murmurs of the air,And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymnsOf night and day, and the deep heart of man.

(Op. cit., ll. 46-9.)

For a few examples to illustrate this deep empathy, I would cite, from A Summer Evening Churchyard, a description of the coming of evening (ll. 1-12); at an opposite pole of perception, from A Vision of the Sea, the dissipation of a great ocean storm at sunrise (ll.115-132); from Mont Blanc, a feeling of the vastness of a mountain landscape and of geological time (ll. 57-75); then, showing the range of feeling and perception, in The Sensitive Plant, Part First, one passes to the exquisite and the delicate; lastly, from Adonais, a passage where the inmost sense of spring has rarely been evoked so poignantly and deeply: Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,

But grief returns with the revolving year;The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons’ bier;The amorous birds now pair in every brake,And build their mossy homes in field and brere;And the green lizard, and the golden snake,Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

Through wood and stream and field and hill and OceanA quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burstAs it has ever done, with change and motion,


From the great morning of the world when firstGod dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed,The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;All baser things pant with life’s sacred thirst;Diffuse themselves; and spend in love’s delight, The beauty and the joy of their renewe`d might.

(Op. cit., ll. 154-171.) So, a poet with an intense empathy with and love of the world around him, who at the same time could not accept this firm and solid world: is a synthesis between these two contradictory impulses possible? A suggestion of a possible synthesis comes in Mont Blanc, that seminal poem (along with the contemporan-eous Hymn to Intellectual Beauty) written near the beginning of his career as a mature poet, a career that only spans the years 1815 to 1822, demarcated at one end by his juvenilia and at the other by his premature death at sea. This poem was reviewed, from a different perspective, by Barrie Mencher in Issue no. 14 of the magazine; my treatment of it here is for the purpose of illuminating the contradiction in Shelley referred to above. The poem, supposedly a depiction of a wild and majestic alpine scene, does not begin with the natural world at all; it begins with an abstract consideration of the relative interplay of sense percep-tions of the external world with interpretations originating from within the mind; this abstract consideration is then presented as a metaphor of a feeble brook within the woods among mountains, where certainty has vanished as to the origin of the sound of rushing water that one hears, which might be emanating from the brook, from surrounding unseen waterfalls, or some vast river bursting over its rocks: to this uncertainty he adds, through a deliberate obscuring of the syntax, the further ambiguity of what the brook represents in the image, whether it is meant to portray thoughts emanating from the mind or external sense perceptions —only then does he proceed to the depiction of the natural scene before him, which he opens by likening to the metaphor previously presented! The effect of this unorthodox proceeding is to render what would otherwise be merely natural as preternatural, with a heightened and intensified perception through the removal of the veil of familiarity covering and dimming what we see: this ‘removal of the veil’ is a common feature of Shelley’s poetry, as stated explicitly in another and a later poem: “But life’s familiar veil was now withdrawn,/ As the world leaps before an earthquake’s dawn,/… As if the future and the past were all/ Treasured i’ the instant … .” (Ginevra, ll. 122-4, 130-1). The poem then becomes an entranced contemplation, an intense apprehension, of nature in its most solemn, majestic, and remote aspects; of “Power in … his secret throne”, of “children of elder time”, of “old and solemn harmony”; here, analogously as in the poem of a year earlier, Alastor, where the poet regards the earliest man-made monuments, “memorials of the world’s youth”, where on those forms he “… ever gazed/ And gazed, till meaning on his


vacant mind/ Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw/ The thrilling secrets of the birth of time”: yet here, it is nature’s secrets he wishes to unlock, but finds himself musing on his “own separate fantasy”, his individual, human mind, to wit, on the fundamental relationship between the object observed and the observer, and the nature of reality itself: his thoughts sometimes rest upon the scene before him, and sometimes inhabit “the still cave of the witch Poesy”, where the funda-mental inaccesibility of the sublime magnificence and power before him is confessed in his “Seeking among the shadows that pass by/ Ghosts of all thing that are, some shade of thee,/ Some phantom, some faint image …”. What makes this magnificence and power, this inaccesibility? What does he mean when he says, “Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal/ Large codes of fraud and woe …”? Is that which lies before him now, indeed, all “the clear universe of things around”, the same if there is no one to observe it, or is observed by a bird, a monkey, or is data fed into a computer? Suggestions of answers to such questionings can be found in the concluding fifth part of the poem:

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: – the power is there,The still and solemn power of many sights,And many sounds, and much of life and death.In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,In the lone glare of day, the snows descendUpon that Mountain; none beholds them there,Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,Or the star-beams dart through them: – Winds contendSilently there, and heap the snow with breathRapid and strong, but silently! Its homeThe voiceless lightning in these solitudesKeeps innocently, and like vapour broodsOver the snow. The secret Strength of thingsWhich governs thought, and to the infinite domeOf Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?

(Op. cit., ll. 127-144.)

What indeed? The objective nature of empirical science, then newly established, now ubiquitous and supreme. For Shelley, the firm, solid, stark, objective world, untransformed or unillumined by imagination, was never to be enough. Mont Blanc was composed in 1816, and his subsequent work illustrates and develops the principle suggested, as in The Revolt of Islam (composed 1817): “The dawn of mind, which … far illumines space,/ And clasps this barren world in its own bright embrace” (op. cit., Canto V, ll. 2239-41). Note “barren” to describe the world. Again, in the same poem, the narrator says his song “Peopled with thoughts the boundless universe”, thoughts which strove “Where’er they trod the darkness to disperse/ The cloud of that unutterable curse/ Which clings upon mankind …”


(Ibid, Canto II, ll. 928-33). In the postmodern blankness, in the cultural desolation of our civilization now, this poet’s words may have strange applicability. For him, it is not enough to be just the passive and objective observer of a quiescent nature, to give back a faithful rendering, grounded in the “firm and solid world”, of his perceptions; he is ever seeking more than this, where, through various conditions of “darkness wide and deep”, there is always a hope which ultimately can find its basis neither in the individual nor in the human condition, but only in the eternal cycles of nature of which humanity is a part:

Such are the thoughts which, like the fires that flareIn storm-encompassed isles, we cherish yet In this dark ruin – such were mine even there; As in its sleep some odorous violet,While yet its leaves with nightly dews are wet, Breathes in prophetic dreams of day’s uprise,Or, as ere Scythian frost in fear has metSpring’s messengers descending from the skies,The buds foreknow their life – this hope must ever rise.

(Ibid, Canto VII, ll. 3154-62.)

What, then, is this hope? Is it the hope at the end of the Ode to the West Wind characterized as “foolhardy” by A.R. Gomme in his essay in Issue no.13 of this magazine? (By the way, it is of some relevance that in the first draft of that poem Shelley had the concluding line as a statement, which he later crossed out and made into the question which is its final form.) This hope is nothing but the necessity for hope, whose source is the light that must exist within the mind which seeks its kindred light within the world (I am paraphrasing from his essay A Defense of Poetry), as long as we have any pretensions to being alive—and many people who think they are alive today are deluded on that score. As he puts it, “This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw/ The unenvied light of hope …”, and,

……………………… ’tis like thy light,Imagination! Which from earth and sky,And from the depths of human fantasy,As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fillsThe Universe with glorious beams, and killsError, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow

Of its reverberated lightning …

(Epipsychidion, ll. 184-5, 163-69.)

The “error” referred to above is the analytic and calculating mind usurping the primacy of place which should belong to mind redeemed by imagination. As he states in his A Defense of Poetry, “ we must feel what we perceive, and imagine what we know”. But it is not that he is dogmatic in his theorising, for, as he says in the essay, the poet’s task is “not to pose but to create”. Thus, near the end of Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, when the poetic


mood which inspired him begins to depart, he does not pretend to any kind of certainty as to its source, whether

Be it love, light, harmony, Odour, or the soul of allWhich from Heaven like dew doth fall, Or the mind which feeds this versePeopling the lone universe.

(Op. cit., ll. 315-19.)

Whatever it is, it is also the source of human liberty. Liberty is a central concept of Shelley’s poetry, and it is a condition existing first and foremost in the human mind; contingent upon this condition is the possibility of action to trans-form the dispensations to be found in the external world. Near the beginning of the long poem Julian and Maddalo, the bell of the belfry tower of a lunatic asylum tolls to summon the inmates to vespers. Julian (a poetic stand-in for Shelley) observes wryly, “… As much skill as need to pray/ In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they/ To their stern maker …” (ll. 111-3). Count Maddalo, drawn upon Shelley’s friend Lord Byron, although, according to Shelley, inclined by pride to take the “darker side” of arguments, is more religiously orthodox, and chides Julian for ever being “a perilous infidel”. But he then goes on to comment on the scene before them as an emblem of human mortality itself, and of the futility of our hopes and our desires, which, like the madmen summoned by the bell, gather around the soul and pray—“For what? They know not …” Julian responds to Maddalo’s gloomy metaphor by noting that the argument of futility applies only on the assumption of human passivity, and, although there is no guarantee of liberation, it is possible to struggle against the chains which bind the human mind and spirit, against “… what degrades and crushes us. We know/ That we have power over ourselves to do/ And suffer – what, we know not till we try;/ But something nobler than to live and die …” (ll. 184-7). An illustration of how this inward condition of liberty in individuals manifests in the aggregate of human society is provided in the sonnet “Political Greatness”, where he first describes the effects upon society where this liberty is lacking due to tyranny, tyranny that he says can be of two kinds, the one imposed by force and the other by custom (ll. 9-10). Presumably, one may apply the latter kind to postmodern mass civilization, for here one may say, as in the sonnet (with allowances for poetic exaggeration), that

Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,History is but the shadow of their shame, Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts As to oblivion their blind millions fleet, Staining that Heaven with obscene imageryOf their own likeness. . . .

