‘Stars Caught in My Branches’

Chapter 17 considers Shelley as a predecessor who, paradoxically, taught Swinburne how to go beyond being ‘A sort of pseudo-Shelley’ (Matthew Arnold). Swinburne becomes his own kind of iconoclastic poet by starting from Shelleyan examples. The chapter reveals the intricacy with which Swinburne adapts and inherits Shelley’s poetic thought. It explores Swinburne’s response to Shelley through readings of paired poems across a range of literary kinds: lyric, remodellings of classical drama, elegy, and extended metapoetic rhapsodies-cum-meditations. As Shelley does, Swinburne explores myth while revealing the eternal energies of desire and dread that draws the poet towards it. Reading ‘To a Seamew’ (for example) as a saddened and lyrical reworking of Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’, this chapter attunes itself to Swinburne’s adaptations and insistent individuating of Shelley’s Romantic music. Again it contends, in relation to the view that Shelley’s work bravely seeks to face up and face down the forces pitted against affirmation, that Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon shows extreme sensitivity to this Shelleyan dialectic. Overall the chapter argues that Swinburne’s counter-Shelleyan achievement is to fuse a poem’s becomings with its essential being.

‘Materials for Imagination’

Chapter 14 examines Hemans’s subterranean though profound engagement with Shelley in her poetry from 1822 onward. After discussing how Hemans often drew Byron and Shelley together, even as she was alert and responsive to their differences, the chapter shows how Hemans responded to Shelley in particular in order to individuate her more subjective, later-career poetry. Shelley often comes to Hemans’s mind as a fraught ally when ‘intersubjectivity’, in the form of intertextual responsiveness, points up poetic aloneness. At the same time, she continually reworks Shelleyan pursuit into a poetry of quasi-transcendental intimation that rarely settles for banal piety, but prompts us, rather, to see in her work a poet grappling with the aesthetic challenge of constructing her own poetic habitation out of the ‘materials for imagination’ available in her culture.

Introduction

This introductory chapter offers a discussion of literary dialogue and influence to give a delineation of the ways in which Shelley perceives how poets and poems connect, correspond, and contrast. It puts forth the argument that Shelley’s awareness of the ‘interplay’ between the works and ideas of a predecessor, the ‘consonance and dissonance’ between his own art and that of other artists, is an ‘artistic advantage’. Shelley’s greatness of originality is exemplified in the manner in which he establishes ‘new relations’ with originating texts. The Introduction outlines the ways in which Shelley’s gift for creative dialogue with predecessors and contemporaries as well as his influence on later poetry are examined in the book. It considers how Shelley understands and approaches influence; it also outlines the structure of the book, its central ideas, and the corresponding chapters in which those ideas are presented.

The Wheels of Being

Chapter 16 sees Tennyson, who published his first poems only five years after Shelley’s death, as taking his points of departure from Shelley’s poetry. Though Tennyson was original, and deeply immersed in the fabric of his own age, his fascination with Shelley runs throughout his career. Not that Tennyson evolves out of Shelley in some diagrammatic or uncomplicated fashion. But Tennyson’s poetic identity develops in accordance with his response to Shelley’s multi-faceted practice. In In Memoriam, for example, true to his uncanny ear for Shelley’s darker tonalities, Tennyson locates the unspeakable responses to his unanswerable questions ‘Behind the veil, behind the veil’ (LVI. 28). Tennyson, we may feel, wishes to dwell with a more prolonged gaze than Shelley does on that which lies this side of the veil. In his work, quest often mesmerizes itself into something close to imaginative reverie. But the yearning to know what lies ‘Behind the veil’ is by no means buried in Tennyson, who inherits from Shelley longings and despairs that are transmuted into his own lyric meditations.

‘The Inmost Spirit of Light’

Turner, Hazlitt wrote in The Examiner, is ‘the ablest landscape-painter now living’, but his paintings are ‘too much abstractions of aerial perspective, and representations not properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they were seen’. It is likely that Shelley would have known Hazlitt’s review, which foreshadows Hazlitt’s later criticism of similar traits of ‘abstraction’ in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems. Regardless of mutual influence or awareness, Turner and Shelley exhibit at times a startling similarity, both in thematic terms and in terms of their angles of vision and affective impact on viewer or reader. If in some moods they welcomed the resmelting of an old world in the furnace of words and paint, they were conscious, too, that such a burning away might induce regret as well as rhapsody. Through a range of comparisons between poems and paintings, the chapter shows how Turner and Shelley hymn change and lament evanescence in a blink of a line-ending or swish of a brushstroke; to try to pin them down to either praise or lament is nearly always to simplify.

Narrative and Play

‘Narrative and Play’ continues to evaluate Byron and Shelley’s relationship with an eye to discussing how both poets employ narrative form in ways that create allow a constant cycle of renewal. The chapter examines how both poets explore the justification of art as well as the limits of art. It identifies the deftness with which Byron, in his narrative poems, ‘enthrals and challenges the reader’ by creating characters and circumstances that challenge ethical clarity. His characters are divided against themselves; they often act by reacting rather than drive the narration with a sense of purpose. Shelley’s narrative poem, however, offers ‘something close to virtuosic poetic display’. For all the Romantic emphasis on the ideal, both poets also recognize and place value on what is real. They seek for truth through the imagination, and this chapter examines how each poet does so. The chapter also traces each poet’s capacity for balancing and blending contraries. It includes examination of poetic form in both poems, in this case ottava rima, and the ways in which both poets employ the Italian form. The chapter concludes with a final summing-up of the differing ways in which Shelley and Byron employ narrative form. Byron takes advantage of the infinite possibility in self-multiplying tales and of digression and narratorial presence. Shelley focuses less on the story itself, and more on the compulsion to create stories, which reflects, ultimately, the compulsion to create. Finally, the chapter points out the importance of Byron and Shelley’s poetic works and experiments in narrative form as precursors to postmodernist experimentation.

