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1. Shelley's Conception of Poetry. Shelley has explained his lofty view of poetry in a prose-essay; Defence of Poetry. Poetry was to him what religion is to most people—an idealization of life. According to Shelley, "a poem is the very image of life expressed in eternal truth." He defines poetry as "the expression of the imagination" as contradistinct from that of the reason. He conceives that "the functions or objects of poetical faculty are two-fold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure: by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. "But these functions cannot be exercised at will even by the greatest poet. A great poem is not produced by reason, by study; or by hard work. The Poets are born not made. The poetical power "arises from within." "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds." The poet embodies in his verse the evanescent visitations of a divine nature which has come into his own. "Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the One: as far as it relates to his conceptions, time and place and number or not. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error." Again, he says, "Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure. Poetry is indeed something divine; it is at once the center and circumferences of all knowledge. Poetry turns all things to loveliness, it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed."
2. Shelley's Character and it's Bearing on His Art. Here we are giving the views of Prof. Clutton-Brock and Prof. Elton. Shelley's poetry is the expression of the man himself, springing from the heart rather than from the brain, and we must understand the man to understand his poetry "In his poetry," remarks Clutton-Brock "his character interests us as much as the poetry itself, because he has, so unexpectedly, been able to exhibit the beauty of his conceptions in its native truth and splendor, and has not needed to temper his planetary music for mortal ears."
His character and his story are more chequered and romantic than Wordsworth's, purer and loftier than Byron's. "Byron is always," says Professor Elton, "called an egotist, and so he is. Shelley is often called a saint, and he had, or came to have, some of the qualities of the saint. Shelley's frank friendliness and comradeship; his clear witted tact and good feeling in his intercourse with persons; his odd and fitful but genuine gaiety; his eager simplicity and naturalness—we must get all this into our minds if we are to see him right." His life was itself a romance. He was fearless and bold. He was not very strong in morality. He eloped with Mary Godwin, and his first wife Harriet committed suicide through his bitter estrangement from her. He was, moreover, skeptical and revolutionary in his ideas from the very outset of his life. "Of a sensitive and highly strung nature, Shelley was stirred at an early age by the spirit of revolt.".
3. Shelley's Philosophy of Human Life. O.W. Campbell has elaborated Shelley's concept of human life in contrast with Plato (429-347, B.C.), the renowned Greek philosopher. His dialogues and his Republic are among the greatest works of the ancients and embody a philosophical system which has served for admiration and discussion in all succeeding ages. According to O.W. Campbell, from his earliest youth Shelley was ambitious to improve the world: he tried to do this by reasoning against superstition and by actively supporting causes of political freedom. He was aware of the evils of the time in which he lived and he deliberately turned to poetry to expound his ideas on different aspects of life and society. Much of the romanticism of his contemporaries was a refuge from reality Shelley sought poetry with the most serious purposes. His poetry reflects his outlook on life. Shelley's real philosophy of life lay deep down in his imagination and though it developed as he learned wisdom, its main tendency was never changed. The most important of his beliefs, the motive power of his life and work, was his immense faith in man. With Plato, Shelley had far more in common than with Rousseau or Godwin and two of the ideas which recur most frequently in his prose and poetry are essentially Platonic. "These were the belief that life, as man knows it, is only an unreal show or a dream, and the conception of some all pervading Spirit of Reality dwelling behind this painted veil of life." To Shelley life is the great unreality, a painted veil, and the triumphal procession of a pretender. There is profound resemblance between Shelley and Plato in their whole outlook on life. Both were inspired almost entirely by what Jowell calls "the passion of the idea." Both seemed to see life not in its transient and imperfect form so much as in its eternal relation to the future and the ideal, and to value it for the unrealized (but not unrealizable) more than for the actual. Both not only taught, but vividly felt, that between the shadow life on earth and the immortal world of ideas there was only a mist of ignorance or error which any man might dispel at any time—if he had sufficient wisdom, according to Plato, and, according to Shelley; sufficient love. For both, the possible was the foundation of the actual, and the abstract perfection of the human character a reflection from the actual perfection of the divine.