Indeed. Opposed to this he places ………… Man who man would be,

Must rule the empire of himself; in itMust be supreme, establishing his throne


On vanquished will, quelling the anarchyOf hopes and fears, being himself alone.

(Op. cit., ll. 4-9, 10-14.) To Shelley, liberty is a much more complex, existential, as well as inclusive idea than mere political reformism; one may gather as much from a reading of his Ode to Liberty, in which he has transcribed the principle delineated in the sonnet presented above into a long poem that views the genesis, the rises and the falls, and the prospects of “man being himself alone” against the tapestry of human history. Here is presented one of the most luminous examples of Shelley in the multiple roles of lyric poet, social philosopher, and political reformer fused into one, in a relatively shorter poem (as opposed to long works such as Prometheus Unbound and Hellas) of 285 lines. This is not the proper place to cite from a poem whose mood, tone, and language stand in striking contrast to those of the postmodern muse, clashing as it does with the cautiously dim, the prudently ambiguous, the scrupulously qualified, and the self-absorbed (the last of which is one of the sins with which Leavis charges this poet); nor is it really relevant, concerning itself as it does with a process whose end, in Western civilization, we have reached and which is therefore dated, namely, human history (Francis Fukuyama was right in this regard as far as it related to the West, wrong as it related to the rest of the world); all the same, it may be possible to see a relation to our age in a section of the poem where he addresses the personification of the idea which one would grossly over-simplify by the mere denomination of ‘liberty’, regarding the circumstances of a historical epoch conventionally ascribed a length of five hundred years, which nonetheless is no reliable predictor of the duration of its recurrence, an event occasioning dismay in a few and unnoticed by most:

From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,Or utmost islet inaccessible,Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign,Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks,And every Naiad’s ice-cold urn,To talk in echoes sad and sternOf that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn?

(Op. cit., ll. 106-13.)

It is also perhaps pertinent where, near the poem’s end, he warns of the distortion of then newly-dawning liberty into a proliferation of “new wants” (ll. 241-255). Indeed, in the next stanza he explicitly states that ‘liberty’, as it is conventionally understood, is not enough, and, invoking the former, pleads “Come thou, but lead out of the inmost cave/ Of man’s deep spirit, as the morning-star/ Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave,/ Wisdom …” (ll. 256-9). To which he adds, as also not possible to be disjoined from ‘liberty’, the other “rulers of eternal thought”, love, justice, memory of the past, and


hope of the future (ll. 261-7). A charge typically levelled against Shelley by his detractors is that he pursues airy idealisms and impalpable abstractions, which have little connection to real life and the real world. As a matter of fact, his wife Mary voiced just that objection with regard to his The Witch of Atlas, after seeing it for the first time. However, a poet may be forgiven the occasional sally into the realm of pure fantasy, as that particular poem happens to be (though not entirely: it contains some astute commentary on the human condition near the end). Other poets, most notably Keats, seem to be far more easily forgiven their weaknesses and indulgences, while Shelley positively draws censure and reproof from the same critics so lenient regarding others. Perhaps this is due to the abrasive and uncompromising nature of his genius, which elicits strong reactions, positive or negative. As for the criticism of escapism and flight from reality made against him, I would suggest that, idealist though he was, he at the same time perceived and realized, far more deeply than may superficially be conceived, the actualities of this world. A hint in the direction of this assertion may be given by how he concludes all of his longer works, with the notable exception of Prometheus Unbound, which have a narrative thread.. In The Revolt of Islam, the revolution fails; in Julian and Maddalo, the chief character developed in the poem, who holds views similar to Julian’s (a stand-in for Shelley), has gone mad; in The Sensitive Plant, the paradisal garden runs to foulness and decay; in his single completed play, The Cenci (Prometheus Unbound and Hellas are lyrical dramas), justice most eminently does not prevail; in Hellas, the Greeks lose their struggle for freedom, a denouement which prompts the drama’s chorus to lament that ideals such as liberty, virtue, love, and truth can be overcome by common forces of the world like numbers, wealth, erring judgement, and change (ll. 973-87). In Prometheus Unbound, that much-maligned and misunderstood work which Yeats has stated should be numbered “among the very few sacred texts of humanity”, and whose Act I is surely, if anything is, a metaphorical representation of the essential reality of this world, one of the Furies sent by Jupiter to torment him taunts the chained Prometheus with this: In each human heart terror survives

The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man’s estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare. The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill. Many are strong and rich, and would be just,But live among their suffering fellow-menAs if none felt: they know not what they do.


(Op. cit., Act I, ll. 618-631.) In his last poem, The Triumph of Life, a similar theme is echoed: “And much I grieved to think how power and will/ In opposition rule our mortal day,/ And why God made irreconcilable/ Good and the means of good …”(ll. 228-31). So how does one pursue the very loftiest ideals while concurrently fully conscious of the actual dispensations of the world in which we live? Just as the poem Mont Blanc, in that seminal year of 1816 near the beginning of his maturity as a poet, provided the model for his subsequent work on the levels of cognition and perception, so did his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty of the same year give the pattern according to which he would reconcile aspiration and reality. This, his most characteristic poem (not his greatest, but certainly to be numbered among his ‘great’ poems), portrays, I think, more than any other, what Shelley is all about: that is, if one were to select among his works one that illustrates his peculiar and idiosyncratic place, with his strengths and his weaknesses, in the English poetical canon, this would be it. For this reason I want to quote this poem of 84 lines almost in its entirety, and then venture some comments and observations afterwards. The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats though unseen among us, – visitingThis various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, -Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,It visits with inconstant glanceEach human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, -Like clouds in starlight widely spread, -Like memory of music fled, -Like aught that for its grace may beDear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrateWith thine own hues all thou dost shine uponOf human thought or form, – where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?Ask why the sunlight not for everWeaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,Why fear and dream and death and birthCast on the daylight of this earthSuch gloom, – why man has such a scopeFor love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given -Therefore the names of God, and ghosts, and Heaven,


Remain the records of their vain endeavour,Frail spells – whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,

From all we hear and all we see,Doubt, chance, and mutability. Thy light alone – like mist o’er mountains driven,Or music by the night-wind sentThrough strings of some still instrument,Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds departAnd come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal, and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.Thou messenger of sympathies, That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes -Thou – that to human thought art nourishment, Like darkness to a dying flame! Depart not as thy shadow came, Depart not – lest the grave should be, Like life and fear, a dark reality.

He goes on to relate how in vain he had sought the power that he here invokes, until for the first time its “shadow” fell upon him; now, in the poem, he calls as witness ……… the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowersOf studious zeal or love’s delightOutwatched with me the envious night – They know that never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou – O awful Loveliness, Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past – there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,Which through the summer is not heard or seen,As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm – to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bindTo fear himself, and love all human kind.


(Op. cit., ll. 1-48, 64-84.) Now this poem can give some insight into why Shelley provokes such disparate responses in his readers, and such contrasting opinions on his worth from literary figures like Leavis and Yeats, by comparing it with Wordsworth’s poem on a similar theme, his Ode: Intimations of Immortality, which, published in 1807, obviously influenced Shelley. (Indeed, he quotes a line from it in Alastor.) Wordsworth’s poem presents thoughts, feelings, and ideas that most can identify with, and provides comfort and reassurance in its conclusions. He regrets the “visionary gleam” which, existing during the period of one’s child-hood, in adulthood fades away. Yet to him it is the earnest of our immortality, an indication that the child yet remembers whence he came, which is “from God”, or “from afar”. Furthermore, the very fact that the gleam once existed, of which the recollection itself means that something of it still exists, is sufficient to give him strength for his onward life, breeding in him “perpetual benediction”. For it provides him with the truth—a truth he feels as certainty—that the mortal world is not all, and that there is a greater eternal world which existed before and which exists after death. With this thought he again finds joy in the contemplation of nature, even though it is not the joy that he once knew, and, though nature, a “homely nurse” with “no unworthy aim” tries to make Man forget “that imperial palace whence he came”, the memory and the knowledge “Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,/ Are yet a master-light of all our seeing”. He has found relief, as has the reader, in the regret with which he began the poem, and finds, even in human suffering, “soothing thoughts”. On the whole, a reading of this poem (which I admit I do not do justice by paraphrasing) imparts to the reader pleasure and deep emotion, and a truth that solaces even those for whom the “visionary gleam” is not necessarily proof of the existence of God or an afterlife. However, I must add, although I recognize it as a great poem with some unforgettable lines in it, it contains, through its very reassurance, the seeds of that smug complacency which tarnished Wordsworth’s later years and creations, and whose regrettable “dim stupidity” Shelley (rather viciously) satirised in Part Seventh of Peter Bell the Third. Whereas Wordsworth’s Ode presents the reader with a simple dualism of a natural world of the here and now, and an eternal world not present yet dimly recollected existing before and after death, Shelley’s Hymn provides a view of life and the world not at all so readily accessible to sympathy and understanding. I leave apart the question of whether one accepts the Christian eschatology or not, which Wordsworth did and Shelley didn’t, for I am considering the poems from an ontological perspective only—in other words, this is literary criticism (of a rather improvised sort) and not theology. In Shelley’s poem, there are also two worlds, but they co-exist, and he provides no simple answer regarding the nature of the shadowy other world he adumbrates, nor any simple explanation as to the manner of its co-existence with the here and now. Indeed, the measure of the meaning and the power of this other world lies not in the grace that it


