‘The Right Scale of that Balance’
This chapter outlines the unique role that Spenser and Milton played in influencing Shelley’s development as a poet. Shelley responds to, builds upon, and at times revises the artistic achievements of Spenser and Milton to create his own notion of art. The chapter explores Spenser’s capacity for contradiction and identifies the ways in which The Faerie Queen and other Spenserian works have an affinity with Shelley’s interest in the interplay between opposing ideas or forces. This examination of Shelley’s receptive and reformative relationship with Spencer traces the ways in which Shelley borrows—sometimes directly and sometimes in a modified fashion—the Spenserian stanza, exploiting its intricate poetic form and its capacity for variance. It shows that Spenser’s belief is not completely rejected by Shelley, but rather modified or revised: Spenser’s ‘Heavenlie’ beauty becomes Shelley’s ‘Intellectual’ beauty, for example. The second half of the chapter explores Shelley’s inheritance from and revision of Milton, how Shelley uses echo and allusion to recreate Miltonic effects, and how he gives those deliberately Miltonic effects his own uniquely Shelleyan inflection. It outlines how Shelley is attuned to Milton’s capacity for ambiguity of perspective in Paradise Lost and how Shelley imbues characters, such as Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound, with ambiguity. It also brings out Shelley’s use of forms he inherits from Milton, such as the way in which he employs tragedy to challenge moral values. This discussion is related to the larger question of the manner in which Shelley explores and revitalizes literary genres often associated with Spenser and Milton, such as the lyrical drama and narrative poetry.