‘The Fixed and the Fluid’

This chapter addresses the question of poetic identity in the works of and literary relationship between Shelley and Byron. It identifies the mutual responsiveness of the two poets as well as their responsiveness to the self in poetry. For both poets, there is a great awareness of the possibility to re-imagine the self through poetry: to ‘multiply’ and be multiplied, to become ‘immortal’ through the continuance of one’s ideas and poetic visions, and to be born again in the minds and hearts of those readers who are receptive to the poet’s creations. Both poets, through their poetic works, explore the value of poetry through different forms. Byron’s narrative form provides means by which he can explore the self through opposing poles. As the chapter points out, for Byron, ‘Stories fix and identify; but they are also the doorways towards novelty and escape’. Shelley’s intense lyricism provides an opportunity to test the imagination’s capacity for movement between poles, to be at once fixed and fluid. Both poets present identity through the lens of poetic surrogates through whom they explore notions of isolation, the concept of heroism, a sense of suffering, and the very mortal wish for the timelessness of the soul. The two authors also deftly probe the relationship between author and reader. The chapter also explores the converging and diverging ways in which Byron and Shelley respond to Wordsworthian ideas of identity. It details how the poets’ friendship and intellectual exchange ‘changed who they were as poets’. Throughout, the chapter examines the skill with which each poet creates his works, and traces how poetic form corresponds to poetic idea.

‘A Double Face of False and True’

Chapter 3 traces the movements of Shelley’s ideas and attitudes toward religion throughout his life and writings. It views Shelley as a far more nuanced religious thinker than is often implied by critics. It identifies the ambivalence with which Shelley, a self-styled atheist, approaches religious belief—especially Christian modes of belief—and the ways in which Shelley wrestles with and subverts the boundaries between the secular and the religious. The chapter examines how Shelley’s imagination adapts the language of religious belief in order to articulate poetic vision and experience. It traces many of Shelley’s allusions to the Bible and identifies the ways in which Shelley ‘incessantly reorchestrate[s]’ Biblical language in his works. It identifies the treatment of religion in other Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Blake, and shows how Shelley’s poetry departs from their approaches to religion. The chapter also probes a recurring idea in Shelley’s poetry and writings that there is some power or spirit that affects human souls, that originates within or, just possibly, beyond humanity, and has characteristics that influence and are influenced by poets. For Shelley, poetry is religion and poets are prophets and seekers of truth. The chapter also discusses Shelley’s religious prose and the ways in which his writings about God, belief, and religion ‘[reveal] a double rhythm’ in which Shelley ranges from scientific examination to ‘eruptions of latent feeling’. The chapter concludes with a study of Shelley’s final poem, the unfinished Triumph of Life, showing that throughout the poem there ghosts a ‘Christian belief-system that is never wholly abandoned or forgotten’.

Emulating Plato

Through an exploration of Shelley’s poetic and discerning translation of Plato’s Symposium and Ion, this chapter closely examines the nuance of language with which Shelley responds to the Greek, and details the way in which Shelley’s translation achieves, through both form and idea, an unparalleled closeness in spirit to Plato’s original work. It explores Shelley’s stylistic range in tracing Plato’s movement between thought and language, and how his prose serves to echo and intensify the Platonic concepts of the Symposium through intricate forms, broadened perspectives, and a sense of the complex significance of the idea of love. The chapter demonstrates how Shelley’s poems, and in this case his poetic translations, ‘have remarkable intra-textual memories’. The chapter also traces Plato’s lasting influence on Shelley and on his metamorphosis into a great poet: how the poet’s interrelations with Plato, and specifically the Symposium, contribute to his development into a poet more capable of allowing for conflicting perspectives, for dialogue, and debate. Platonic ideas and their evolution feed into Shelleyan concepts in such works as A Defence of Poetry, and Shelley explores the nature of poetic inspiration and the role of a poet in his or her own culture in his translation of Ion. Chapter 1 additionally considers the ways in which, through his translations of and commentary on Plato, Shelley highlights what he calls the ‘vulgar error’ of differentiating between poetry and prose as separate and distinct literary forms.

‘The End and Aim of Poesy’

Chapter 10 reads the dialogue between Shelley and Keats in terms of the two poets’ ideas concerning the role of poetry in culture and in the imagination. It reconsiders the received perception of the two poets’ relationship—that Keats was not as interested in a poetic friendship as Shelley—and points out that the two had a friendly rivalry. The chapter points out the fact that Shelley is underappreciated for his ability to recognize, appreciate, and encourage in his contemporaries, Keats in particular, not only their poetic achievement, but also their poetic potential and the potential of their poetic works. The chapter examines their exchange of letters in 1820 and notes that the views each poet had of the other have set the tone and pattern by which the other poet would be viewed and criticized by their successors. The chapter addresses the subject of death in both poets’ works, and it addresses the fact that both poets were heavily influenced by Wordsworth, tracing the older Romantic poet’s echoes in their works. It identifies two seemingly insignificant words from Keats’s letter to Shelley from 16 August 1820, ‘spot’ and ‘remain’, and how Shelley revisits both words and expands their poetic significance in Adonais. The chapter argues that ‘Shelleyan metaphysics and Keatsian physics reach out to their opposite’. Shelley, too, influenced Keats, and the chapter identifies how Keats’s consideration of beauty shifts after encountering Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. Finally, the chapter traces how both poets assert that ‘great poetry endures’ and how their works have found their place, their own ‘spot’, in the history of canonical works that endure.