confers, but in its mystery (ll. 11-12). Furthermore, the manifestations of this other world upon our own are inconstant and cannot be relied upon, and seem coeval and innate with mutability itself; seem only, because here too he provides no clear answer or certainty. Apparently, the questing, restless nature of the mind of this poet, of whom Leavis said, “in [him], feeling is divorced from thought”, is such that he does not resist undermining his own argument: although he posits the power represented in the poem as an external force, he injects the ultimate doubt regarding its existence when, invoking physical but not psychological impossibility, he says of it, “Thou – that to human thought art nourishment,/ Like darkness to a dying flame!” He can pretend to no infallible conviction regarding its ultimate existence, and can only plead that it not depart, as its “shadow” variously does, “… lest the grave should be,/ Like life and fear, a dark reality.” Contrast this with Wordsworth’s certainty and consoling joy in his poem, and one can see why he can have far more popular appeal, and critics see that appeal, than Shelley. But it is also possible to see why to a few, not many, Shelley can have a peculiar attraction; the view of our common, ordinary world’s simultaneous and unimmediate magnificence corresponds, to a degree neither more or less, with that actuality of the world perceived when one seeks more than the immediately and comfortingly apparent, the conveniently adaptable, the habitual and ready-made, whether supplied by custom, popular belief, particular doctrine, or literary canon. In Shelley’s Hymn, the physical manifestations of nature—“moonlight on a midnight stream”, “mist o’er mountains driven” —are symbols of a shadowy, higher reality not amenable to any kind of definite formulation. (In this and some other poems he anticipates the later Symbolists.) It is easy to see why this can seem like other-worldliness, that lack of a firm grasp upon reality which is one of Leavis’s criticisms; but it is precisely because of this attribute of his that there exists in Shelley that intense empathy with nature, apparent in the Hymn and in the poems cited as evidence of this quality in a preceding passage: he is always striving to see more than what is only actually and objectively there, seeking to remove “the veil of familiarity” which bars the ordinary sense from that intense and higher communion with the objective world possible only when that world has undergone the transformation to the preternatural which is the aim, though not necessarily and not always the achievement, of many of his works. For this reason it is possible for some, that is, the admirers of Shelley, like Yeats and Robert Browning, to see in his relation to reality the very opposite to Leavis’s criticism in this regard. All of the foregoing is not to say that an empathy with nature, intense in its own way, does not also exist in Wordsworth’s Ode; but there the poet’s relationship with nature is simple and direct, owing to the distinct and separate existence of the natural and the eternal worlds. There is no admixture of the eternal with the here and now, except as recollection, which, according to the poem, is in childhood sufficiently near to colour the child’s perception of the natural world,


and except as joyous consciousness of an eternal world’s assured existence elsewhere. The “obstinate questionings” in the poem regard the inferior nature and ephemerality of mortal existence, doubts whose resolution points to a certainty the poet possesses and imparts. As well, it is interesting to compare the two poems by looking at the respective responses the two poets take away from their deep meditations upon existence. Wordsworth takes away a joyful personal consolation, a consolation the reader can share, because of which the poet says “And I again am strong”. In Shelley the possibility of joy is of a different sort, where, addressing the Spirit the poem invokes, he says of himself “… that never joy illumed my brow/ Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free/ This world from its dark slavery”; while, at the poem’s conclusion, asserting of that same Spirit that its “spells” bound him “To fear himself, and love all human kind”. This is joy and consolation of a more remote sort for the reader, and it is scant wonder that Leavis called Shelley self-absorbed, and described him as being defficient in an interest in things outside himself. Regarding these matters, being no literary critic, I can only shake my head, and am left only with the hope that, like Hamlet, “I can still tell a hawk from a handsaw”. These musings should be viewed in the context of my description of the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty as Shelley’s most charact-eristic poem, a statement I should perhaps modify to “his most characteristic poem when at his best”. In the end, it is only our best that endures, while it is to be hoped that our failings and lesser expressions, be they those of Shelley, Leavis, Wordsworth, or Keats, find forgiveness. The foregoing discussion of Shelley’s Hymn leads towards another of the major sources of misunderstanding—needless to say, there are numerous such—of him by his critics. As a prime example of what produces this misunderstanding, one may examine a passage from his Epipsychidion, a poem that Shelley called “an idealized history of my life and feelings”, and on which the major influence was Dante’s Vita Nuova. Here, the poem’s narrator addresses his lady loves:

Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth, This world of love, this me; and into birthAwaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart Magnetic might into its central heart; . . .

He goes on to say that as the earth’s natural forces and elements, such as waves, winds, tides, and storms are governed by the influence of the sun and moon, his two loves should similarly govern his “sphere of being”, alternating their presence and power through night and day as do their celestial counterparts, and light it through the seasons of spring to autumn “into the Winter of the tomb”. He then adds a third female figure to the pantheon—critics have variously ventured to attach the identities of real persons to the figures in the poem, but Shelley himself wrote “the Epipsychidion is a mystery”, and that it does not deal in “real flesh & blood”—a third figure whom he addresses as a “… Comet beautiful and fierce,/ Who


drew the heart of this frail Universe/ Towards thine own …” He beseeches this new celestial object, which had gone astray, to “float into our azure heaven again”, and become as the morning and the evening star, to which is promised that

The living Sun will feed thee from its urnOf golden fire; the Moon will veil her hornIn thy last smiles; adoring Even and MornWill worship thee with incense of calm breathAnd lights and shadows; as the star of DeathAnd Birth is worshipped by those sisters wildCalled Hope and Fear – upon the heart are piledTheir offerings, – of this sacrifice divineA World shall be the altar.

(Op. cit., ll. 345-383.)

Now, at first glance, it is possible to see this as a monstrous example of self-centredness, of an egregious egotism, where the narrator presumes to appropri-ate the earth itself, indeed, to absorb the entire universe, as nothing more than a representation of his own self, and as the grand theatre existing but for the play of his own thoughts and feelings. Let us then take the following passage from his essay On Life, written about a year to a year-and-a-half before the composition of the above-cited poem: “… the existence of distinct individual minds similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The words, I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference sub-sisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind. Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption, that I, the person who now write and speak, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words I, and you and they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attributed to them.” Looked at in this light, the above-cited passage of the poem expresses not the concentration of all externality within the confines of the narrator’s ego, but, quite the contrary, the subsuming of the narrow self within the boundless external world, a boundlessness commensurate with and coexisting with the narrator’s love, whose effect is a divine unity of which “a world shall be the altar”. Shelley’s central poetic doctrine is the distending of individual mind towards the universal; his detractors have taken to interpret this as the absorption of world into self. Thus, in these lines from his elegy on Keats, Adonais, it would presumably be palpably absurd to infer that he means to represent Keats’s spirit as having become or absorbed the universe; it would be of the same absurdity to impute the implications of a like egotism to Shelley himself when he is engaged in writing about himself or some poetic stand-in. Here are the lines on Keats: He is made one with Nature: there is heard


His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where’er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own;Which wields the world with never-wearied love,Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there, All new successions to the forms they wear;Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flightTo its own likeness, as each mass may bear;And bursting in its beauty and its mightFrom trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.

(Op. cit., ll. 370-387.) This is the expression of a world-view which can be unsettling in its import, and may be one of the reasons for its distorted interpretation; in it, “The One remains, the many change and pass” (l. 460), and is manifested as

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Beauty in which all things work and move, That Benediction which the eclipsing CurseOf birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly woveBy man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst; . . . . .

(Ibid, ll. 478-485.)