4. Platonism in Shelley. The views here are based mainly on L. Winstanley's essay on 'Platonism in Shelley'. "Shelley was by nature one of the most studious of all English poets; from his Oxford days onwards Greek was his favorite reading and for Plato, he had a natural affinity of mind."
In this youth, Shelley confused two different systems—the scientific agnosticism of the eighteenth century and the idealism of Plato. In Queen Mab, for instance, Voltairean skepticism and Platonic idealism lie side by side in curious incongruity and self-contradictions. But as he advances in life he becomes more and more a Platonist. The so-called wildness of Shelley's social and ethical speculations was but the outcome of his study of Plato.
The ideas which Shelley borrows from Plato may be divided into four groups:
(i), General Religious and Philosophic Ideas: Shelley's religious system is, speaking generally; rather Greek and Platonic than Christian or Biblical. Shelley was one of those to whom the Hebraic ideal appears naturally repugnant, his antipathy to it being as innate as Milton's sympathy. He disliked narrow mindedness and exclusiveness; he disliked all kinds of formalism; he had the Greek detestation of priestcraft; severity of all kinds he abhorred, and severity in morals appeared to him a contradiction in terms. He not only disliked Hebraism but he was bitterly opposed to Christianity.
It was in this sense no doubt—because he hated established religions—that Shelley called, himself an atheist, but the whole structure of his mind was essentially religious. His religion was, however, Platonic both in its excellence and in its defects. Shelley like Plato, believes in a supreme power; it is beyond and above the world but also within, at once immanent and transcendent; it works from within the world, struggling with the obstructions of matter, transforming matter and molding it to its will. Like Plato, Shelley is vividly conscious of the unity of the world and of all life, and the underlying spirit, though it reveals itself in many forms, is everywhere and essentially the same.
As is the case with Plato, Shelley's conception of the Supreme is much less anthropomorphic and personal than the God of the Bible. Again, both Plato and Shelley lay hold of the idea of Deity largely from the aesthetic side. (Vide Hymn to Intellectual Beauty).
Like Plato, Shelley; too, believed in the immortality of the soul and its pre-existence and reincarnation.
(ii), Cosmic Speculations: In the Timaeus, Plato teaches that the entire universe is the self-evolution of an absolute intelligence; thinking in accordance with the laws of its own perfections, it creates and animates the universe. All parts of this universe are inspired by their own intelligence: the sun is the visible embodiment of the supreme spirit; the planets are all divine or under the guidance of divine spirits; (Plato speaks of the soul of the seven planets): the Earth also is a divine being. Shelley has embodied all these conceptions in his poetry (Vide Hymn to Apollo and Prometheus Unbound; the latter is full of Platonic imagery concerning the soul of the Earth and the soul of the planets).
Social and Political Ideas', With regard to man's nature and general position in society Shelley again shows certain resemblances to Plato. Shelley, like Plato, is conscious of a dualism. In his Prometheus Unbound, it forms the leading idea. Prometheus is the soul of man, his mind, noble and suffering; in Jupiter is exemplified the baser side of man, his lusts and concupiscence, his errors of mind and his sins of body. Besides, Shelley's general conception of society is essentially Greek; it consists of a voluntary rule over voluntary subjects.
(iv), The Theory of Love: Shelley's conception of love is essentially Platonic. Plato's distinctive teachings on this subject have depended mainly upon two circumstances: his philosophy of beauty and the extraordinarily high position which he ascribes to love as an inspiration in human life. Beauty has such an enormous power over men, because, according to Plato, they have previously beheld it in the heaven-world and, since sight is the keenest of the bodily senses, they are more powerfully stirred by beauty than by anything else; beholding it they are rapt beyond themselves and henceforward consumed with exalted desire. Such a vision is described many a time in Shelley.
