Chapter 6 Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley was born in a wealthy family at Sussex. His father was a conservative man of the landed gentry, and his mother was a beautiful woman. He was a quiet and thoughtful boy. Though gentle by nature, his rebellious qualities were cultivated in his early years. Shelley grew up with violent revolutionary ideas under the influence of the free thinkers, so he held a lifelong aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority, institutional religion and the official shams of respectable society, condemning war, tyranny and exploitation. He is one of the leading romantic poets, an intense and original lyrical poet in the English language. His poems are harder to comprehend than Blake’s: imagistically complex, full of classical and mythological allusions. And they also abound in personification and metaphor and other figures of speech which vividly lead to what we see and feel, or resonate to our feelings.
Critical Perspectives
1.New Historicism
Alison Morgan, in “God Save Our Queen! Percy Bysshe Shelley and Radical Appropriations of the British National Anthem”, discusses the development of the British national anthems God Save the King and God Save the Rights of Man from the 18th century through the mid 19th century, with a particular focus on the poetry of writer Percy Bysshe Shelley’s relationship with the anthem. The influence that British radicals had on British national anthems, including in regard to the political movement of the Jacobites, is discussed.[1]
Eleanor Fitzsimons, in “The Shelleys in Ireland”, discusses the experiences of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Harriet Shelley, in Ireland in 1812 and 1813”, and argues that the Shelleys were in Ireland to attempt to assist in the Irish revolutionary movement in Dublin, Ireland. It discusses the contempt that the Shelleys had for then-Chief Secretary for Ireland Lord Castlereagh, their study of Irish history and politics, and the work An Address to the Irish People by Percy Bysshe Shelley.[2]
Paul Stock, in “Liberty and Independence: The Shelley-Byron Circle and the State(s) of Europe”, discusses the reactions of poets George Gordon Byron, John Cam Hobhouse, and Percy Bysshe Shelley to the political reconstruction of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. Paul details the poets’ understanding of the condition of Europe after decades of ideological and military conflict, with a specific focus on the interpretation of European politics through the use of the words “freedom” and “liberty”. Several historical texts are analyzed, including Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.[3]
Michael Rossington, in “ ‘The Destinies of the World’: Shelley’s reception and transmission of European news in 1820-1821”, examines the publishing of poetry and other literary works by the English author Percy Bysshe Shelley in response to European news and events through newspapers in the early 1820s. Shelley’s utilization of both English speaking newspapers in Italy as well as papers in London, England to carry his politically motivated works to the public is analyzed in detail.[4]
Sharon Ruston, in “One of the ‘Modern Sceptics’: Reappraising Shelley’s Medical Education”, explores the friendships and intellectual acquaintances English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley made among the Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital medical community during the spring of 1811; initial steps Shelley took towards becoming a surgeon himself; context for the science found in Prometheus Unbound and later poetry; Shelley’s use of a contemporary vocabulary employed within the science of life.[5]
2.Psychoanalytical Criticism
Merrilees Roberts, in “Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s Prefaces”, discusses that the prefaces to Shelley’s poems are generally seen as an important addendum to understanding the complex narratorial personae in the poems they accompany; to pull these textual edges into the centre of enquiry allows for consideration of the unique perspectives on ethics and aesthetics that they offer. Merrilees argues that Shelley’s prefaces conflate Sympathy conceived of as a personal and morally accountable emotional reflex, such as found in the thought of Adam Smith, and sympathy conceived as the abstract, disinterested aesthetic judgment of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. This conflation casts the sensitivity of the poet as both a faculty of judgment which forges an only indirect relationship to moral concerns, paradoxically, as something requiring explicitly moral behaviour. This tension engenders a psychological trauma which makes the idea of “the self” a contested, liminal space that marks the edges of Shelley’s understanding of the mental operations that occur in aesthetic experience.[6]
Thomas R. Frosch, in “‘More than ever can be spoken’: Unconscious Fantasy in Shelley’s Jane Williams Poems”, examines the play of unconscious fantasies of author Percy Bysshe Shelley and his effort to handle them as Shelley in these poems to Jane Williams seeks love, certain types of mastery, and also peace of mind. Peace of mind is a goal not to be undervalued in the troubled, agitated, conflicted psyche that appears throughout his poetry and with particular explicitness and intimacy in these last lyrics. Stuart Curran has seen in the Jane Williams poems an attempt to create a pastoral of the mind and a timeless bower of psychic peace. Williams enters Shelley’s poetic mythology in the unfinished The Zucca, written in January 1822. In The Serpent Is Shut Out From Paradise, also dated January 1822, Shelley writes manifestly about Jane and her husband, Edward Williams, but what he writes about them and exactly whom he is writing for are equivocal. Shelley sent the stanzas to Edward with instructions that he may read them to Jane, but to no one else—and yet Shelley changed his mind and said he would rather not have Edward read the poem to his wife. It seems that Shelley wanted Jane to see the poem but had some conflict about this wish, and that he absolutely did not want his wife, Mary, to see it.[7]