Incidentally, this elegy on Keats was not just some gratuitous occasion for the writing of fine verse: although it is true that in Keats’s fate and reception by the critics he saw similarities to his own, his regard for Keats (not known to him personally) can be seen in his Preface : “It is my intention to subjoin (to this poem) a criticism upon the claims of its lamented object to be classed among the writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age. My known repugnance to the narrow principles of taste on which several of his earlier compositions were modelled prove at least that I am an impartial judge. I consider the fragment of Hyperion as second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years.” It is to be regretted that the same candour is seldom displayed by Keats’s partisans and Shelley’s detractors of later times, including our own. To return to the consideration of the world-view elucidated in Adonais, perhaps the most radical expression of it can be found in


the lyrical drama Hellas. In the following passage the Turkish Sultan, having summoned the seer Ahasuerus to prophesy the future prospects of his dominion, reproaches him for his apparent disdain of worldly things, a disdain he presumes does not exempt his own exalted person, supreme ruler of the Ottoman Empire that he is. After some remarks concerning the place of humility and pride in the world, Ahasuerus says,

………………… Sultan! Talk no more Of thee and me, the Future and the Past; But look on that which cannot change – the One, The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,Space, and the isles of life or light that gemThe sapphire floods of interstellar air, This firmament pavilioned upon chaos, With all its cressets of immortal fire, Whose outwall, bastioned impregnablyAgainst the escape of boldest thoughts, repels themAs Calpe the Atlantic clouds – this WholeOf suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers, With all the silent or tempestuous workings By which they have been, are, or cease to be, Is but a vision; – all that it inherits Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams; Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less The Future and the Past are idle shadows Of thought’s eternal flight – they have no being:Nought is but that which feels itself to be.

(Op. cit., ll. 762-781.), ll. 762-781.)

The Sultan responds by saying Ahasuerus’s words cast doubt upon all things he had taken as certainties, and render everything futile. But Ahasuerus answers that the Sultan has misconceived him, and that “all is contained in each”, whereby all that has been or will be is infinite in proportion to the minuteness of the present. The meaning is not that the universe is an illusion created by individual mind, but the reverse. I am moved to add here, regarding the above passage, that the three lines beginning with “Whose outwall . . .” contain a towering idea, strikingly expressed. Having hoped to cast a somewhat different light on Shelley than the filtered one received by the followers of Leavis, I was gratified to see an effort that went some ways towards a partial rehabilitation, by one of Leavis’s self-confessed adherents, Barrie Mencher, through his articles on Mont Blanc in the October 2005 issue, and on The Triumph of Life in the last issue (January). His examinations of the aforementioned two poems are illuminating and stand by themselves. I do however find it necessary to make some remarks regarding his observations on Shelley in general. To begin with, I certainly concur in his opinion that Leavis makes too much out of Shelley’s narcissism, and exhibits a lack of fairness in at the same time


ignoring it where one of his favourites is concerned, D. H. Lawrence. While also agreeing with Mr Mencher that Leavis’s “moral outrage” occasioned by one of Shelley’s very minor poems is all out of proportion, I would go further than the point at which he stops by allowing that such “moral outrage” can be understood. Perhaps it can be understood, but it is highly irresponsible in a serious literary critic. What, after all, is Shelley’s sin that has provoked this “outrage”? Philandering. Or, at worst, disloyalty to his wife Mary by loving another woman (Jane Williams), a love that probably did not progress beyond the platonic stage. Well, one can debate the morality of this, and although I could say it has little relevance to the totality of a writer’s literary compositions, let one acknowledge Leavis’s view that the two should not be separated. But if that is the case, what about, for example, Shakespeare? He hardly appears to have been the model husband, but I note no “moral outrage” on Leavis’s part. A good many other examples could be cited, but the real question is where would the universally and impartially applied judgement of writers’ worth—as opposed to the partial and selective judgement applied to Shelley—influenced by their marital fidelity conduct to? Does it mean that Rimbaud, tainted with considerably more than an extra-marital fling, cannot be seen as a poet of the highest genius? Or is it not rather that the critic, in the mind that he brings to the judgement of a literary work, may join morality with literature (allowing the argument in the case of the critical doctrine of Leavis), while the poet, especially the poet of genius, by his very nature strives in his work to transcend himself, go beyond himself, so that the man and the poet are not the same? As an aside to the foregoing, it is worth noting that applying the term ‘disloyalty’ to Shelley’s behaviour may be using a rather narrow concept for one who wrote “Love is like understanding, that grows bright,/ Gazing on many truths …” (Epipsychidion, ll. 162-3). It is also not without relevance to note that in numerous places in his poetry he condemns mere sexual lust, not least because he considers it to degrade women. For example, in The Revolt of Islam, “She told me what a loathsome agony/ Is that when selfishness mocks love’s delight” (Canto VII, ll. 2875-6); again, from the same poem, “And made them slaves to soothe his vile unrest,/ And minister to lust its joys forlorn” (Canto II, ll. 979-80). Now, although aiming at some rehabilitation of Shelley among the disciples of Leavis, the limited extent to which Mr Mencher is willing to go in that direction is evinced in his considering, it would seem, only the Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Mont Blanc, The Triumph of Life, and (perhaps) Adonais as those among Shelley’s compositions worthy to stand alongside those of Wordsworth and Keats. I can think of numerous others, for which I would refer the reader to the Appendix at the end of this article, ignoring for this purpose the fragments and incomplete poems there also listed . As well, his characterisations of Prometheus Unbound and Hellas as “purely academic”, and as no more than “convenient vehicles for Shelley’s political reformism” grossly undervalues these works.


Regarding Hellas, he views only the final chorus as deserving consideration. Well, although I’d hold Hellas in its entirety as so deserving, among the magnificent choruses alone, some others I would proffer are the one at the poem’s beginning, “Breathe low, low/ The spell of the mighty mistress now”; the chorus starting as “Worlds on worlds are rolling ever/ From creation to decay”; and that unrivalled depiction of a violent thunderstorm within the semichorus beginning with “Thou voice which art/ The herald of the ill in splendour hid”. Mr Mencher goes on to conclude that from a reading of Leavis’s treatment of the three poets, it is clear that Shelley’s achievement is decidedly inferior to that of Wordsworth or Keats. Well, this may be clear to him from a reading of Leavis, but it is not clear to me from a reading of Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats. And, although averse to engage in what is the literary equivalent of name-dropping, yet being impelled to do so inasmuch as it may legitimately be asked what my qualifications are for the former assertion, a query to which I would be bound to respond “none”, Mr Mencher’s conclusion is also not clear to Yeats. Here I would display the inherent prejudice of writers against critics, in inclining towards the opinion of a great poet on another poet, as opposed to that of a great literary critic (a qualification I have no grounds for doubting, even though believing him fallible in this particular case). Mr Mencher also says that he finds much of Shelley almost unreadable. I’m not quite sure what he means by this, but it hardly qualifies as criticism. It tells about his taste in poetry, a taste to which he is surely entitled. I could say that I find most of Eliot unreadable (which I do), and most of postmodern poetry (which is also true), but these statements also would not constitute criticism. He complains about the unclear referents of Shelley’s pronouns. I find that in almost all instances these referents can be made out, and where they cannot, can be inferred; reading Shelley requires some work, due to the rapidity of his thought process, displaying in this once again that he is more the poets’ poet than the critics’. One reason that Mr Mencher does advance for the to him unreadability of much of Shelley—apart from the red herring of the unclear referents of pronouns—is what he describes as “Miltonic solemnity of tone allied with relative naivety of idea”. His aversion to these qualities merely indicates that his literary taste is in large part postmodern (I say only “in large part”, and not entirely, because if the latter were true he would not be an adherent of the doctrines of Leavis). If “Miltonic solemnity of tone” constituted a valid objection to reading the literature of the past, a great deal of it could be ruled out as suitable for our times. Back then life was a serious affair, taken seriously, often manifested in consequential acts and expressions upon a grand stage, rather than flippantly ironic articulations of conditional and trivial selves in a theme park. As for what Mr Mencher calls “relative naivety of idea”, I would rather say “simplicity of great ideas”. This has already been touched upon in relation to The Revolt of Islam and the Ode to Liberty. But Mr


Mencher does concede that Shelley is a much more various poet than either Keats or Wordsworth, and for him and others with a dislike for or seeking a foil to weightiness, a fine and at times exquisitely crafted wit and fancy can be found in works such as The Witch of Atlas, Letter to Maria Gisborne, The Cloud, and Peter Bell the Third. Although, as I believe, a great poet for all time, who ought to be recognized as such as long as some semblance of English is still spoken, Shelley has special significance in the postmodern culture in which we live. At a time when the perception of the world is collapsing into the little orbit of the self, and the reaction to that world diminishing to expressions ever more petty, confined, and sordid; when writing in general is characterized by either an ironic detachment or a clinical cold-hearted objectivity; when cognition itself manifests increasingly in a mechanistic, computer-jargon form belonging to the tools of a human invention originally designed to serve, and now transforming to enslave, the humanity which created it: to these contemporary tendencies, Shelley’s poetry, in a unique manner in ways I have attempted to describe, stands in magnificent antithesis. His poetry at its best is infused with the sense of a much larger, fathomless, and far more mysterious world. This sense acts as a background against which whatever he depicts, whether natural scenes or personal emotions, is imbued with an energy that ever strives against its limits, and a purity and depth of thought and feeling which can only have its source in that continuous quest for what is beyond and larger than the moment, the immediate, and the self. I realize that Leavis’s conclusions on Shelley are just about the opposite. To a degree he might be right about Shelley’s lapses: for, being human, lapses he certainly had, and his work is assuredly not flawless. But whether these faults and lapses are as spots on the sun which do not impair its original golden brilliance (in general, the view of Yeats and Robert Browning), or as clouds which occasionally may veil, but do not obscure it, or a fog through which only at times that sun’s shafts can penetrate (Leavis’s view, apparently), or some gradation between any of these, the reader, if willing not to lean for a conclusion on the casuistry of a particular critical orthodoxy, must ultimately decide through reading Shelley’s work, something I have tried to induce those who have read this far in this amateurish attempt at criticism to do; furthermore, this reading of Shelley ought to be one from which, as it often is in selections and anthologies, owing perhaps to reasons of misunderstanding previously discussed, his best and most significant work is not excluded. What, in my view, constitutes such I have listed in the Appendix. Before concluding, there are three topics I want to touch upon briefly, two of them controversial, as, needless to say, are many things about this poet and his work. The first of these are Shelley’s views against religion. I’ll let Shelley speak for himself. Here is an extract from the Preface to The Revolt of Islam, his most anti-religious poem, apart from the juvenile Queen Mab: “The erroneous


