Shelley, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Revolutionary Imagination

This chapter is concerned with the revolutionary imagination and Shelley’s relationship with Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. It examines the personal and critical tensions between Shelley and his older contemporaries. Although Lamb and Hazlitt were outspoken in their objections to Shelley’s poetry and politics, the chapter traces their many affinities. It focuses mainly on Hazlitt’s response to Shelley and the conflicting feelings of contempt and admiration that Hazlitt has for Shelley and his poetry. The chapter identifies the ways in which the two writers converge and depart in their revolutionary, poetic, and philosophical ideals. Hazlitt, who places great value on disinterestedness, is identified as at first hopeful but ultimately aware of the difficulty of sustaining his revolutionary ideals. Thus, Hazlitt criticizes in Shelley an optimism that he believes to be naive. For Hazlitt, Shelley’s idealism isolates him and diminishes the potential achievement of his poetry. The chapter draws out the brilliance of Lamb’s and Hazlitt’s prose, and identifies ways in which the other Romantic poets’ antipathy toward Shelley is often accompanied with admiration. The chapter argues that Lamb’s and Hazlitt’s dislike of Shelley coexists with admiration, and that many of their condemnations of Shelley’s poetic, philosophical, and political ideals reveal an underlying acknowledgement of Shelley’s poetic genius.