Meena Alexander, in“What Use Is Poetry? ”, discusses the social value of poetry, the psychological analysis of poetry, and the essay “A Defence of Poetry” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as her poem Question Time, adapted from an essay by Meena Alexander that was presented to the Yale Political Union in 2013.[8]
Barbara Judson, in “Under the Influence: Owenson, Shelley, and the Religion of Dreams”, discusses the novel The Missionary: An Indian Tale, by Sydney Owenson and particularly focuses on its influence on poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the realm of dream and desire. Both use dreams and imagery to express political and religious opinions while still appealing to their reader’s sensibilities.[9]
3.Philosophical Study
Daniel E. Lees, in “Berkeley Redux: Imagination as Ethical Power in Shelley’s Mont Blanc”, offers poetry criticism of the poem Mont Blanc by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It explores a unified view of life with all phenomena under the control of a single conscious power. Daniel reflects on the post-epiphany seen in the poem’s final movement and Shelley’s recognition of divine power and his piety in speaking of God. The relationship of reason and imagination to a super-sensible reality is interpreted.[10]
4.Deconstruction
Alan Rawes, in “Shelley’s ‘compelling rhyme schemes’ in The Triumph of Life”, argues that many critics have noted The Triumph of Life’s contradictory understandings of “life”, interpreting these contradictions as the product of thematic intention or thematic uncertainty. Drawing on a few deconstructive concepts about language and applying these to Shelley’s rhymes in The Triumph of Life, this essay argues that in Shelley’s poem rhymes create and disseminate equivocality of meaning but also offer Shelley a means of engaging creatively with that equivocality, and it is this interplay between form and poet that produces the poem’s contradictory readings of “life”. It also suggests that paying attention to this interplay working itself out does not just tell us something fundamental about The Triumph of Life but also a great deal about Shelley’s more general sensitive responsiveness to what he describes in A Defence of Poetry as the “relations” between “sounds” and the “uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound”, without which poetry, for Shelley, “were not poetry”.[11]
5.Thematic Study
Betsy Bolton, in “Agency from a Stone: Shelley’s Posthumanist Experiments in Mont Blanc”, reads Shelley’s Mont Blanc as an extended exploration into possible modes of relationship linking the human mind to the material world. The modes of relationship considered by Shelley anticipate many of the structures and strategies developed by posthumanist theory, including structural coupling, strategic anthropomorphism, imagistic translation, and human-nonhuman assemblages. After summarizing Kantian and post-Kantian readings of Mont Blanc, the essay works through an extended close reading of the poem to elucidate its proto-posthumanist elements.[12]
Christopher Hitt, in “Shelley’s Unwriting of Mont Blanc”, discusses efforts to contribute to the critical discussion of the poem Mont Blanc by Percy Bysshe Shelley; analysis of the subject and rhetorical operations of the poem; belief that the poem must be understood in the larger context of literary history; argument that the poem expresses a radical but redemptive skepticism which accepts the otherness of wilderness.[13](https://www.daowen.com)
6.Cultural Study
Michelle Geric, in “Shelley’s ‘cancelled cycles’: Huttonian Geomorphology and Catastrophism in Prometheus Unbound (1819)”, discusses a critique of the 1820 poem Prometheus Unbound by Percy Byssche Shelley is presented, focusing on its relationship to ideas about earth science, geomorphology, and geological change posited by Scottish geologist James Hutton. It comments on Shelley’s conceptions of socio-political and ideological revolution. Hutton’s ideas about the earth as selfsustaining and the restorative power of internal heat are considered. Geological catastrophe in the poem is also explored.[14]
7.Comparative Study
Matthew Scott, in “‘A manner beyond courtesy’: Two Concepts of Wonder in Coleridge and Shelley”, discusses the notion of wonder in the thought of poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, topics include the aesthetic theory espoused by Coleridge, the Elizabethan stage in relation to the aesthetics of playwright William Shakespeare’s work, and the definition of poetry in the Romantic thought of Shelley.[15]
【注释】
[1]Morgan A. “God Save Our Queen! Percy Bysshe Shelley and Radical Appropriations of the British National Anthem”. Romanticism, 2014, 20(1):60-72.
[2]Fitzsimons E. “The Shelleys in Ireland”. History Today, 2014, 64(6):10-16.
[3]Stock P. “Liberty and Independence: The Shelley-Byron Circle and the State(s) of Europe”. Romanticism, 2009, 15(2):121-130.
[4]Rossington M. “‘The Destinies of the World’: Shelley’s reception and transmission of European news in 1820-1821”. Romanticism, 2007, 13(3):233-243.
[5]Ruston S. “One of the ‘Modern Sceptics’: Reappraising Shelley’s Medical Education”. Romanticism, 2003, 9(1):1.
[6]Roberts M. “Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s Prefaces”. Romanticism, 2018, 24(2):158-168.
[7]Frosch T R. “ ‘More than ever can be spoken’: Unconscious Fantasy in Shelley’s Jane Williams Poems”. Studies in Philology, 2005, 102(3):378-413.
[8]Alexander M. “What Use Is Poetry?”. World Literature Today, 2013, 87(5):17-21.
[9]Judson B. “Under the Influence: Owenson, Shelley, and the Religion of Dreams”. Modern Philology, 2006, 104(2):202-223.
[10]Lees D E. “Berkeley Redux: Imagination as Ethical Power in Shelley’s Mont Blanc”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2016, 58(3):278-304.
[11]Rawes A. “Shelley’s ‘compelling rhyme schemes’ in The Triumph of Life”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(1):76-89.
[12]Bolton B. “Agency from a Stone: Shelley’s Posthumanist Experiments in Mont Blanc”. Word and Text, 2016, 6(1):28-47.
[13]Hitt C. “Shelley’s Unwriting of Mont Blanc”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2005, 47(2):139-166.
[14]Geric M. “Shelley’s ‘cancelled cycles’: Huttonian Geomorphology and Catastrophism in Prometheus Unbound (1819)”. Romanticism, 2013, 19(1):31-43.
[15]Scott M. “‘A manner beyond courtesy’: Two Concepts of Wonder in Coleridge and Shelley”. Romanticism, 2012, 18(3):227-238.