and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being, for instance, is spoken against, but not the Supreme Being itself. The belief which some superstitious persons whom I have brought upon the stage entertain of the Deity, as injurious to the character of his benevolence, is widely different from my own.” I should add here that Shelley’s idea of a Supreme Being was never anthropomorphic, and gradually develops from the atheism of his youth to the idea of a spirit which pervades the universe or is in fact the universe itself. Now here are his views on the founder of the Christian religion, and the later implementation of his teachings:

One came forth of gentle worthSmiling on the sanguine earth; His words outlived him, like swift poisonWithering up truth, peace, and pity. Look! where round the wide horizon Many a million-peopled city Vomits smoke in the bright air. Hark that outcry of despair! ’Tis his mild and gentle ghostWailing for the faith he kindled: Look again, the flames almost To a glow-worm’s lamp have dwindled . . .

(Prometheus Unbound, Act I, ll. 546-557.)

This brings me to the second topic, his Prometheus Unbound, considered by most of his admirers as his greatest work, and by his detractors as an idle daydream with little grounding in reality. As stated earlier in this essay, Act I is a metaphor for reality, for the world as it is. The rest of the poem develops to what the world might become, presupposing a radical change in human nature. Those who call this work an idle daydream would be of the view that human nature cannot so change, and unfortunately they are probably right. The poem presents the problem and the possibility, and it is in this context, not in that of prophecy or fatuous hope, that the work should be considered. The third subject for brief mention here is his last poem, The Triumph of Life. To the valuable points made by Mr Mencher in the last issue, I just have a few of my own remarks to add. I would agree with him that this could be viewed as his best poem, differing only in holding Prometheus Unbound to be on about the same level. But how different these two poems are—or are they? Although a span of less than three years separates their composition, the ironically titled The Triumph of Life might almost be taken as a retraction of Prometheus Unbound. And yet it is perhaps not so different from the first Act of the latter. A hauntingly enigmatic poem, not quite finished, the revolving and repeating cycles central to its theme are replicated in the structure of the poem itself, and the mysterious second part, beginning with line 308, “…. Now listen: – In the April prime”, seems to repeat the first part of the poem, but upon other and


deeper levels. The poem does not provide an answer to its central question, “what is life?”, and it is with that very question that it ends. Although Shelley ought not to have been aware of his impending death, as it was accidental, he could have written here, at the end of his life, a no more fitting poem.

Nicholas Somlo APPENDIX: SHELLEY’S WORKS: A SELECTION

What follows here is a listing of what I consider his best and better poems. These are not all great poems by any means, and certainly they are not all free of faults; but all, I believe, are worthy of a great poet. Included as well are fragments and incomplete poems (noted as such), in cases where I think they contain at least something worth retaining. I have listed the poems by year of composition, and have used (as is the case throughout this essay) Mary Shelley’s posthumous edition of her husband’s poems of 1824, and her 1839 edition of the Collected Poems. Long poems—I have used Mrs. Shelley’s classification of what constitutes such—are in capitals.

Before 1815None. Queen Mab is rightly relegated to Shelley’s juvenilia, as deemed by Shelley himself, except for his later rehandling of a part of it as a fragment titled The Daemon of the World.

1815ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDEMutability (This is actually much superior to the poem of the same title written in 1821.)On Death (The revision of an earlier version written before 1815.)A Summer Evening Churchyard

1816The SunsetHymn to Intellectual BeautyMont Blanc

1817THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, Cantos I-V, VII-IXPRINCE ATHANASE. A FRAGMENTLines: “That time is dead for ever”Ozymandias

1818JULIAN AND MADDALO. A CONVERSATIONTo the NileThe PastLines written among the Euganean Hills


Invocation to MiseryStanzas written in Dejection, near NaplesSonnet: “Lift not the painted veil”The Woodman and the Nightingale (Incomplete.)Marenghi (Incomplete.)Apostrophe to Silence (Fragment.)

1819 PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. A LYRICAL DRAMAOde to HeavenOde to the West Wind An ExhortationOn the Medusa of Leonardo da VinciThe Birth of PleasureTHE MASK OF ANARCHY (I cite it here not for being poetry of a high order, but as the best example of his popular political verse.)PETER BELL THE THIRD (Again, cited here not for being high poetry, but for containing some fine satirical verse, chiefly from Part the Third onward.) Wedded Souls (Fragment.) “Is it that in some brighter sphere” (Fragment.) A Tale Untold (Fragment.)

1820LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE THE WITCH OF ATLASThe Sensitive PlantA Vision of the SeaThe CloudTo a SkylarkOde to LibertyArethusaHymn of ApolloThe QuestionThe Two Spirits: An AllegoryOde to NaplesAutumn: A DirgeLibertyThe Tower of FamineAn Allegory: “A Portal as of shadowy adamant”The World’s WanderersSonnet: “Ye hasten to the grave!”Orpheus (Incomplete.)Death (Line missing.)To the Moon (Fragment.)

1821EPIPSYCHIDIONADONAISHELLAS. A LYRICAL DRAMA


Dirge for the YearTo NightTimeSong: “Rarely, rarely, comest thou”Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of NapoleonSonnet: Political GreatnessLove, Hope, Desire, and FearGinevraThe Boat on the Serchio (Incomplete.)Three Fragments written for HellasTo-morrow (Fragment.)“When soft winds and sunny skies” (Fragment.)“O thou immortal deity” (Fragment.)

1822To Jane: The InvitationTo Jane: The RecollectionWith a Guitar, to JaneTo Jane: “The keen stars were twinkling” THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE (Some lines missing.) The Zucca (Incomplete.)The Isle (Fragment.)

PLAYSThe Cenci (1819)Fragments of an Unfinished Drama (1822)

PROSE WORKSOn Love (1818)On Life (1819)A Defense of Poetry (1821)


Immediately below is part three of the piece, begun in the issue before last, about Lyte, the literary theorist at Kronk University, Ontario. Below that—as a kind of footnote *—is the revised version of part two threatened in the last issue. A revised version of part three may or may not appear in the next issue. Ed.

Theory and TraditionPart III

Lyte’s professional success—such as it is—has been in keeping with what is safely politically-correct; and the experience of like success is as much as any student might gain from acknowledging him as a teacher. But let’s return to the publication with which we began, his contribution to The Kronk Revue:

Contemporary Literary Theory is marked by a number of premises, of which I will report nine, although not all theoretical approaches share or agree on all of them. (90)

Lyte seems strangely removed from his discipline, even careless, what with publishing this “report” (his genre of choice, I’ll wager) cross-gartered as interoffice memo and dissociating all “approaches” from the arguments of his colleagues for and against. He describes the activity of teaching (“marked by”) but extends and exhausts that activity in his own preoccupation (“Contemporary Literary Theory”), which, as the bizarre capitalization seems to indicate, he mistakes as authoritative. “Contemporary Literary Theory”, like some Frankenstein Monster, seems to come to being in the “theoretical approaches” which we might think see literature as a sort of homunculus to be begotten with the ability to “share” and “agree”.[1] Note: Now that Lyte claims awards for teaching excellence, he will weed the subject he teaches: he has become dangerous … if not indispensable. Listen. Theoreticians have no use for “The Western Canon”, they read theory obsessively, and they try to read more of it then the next guy or gal: voluminous masses of paper dedicated to obstruction; and what wit they make of it! They represent a faction in civilization that claims superiority to literatures, though they would, as we have noted, be called literary. It is terribly important for us to realize that they are, one and all, for The Administration, no matter how we may pity or cherish their blinking, wheezing, stoops and stutters. Whereas Derrida would get a kick out of any administration’s reaction to his strange posturing in Glas, and Foucault might allow a smile at the naïve calculus of the first book of The History of Sexuality, Lyte submits his humorless methodology with a straight face. That said, The Kronk Revue lasted merely three issues (two circulated), a different beast than more familiar journals and university quarterlies, but Lyte’s unabashed grievance against literature should still be


disconcerting to the English department, if not the taxpayer garnishing wages. The English department, though, can afford the longer memory and, what’s more, can afford to pull. Lyte is our example of a pedagogue. The character of a pedagogue has not borne criticism well, all too often at the sticking place of shame and blame. It falls to his lot that he be heedless in propagation of error and even superstition. One professor [2] has ably defined the pedagogue in an essay titled, “The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: A Portent.”

The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads has secured for itself generations of superstitious veneration. To pedagogues it has commended itself as a solid handhold where so much else eludes the grasp. It has been treated as central, not so much because it was unquestionably central, but because it was portable and expoundable.

We read of the sophistical “pedagogue” and what “commends” itself to him, and then of his handhold, his grasp: a busy sort, but that of an empty glad-hander whose artifice is like to condescend to the thing itself. Lyte’s rubric is an example of that portable and expoundable thing, serving just as well in any number of reports, and a CV, his occupation professing—anything but humanity, that pathetic thing—“Art more engaged”![3] Lyte’s affirmations flatter the generation-ally-gapped, but do little else.[4]

The central interpretive strategies in force and in power in the academy which are being challenged by Theory were themselves revolutionary, theory-based practices which became the norm. (90)

The challengers are morally opposed to “the opposition” (it’s us-for-survival v. them-with-all-the-dough). They’ve got “gung-ho”, “gonzo”—and like expensive hairstylists, they revel in a virtue not central to society: originality. Excruciating morality results and we are subject to the most embarrassing fashions of thought (e.g. “creativity”). So, Lyte thinks that “theory-based practices” are the norm; after all he has got his rubric, and in theory someone will congratulate him for coming prepared. There’s certainly nothing revolutionary in this sort of behavior, just sinister where its pretension is to submit a grading scheme for his betters to their higher-ups.

If an inquiry thus carefully conducted, should fail at last of discovering the truth, it may answer an end perhaps as useful, in discovering to us the weakness of our own understanding. If it does not make us knowing, it may make us modest. If it does not preserve us from error, it may at least from the spirit of error, and may make us cautious of pronouncing with positiveness or with haste, when so much labour may end in so much uncertainty. (Burke)

Ttheory and tradition are transposed, appositely.


Apple Nodham 1. I am reminded of a scene in Whales’s Frankenstein, where the monster casts his lover into the river and where the scientist screams, “LIVE!”—very similar theatrics.2. The famous Canadian scholar. I have not neglected to name him. I am only afraid that naming him will give me away. After all, who is up on their literary criticism these days? Gossip, on the other hand …3. Claudio’s prayer4. Although they might send you off to McLuhan’s The Executive As Drop-Out where you can ponder the rhetorical similarities. Was Lyte ever a McLuhanite?

* Theory and Tradition II

A staff is a fact concerning those who belong in Ontario’s provincial universities. I expect the run-of-the-mill professor knows it and attends to it. If some other scheduled body requires an audience of him or her then doubtless that body can appreciate the grimness in a secretary’s reply, that so-and-so is “in a Department meeting right now.” A staff meeting is another thing. What good is served? Kronk’s English professors go to the hardly topical, fluorescent-lit students lounge shuffled midst their offices. The architect had a few funny ideas. The door to one room in particular sports one of the few frames that could be said to be functional, the stolid vistas in each professor’s workspace a given, and what’s more its inviting pane opens up a mystic congestion; that is, Humanities at University, the “A-Block”. Every so often those employed to teach sit at a paper tablecloth, the coffee service at its head pours, heraldry consists of inspirational posters left to right: a successful Garfield and Odie strip, representative Group of Seven lithographs, the past but still commercial shades of the Stratford and Shaw festivals, decorative borders, banners, etcetera. Some student may have chalked the motto “Grad School Rocks!” on the blackboard. Or was it a student? Outside, perched on parkland and preservation authority, is the original faculty building. Its separateness meant it hung on a while as the campus pub. Before the cafeteria became the niteclub, the situation for what’s now the “University Club” became truly terminal and its use warranted change. It’s a kind of fixture now, a special pavilion. When students stand at the door in A-Block looking in on the progress of a meeting, faculty members rear a face noting for an instant the damned permissiveness of that steel framed glass. It is, however, the largest and most convenient room for their purposes, doing double duty once in a while for a staff party—but it is hardly a functional lounge. More like a small conference room with varying settings and degrees of informality, with and without donuts. English students head to the seventh floor of the library,


drink coffee and tea in the commons (exceedingly common); some still condescend to congregate under the “The Butt Stops Here” sign and drop ash into the few legal ash trays. In the so-called lounge a handful of recognizable students complain (informally) that there is not much to be done by way of conversation, or else they gossip, get picked up or (happily and unhappily) left off. Other students discuss joining on-campus societies, the significance of exercise and the television-as-life. A journal is spasmodically brought to press. Few know how or why. “How’s it going?” greets Lyte. “It” sounds as though it might be the head of a dissertation. The hapless pupil shouldering The Great Tradition confesses, “It could be better.” “Could it? Could it?” is Lyte’s reproach. The student may shudder but Lyte is right that the exchange provides means; the ends are such that they may be graded accordingly and have nothing to do with the current fashion of ass-borne logos on jogging pants. What sort of participation would we encourage? Will it be worth the expected 10%? Yes, so long as the students give their all and please fill the fill-in-the-blank teacher evaluation. Meetings are brine for office pickles. Was it after leaving a particularly sobering meeting that Lyte wrote, “many departments are divided between” (“Theory and Tradition I”)? He cites no sources and we are left to imagine his crudity. How do the divisions of the sort he describes present themselves? A screen? Does he screen for them? Perhaps the quotation marks on “theory people” are a kind of sympathy—perhaps that sort is unjustly treated. Did he muster up the equivalent of his article: “I’ll fix you”? He cites no sources so we can only imagine. Perhaps …

Starting impetuously like a sanguine oarsman setting forth in the early morning I came very soon to a fork in the stream and found it necessary to pause and reflect seriously upon the direction I would take. Either presented to me equal fascinations, at least on the surface, and for that very reason my hesitation extended over many days. I floated on a calm water of pleasant speculation, between the divergent currents of conflicting impulses, with an agreeable but perfectly irrational conviction that neither of those currents would lead to my destruction. My sympathies being equally divided and the two forces being equal it is perfectly obvious that nothing but mere chance influenced my decision in the end.

The devising screen, unlike Conrad’s fork in the author’s note to Chance, is un-mistakenly personal. Lyte pans the humours of colleague and opponent to gain advantage. “Never alone did Caesar sigh/ But with a general groan.” Perhaps he plays a capitol figure on capital E education or on an ecumenical capital P pedagogy. But what are our claims? Only that we cannot be satisfied with an allowance for ideological frameworks and a palaver of theoretical views no more substantial than the suggested supermarket trip of


“good introductions” and “major movements” he recommends, though this situation does not trouble many students. Funds present a sort of publicizing that is the same scaffold— represent/value—we have noted, but now as a mode of power. This is Lyte’s favourite phrase and also an idea, his germ: “every position is a privileged position.” It is Lyte’s privilege that he lobbies for a special interest. “A people is nature’s detour to arrive at six or seven great men—and then get around them,” throws out Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil. Confident that Lyte is willing to represent his “theory people” let us say that together they constitute a conflagration, corporate and liberal. The boast of a revolutionary mandate is exciting; no doubt all of them will persist in celebrating diversity despite all accounts of a homogeneous and seditious work. Yes, voter, it may be silly to become closely involved. An opinion though may be substantiated in part by way of Lyte’s website. Besides “The Continuing and New Mandates of English Studies” (undated), there are web pages “On The Uses of Studying Literature” (1996) and on “The difference between Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, and ‘theory itself’” (1998). The mandate document begins with what departments of English “have long been charged with”. “By who?” we might ask, as Lyte slips into something more comfortable.

The mandate of English studies then was to chart the history of literature, to preserve and clarify works of the past, to continually reinterpret the literature of the past in terms of the knowledge, anxieties and understandings of the present, and to school young people in the wonders of the intricate and powerful uses of language and form which canonical works embodied.

So, the seeming privy of English studies at Kronk University, an administrated deportment, is a gift after all, a present and—listen—the cronies mandating its use, they should know enough to ensure everyone’s taking a good long look at charts and terms if anyone is going to get a bit of relief … This invention helps Lyte, his firm grasp; but did the signatory literary critics happen to slip off? Is Lyte leery of “young people” or has he rather simply restricted language to the subject of rhetoric and likewise literature to modernity? How does a student, in all innocence, grasp that “then was”? Where is everyone? In our wreck, do we continue as a matter of course? Current anthologies are understood best as a kind of sieve but isn’t it very important to know where English studies are? Governments “school young people”, tending to emphasize the intricacies of power but will anyone ever use calculus to throw a baseball successfully? No wonder the English department seems to be stealing away psychology majors, will-be ad-execs and the advertisements-for-myself crowd interested in drawing the sword from the stone so that they might grasp the intricacies of power and start using. The stamp of Lyte’s prose is a get y’up many pupils, in their youth, willingly respond to. What would Lyte be “constantly reinterpreting” for? Possibly for


that apparition, the Liberal Arts, but likely we are talking about an administration, or at least a few generations of one in Ontario, happening to flatter his spirit.

Whatever certainty is to be acquired in morality and the sciences of life; just the same degree of certainty have we in what relates to them in works of the imagination.

That’s Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 22 in the Oxford World Classics edition. That’s Burke interrupting. No, it is not “reinterpretation”, which needs no “constantly”. It is reiteration. “This mandate remains,” Lyte declares; ready to curb sanctimoniously “the reign of formalist approaches” with the seven key amendments he justifies as alterations “in response to a number of social and cultural changes”. After having alterations done, a little mending of his own, the mandate suits him and he resumes with the “questions” as “problematized”, and even allows for an appropriately peripheral inquiry, something by way of an approach: the issue of consent. To those who will with Socrates declare, “know thyself”: he is back on his feet and selling you the bridge that spans “the hermeneutic gap between the world of the writer and the world of the reader.” You might convince me that the attitude is his right. Come on! This mandate reads like a mock-up of the constitution replete with a sacred Bill of Rights. And if this is like some sort of consultation, if this is not anything like listening to Leonard Cohen sing, “I’ve read the Bill of Rights/ and most of it was good,” then it is hardly the “more complex, more socially-located, more historical, more engaged with problems of meaning and interpretation” that’s supposed to hatch in Lyte’s closing. If “what is the use” is a question we can safely examine, given that professors are still expected to “elucidate” this “wonder” for students, let’s look next at, “On the Uses of Studying Literature”. The direction indicated by the first three paragraphs reads: “engage”, and then “use”, and then “avail”. A list of suggestions on how to work this out in Academe follows. Only the neophyte seizing Lyte’s affected ease and blunt comfort like a guarantee could mistake this for what literature is for. The academic aspect of Lyte’s suggestion consists in its division into targets: theses one may easily master. All eight are naturally self-explanatory; there is however, an interesting inversion in the uniquely bold-faced eighth, “Looked at as privileging the position of the elite”, where “the agenda of the privileged classes” becomes “the agenda of the culture” and creates “pseudo-problems” for which it provides “pseudo-solutions”. The professor incites his persona (with a Machiavellian wink)—“It’s real social function,” he suggests, “is to keep us quiet, to create false consciousness.” Is it “us” he means? And that mark you think you have from Lyte—that’s representation and value for you … Bon mot— “No criticism is innocent of theory.” This gem has been lifted from “The difference between Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, and ‘theory itself’”. Let those without sin cast the first stone, says the painted Jesus, feeling better now that he has been hoisted


onto Judas’s frame. It’s no one’s fault. Oh, the ropey knot of a fist pulls the shirt tight, and nobody likes to be called a dummy …

Theory Itself … is always one step off, is not to hand for criticism, because it is attempting to assess the assumptions and implications of the demarked space …

My theory!—I’m had at the reprinted mistake. I haven’t the wit to shut out that Gravedigger—“It’s a quick lie then from me to you”—let alone Theory Itself bantering with a critical affectation – a Pop-o-matic Bubble as like to Shakespearianisms as landmines. “Step off” is interesting insofar as it may be implicit realization and imperative finding. The Heavenly Demark is tough traffic these days, what with thieving illiterates blasting God (dead), author (dead), Disco, Punk (dead, dead), whatever, so why not step, and, oh—what’s the difference?

Our peculiarities have become insipid sameness; our eccentricity servile imagination; our wit, wisdom at second hand; our distinguish-ing characteristic the want of all character. We are become a nation of authors and readers, and even this distinction is confounded by the mediation of the reviewers. We all follow the same profession, which is criticism, each individual is every thing but himself, not one but all mankind’s epidome [sic], and the gradations of vice and virtue, of sense and folly, of refinement and grossness of character, seem lost in a kind of intellectual hermaphroditism.

Perhaps the charge with which Hazlitt starts off “On Modern Comedy” (Oxford World Classics, page 101) can force our attention to the reality of the situation. The involving “our” functions as a kind of fold, or weight, a “head in my hands” perhaps. Perhaps “Theory Itself” is not to head for criticism. It’s drawn out in a front line and not drawn out in the sense of being flushed out and caught up and kicking. Theory Itself may be an encephalitic. Where Hazlitt says, “we all follow that same profession, which is criticism” let’s say that these days thinking that every criticism is an opinion, or more ordinarily your opinion, and you are unlikely to find a person that will tell the difference, yes, between sense and folly, within sight of a professional. Rather, the attitude we want to get is a tell-all. That is your theory; that is like you: Theory Itself, not the argument, not the thingy. We take that for granted. The thesis can be found anytime—it’s not our department really. The thesis is found, noted. If Canada isn’t yet a nation of authors and readers it isn’t from want of attention. These days there are the sallies of the CBC—“Canada Reads”—as well as standard high school literacy tests and curricula endorsing, stupidly, media literacy. It is unlikely that anyone noticing the scofflaw exculpated is happy discussing the state of literacy. Do we think that respect is the best indication of a person’s perspective? Criticism, right off, may not be a tenable position: one could lose one’s privileges before the game begins. And a literature made deaf to criticism is a poor result. When Lyte states, “Literary


criticism is fundamentally the estimation of the value of a particular work on such grounds as …” does he mean to say literary criticism is a daft way of playing the field and maybe a daft way to divide the field too? But where are we? Criticism is unfortunately the province of the naïve—selflessness. That said, literature is not the culminating activity, is not a team sport … Literature is not “good for you” at all.

The word ‘criticism’ has ordinary-use negative connotations, and to an extent that is right: for literary criticism is part of the disciplining of discourse generally …

In the search for a suitable discipline (a word with extra-ordinary-use connotations above) students in the first year of a humanities program may envy the dedication required of the sciences. Instead of a discipline that is there for the student, the student of English is left free, conspicuous and free, to choose a course of study. When such a student speaks as a man or woman it sounds like discourse to the likes of Lyte and, being in charge, discipline is necessary: for, though not every leader is capable of it, in discourse especially, the high rule is that one must never leave oneself open to criticism. A student may come to think of some other department as more accepting, more inviting – “to an extent that is right.” Is an extent any stranger? Find the extent and disapprove of it? “One patrols the boundaries …” It is more than I can bear. What follows is Lyte’s concrete example of literary criticism. In “The difference between Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, and ‘theory itself’”, Lyte has called out Edward Garnett, his bit on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

One can simply critique or approve Garnett’s literary criticism and feel that one has done one’s job, but only if one chooses to ignore (or simply fully agrees as not to perceive) the theoretical position(s) on which his reading is based.

What Lyte will do, in a singular manner, is startle the lot of ’em with theory, free up some of the snubs, and treat literary criticism in a nondescript way, a case in point that ensures Garnett is made an example of. Really, Lyte’s “one” stands aloof. The challenge is set: critique/approve. With regards to Garnett, it’s too late to disapprove, isn’t it? In its best sense this question falters as attention is drawn to the “negative use connotations” in the substitution, or perhaps we could say malignity. But anyways that would be heading towards criticism—I shall stick it out with Lyte’s paraphrase, which establishes the literary justification that brought us here and—in walks the law, guns blazing by all accounts! Lyte bullets the results: a, b, c, it’s 1, 2, 3 and 4. The coat peg! That one’s hat! The next two quotations are, I think, the mortal wounds.

Similarly, there is a politics in Garnett’s reading, and a position in relation to imperialism; in fact he claims, and claims it apparently as a strength, that there is no


political motivation to the text. This leads us to the perception that Garnett does not read literature of colonization with suspicion, does not think in terms of the language of the Other, does not interrogate imperialist values – or gender values, for another. Reading Heart of Darkness in that manner requires of [sic] set of theoretical conceptions and assumptions Garnett did not have.

What if we preserved the suspicious misprint in that final line? Conceivably what was meant, at least in theory, is that

“Reading Heart of Darkness in that manner requires of [us ( for we are a] set of theoretical conceptions and assumptions) [what] Garnett did not have.”

Does that work? Or we could just assume “a” is meant where we see “of”. In any case, if this quotation is not a perfect example of “fully agreeing so as not to perceive” then what is it? Is it “privileging and maintaining the power of the elite”? Yes, that too. But we can assume that Garnett is about dying, and what’s more leaving us for another world. It’s not a sure death so the question may be whether Lyte deserves to be counted among the elite, now we admit we’re got one, or whether he’s got the position, and that’s that. I do not think the satisfaction he feels when he does the business better than the rest quite covers the territory I am referring to.

Only a certain audience would have read this, why Garnett chose to publish there rather than in the popular press, as well as the title of the publication [Academy and Literature], are themselves important statements about his understanding of what ‘literature’ is and ultimately about what its social functions in society are.

That did it. Garnett cannot speak from beyond the grave. If this is not a perfect example of “mystifying the real construction of society and creating pseudo-problems and pseudo-solutions … to create false consciousness,” what is? So Garnett had an idea. What was it? The questions Lyte poses aren’t even rhetorical. “Only a certain audience would have read this” goes doubly for Lyte. Hell, for any of us, if that’s really the case! Why is Garnett in any way stereotypical in his opinions? Who could be the real object here? Garnett is nothing but ethereal thought, and there’s something more substantial to Lyte’s facetious poise. But this is not even theory in practice, unless that has been totally confounded with “its social functions” … What could lead our literary theorist to this exposition? Lyte: “we are contesting the valuations that criticism makes.”— “Makes”? Well, who? Garnett, that sop? Is this the only way Lyte can see winning? And are his students the contestants? If you are betting on the sure thing, it’s dominance, dominion: “Theory”. The attitude is prejudice: theory is posited as criticism’s better: an orientation towards Being. No thank-you, we say. Yet there is a public to consider. Lyte has no great public reputation. He


has kept up with the times and helps others to do the same. He patronizes Canadian Studies and Pop-Culture, and writes self-effacing “amateur” deconstructionist readings, but for the most part he just introduces and summarizes. Isn’t it nice that this professor will let you know just what his take is on the subject of Bahktin’s “carnevalesque”, Lacan’s Écrits, Post-Modernism, and Post-Colonialism? I mean he really tries to make it easy for you. For this his website is bound to be popular—and if you have anything to add or a criticism to make he asks that you tell him. Opposition, it seems, must be made according to the terms of our democracy, which we must assume is Democracy itself. It’s much like the arrow posted at my former employer’s, “Complaint department: 3,000,000 miles.”

The study of literary theory as I understand it occupies a site of struggle between these two locations, “Literary Theory” and “theory itself”, between the attempt to locate literature in relation to its components, on the one hand, and an attempt to understand the ontological, epistemic, axiological and praxic nature and implications and assumptions of the very phenomenon of ‘literature’ as a cultural foundation and practice. [Ital. added]

A site of struggle! Come on, a re-enactment more like. But let’s try. I suspect that the terms “literary theory”, “Literary Theory”, “theory itself”, “literature”, and “‘literature’” are variables in an ill-conceived paragraph corresponding to Lyte’s occupation.

The study of literature as I understand it occupies a site of struggle between these two locations, Literary Theory and ‘literature’, between the attempt to locate literary theory in relation to its components, on the one hand, and an attempt to understand the ontological, epistemic, axiological and praxic nature and implications and assumptions of the very phenomenon of theory itself as a cultural foundation and practice. [Ital. added]

In the former quotation we see Lyte in 1998, full of himself, and in the latter invention we find the very opinion of his 1993 frontiers article, so far as I can tell (Theory and Tradition I). Let’s try again and without the either/or … I attempt to locate Lyte in relation to his components, and attempt to understand just what Lyte must be. Maybe if I consider the one hand and the other, I might begin to struggle. Normally, I would agree with Cardinal Newman’s use of the proverb, “avoid those who cause divisions” but the latest acquisition boasted by Kronk University is a stock of Master of Art in English Language and Literature degrees, to be conferred with a ceremonious bow on the part of the student. I wish all who attend the best of luck. “This is no impeachment … it only showed some want of knowledge.” That’s Burke again, same book, page 19. I am no legislator. If theory’s hucksters can set their balances in public view and, as the scales crawl to the fulcrum of “literariness” so that the budget is most revered, convince us that they can best tell justice


from injustice, liberalism from conservatism—yes, even while all the people we know become a question of absence or presence, and public dissent, in its strength, withers (a little more than chum, and less than chump) or stands for ideals—what can one do? The Radicals jibber: “Freedom from what? What’s not Left?” But let’s not come too quickly upon the disguised and poisoned rapier those with an investment in theory call text. Those too hasty all-too-human folk become, in the training of theoreticians, figments in the imagination capable of anything. Such sacrifices are necessary in the loose experimentation that flattery is these days. Out of the singularity will come a currency of norms to “will life imitate art/will art imitate life” and the result will be nothing but a practical joke rushed to higher offices, proof that the system is itself the only virtue. Of course, they—we maintain positive outlooks and enjoy some security. There’s a market to consider. Rosancrantz and Guildenstern’s Revenge! Literary criticism is assumed a bastardisation fostered by liberally tolerant cultural studies programs. The bond undergraduates undertake getting with the program is strengthened through the principles of commercialisation and solidified in a nearly unrecognisable theory of evolution concrete in its repudiation of Charles Darwin. Disenfranchised youth setting out to meet the folks that they thought they recognized in snatches from our anathematical Canadian identity is susceptible to the overtures of “Theory Itself”—a situation that evolves as the employment of an English “instrument” becomes more important to Canada’s economy and the Humanities are meant to contribute to a prospering nation. Will English literature survive the dismemberment of its thinking? Of course—just not flourish in the senselessness of University programs. What senselessness! It’s no garden path. After I forgot Foucault (a nice art) I found him again in the curious attention he pays the English, the do-it-yourself spirit of the English, in side glances in Discipline and Punish; and that’s difficult to check against a tradition. The working English language is a part of being in the right and that’s something right. Lyte’s right to teach it isn’t the predilection for cant we might expect; rather it’s through “precepts” promoting a retinue of policy-informers. The lesson is there, still in coming to know, but “agreeing so as not to perceive.” The wrench is still in getting the right answer wrong. Yes, mostly, be sure about your wrench. A few acceptable answers:

(From precept #5) … no solid ground of truth beneath the shifting sands of history …(From precept #6) An individual is a nexus of social meanings and practices, psychic and ideological forces and uses of language and other signs and symbols …(From precept #9) Culture and individuals are constructed through networks of affiliated language, symbol and discourse usages; all of life is textual, a tissue of signifying relationships.


Simple foolery, implementation, and add a doubtful—maybe metonymic. Are we talking desserts or hourglasses? Maybe singularity and compatibility—or eugenics: there it is in number nine, I’m taken aback I must be wrong. I can’t believe that what we end up with at the end of the day is a glut of culturally responsible tissues and that that’s a perfectly normal explanation for the attitude necessary to network where people go to listen to the professors. Hardly surprising that post-modern philosophy in post-secondary education consists in brief constructions and reconstructions of theoretical positions, nothing but process. What sort of a thing is that? Process! Lyte’s writing process! The “schooled” can counter with a Way, perhaps one of Lyte’s from his “On the Uses of Studying Literature”—“The Wisdom Thesis”—or possibly the “ordinary-use negative connotations” that they think is a corollary to the Religion and antiquity of Academia. Tolerance? It may be crazy but a reply to the provincial University’s endemic metropolis of thought should be made: “I bike”.

Though I have not found sufficient reason, or what appeared to me sufficient, for making any material change in my theory, I have found it necessary in many places to explain illustrate and enforce it. (Burke 3)

Oh, fuck off Burke. Apple Nodham


Let’s remember them

No. 1, David Baddiel

David Baddiel, the well-known novelist and literary critic who coined the phrase “I’m a bloke” (famously plagiarized by ‘Emily’ Howard as “I am a lady”), has, his friends say, died, from working himself too hard. He enjoyed a glittering undergraduate career. He read English at Cambridge (he was a King's man), not only taking a double-first but getting the highest marks ever awarded in the English tripos. After coming down, and doing research for a Ph.D. at UCL, he published three novels, the last of which Erica Wagner, the Times literary editor, described as “rewarding”. Despite the setback, he was rumoured, when he died, to be working on a fourth. He was a frequent contributor to quality newspaper book columns and high-brow television chat shows, where he could always be relied on to discover hitherto undetected flaws in the classic and to champion, as long as it was sufficiently recent, the obviously worthless. Fifty years ago he would probably have sounded like Julian Barnes but, the market for Julian Barneses having collapsed, he created for himself a niche as a Jewish bloke. This proved not just commercially but—as anyone familiar with his criticism will know—rhetorically astute, affording him access to a greater range of tropes (a favourite word of his) than any other critic of his generation. It meant he could come onto the reader as a bloke when he was being a literary critic and a literary critic when he was being a bloke. He was probably best known for being a mate of Frank Skinner's and enjoying a wank.


Letters

Sir, Mr Mencher will be aware that both Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists are critical of Zionism as a nationalistic or ethnic force, and given that the promotion of Zionism is opposed by Orthodox Jews, my criticism of it is not especially radical or new, nor can it validly be called “vicious unthinking anti-semitism”; it’s certainly not anti-Arab nor anti-Israeli. It is however critical of Zionism in its aggressive militant form, a criticism supported by many Zionists and non-Zionists, intellectuals, academics and laymen alike. And doesn’t Zionism take away the right of self-determination laid down in the UN Charter from the Palestinians? Or where has Mr Mencher been this last half-century? Ah, I know; he has been writing novels and practising literary criticism. I did point out that to raise this matter would invite the label of anti-semitism. But tu quoque! I don’t suppose anything I can say will alter his unthinking prejudice against a discussion of a complex geo-political and ethnic problem without resorting to insults; it reflects discreditably upon his profession that he can so readily succumb to these journalistic clichés. Cordially,Colin Honnor

* Dear Sir, Why does Words in Edgeways not have a blog connected with it? It would permit discussion without having to wait three months for replies and without needing to go through the editor. Best wishes, Alison JonesIt does now. The first posting is on Middleton Murry’s Son of Woman. Perhaps you might like to comment on it. Ed.

Documents

Achebe’s Racism - Edgeways Books · Web viewAn Appreciation of Shelley in the Postmodern Age