In Epipsychidion, we have Shelley's fullest expression of the Platonic theory of love; large portions of the poem are almost a paraphrase of the Phaedrus. Emilia is a winged soul soaring over the darkness of earth; she is an incarnation of a brighter beauty descending from a lovelier and more wonderful world. She is the mirror, which reflects most brightly the glory of the unseen worlds The beauty of her mind is far greater than the beauty of her body, which is only reflection; she is an image of the eternal beauty.
(v), Shelley's Idealism in His Poetry: Shelley was a magnificent idealist. "Shelley;" says Elton, "is more constantly a poet of the idealizing type than any other except possibly Spenser. If Byron is a great interpreter of revolutionary iconoclasm, Shelley; on the contrary is a great revolutionary idealist, and a poetic prophet of faith and hope in a world which for the moment had lost both. Byron and Shelley thus represent two sides of the French Revolution—Byron, its destructive side and Shelley its constructive and idealistic side. Shelley took the more ideal side of human life. He is fond of painting a golden age of human happiness. Shelley was a reformer as well as a poet. He was a great inheritor and exponent of the ideas of the French Revolution. The ideas as well as the passion of the Revolution glitter and vibrate in Shelley's poems.
"The distinguishing note in Shelley;'' says Edmunds, is ideality— the quality of raising every thought and action on to a higher plane, the imaginative faculty of taking into his mind the wisest reaches and loftiest visions." Love, liberty and nature are treated in the same ideal way. His love soars and fades away into eternity. The territory of liberty he is impatient to make his own and all men's. Nature is not only flowers and streams, mountains and seas, but the movement of the eternal spirit. And in religion, wherein he has been most misunderstood, what he could not endure with patience was the imperfection and the incompleteness, the unworthy littleness of what passed for Christianity. The effect of his poetry upon the mind is to keep awake our enthusiasms and our purest ideals, and this was what he most desired to do.
(vi), Shelley's Marvellous Poetic Genius: Here Prof. Cazamian's view have been summarised. Shelley's poetic genius was marvelous, though his span of life was very short, and it was cut off at, twenty-nine. Shelley's poetry is suffused with a creative beauty of a purely poetical quality which has appeared in no other English poet with the exception of Spenser, and, to a lesser degree, Keats. Its dazzling images, its rapid rhythms, its grace and delicacy of touch, its exquisite melodies and harmonies, win us to forget the vagaries of the reformer in the perfection of the artist. The beauty of his verse is incomparable. His diction is magnificent. His lyricism is marvelous. His verse, responsive to the influence of every mood, trembles and sighs with alternative despondency and hope. "In the Ode to the West Wind, it moves to stately music, wrapped in a garment of splendid imagery In the lines To a Skylark it takes wing with its subject 'in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.'
He is not an unequal poet like Wordsworth; he is much more constantly a poet than Wordsworth. Shelley's poetical career was of a shorter span than that of Byron, and was concentrated within some ten years only "Shelley’s life," says Prof. Cazamian, "was one of passionate devotion to intellect, and this ardor explains how his ideas were transmuted into poetry." In Byron, we find more power of the intellect than of the imagination. In Shelley on the contrary; the imagination is first and the intellect second.
(vii), Shelley's lyricism: Shelley's genius was essentially lyrical, and he reigns supreme in the vast domain of lyricism. The lyrical mood predominates in all his works. His moods, impressions, thoughts and emotions embodied themselves naturally in verse. In lyric, as E.W. Edmunds remarks, Shelley is among the greatest poets of the world because of the purity at once of his melody and of its inspiration. In his lyrics, we find an abundance of rich music of the most exquisite tone. "Shelley's lyricism," says Prof. Cazamian, "is incomparable. In no other do we find the perfect sureness, the triumphant rapidity of this upward flight, this soaring height, the superterrestrial quality as well as the poignant intensity of the sounds which fall from these aerial regions. Truly never was the soul of a poet so spontaneously lyrical " Everything with Shelley is the occasion for a musical stir, since his powers of feeling are the keenest attuned and most delicate, of his age. His influence on the poets of the succeeding generation was very great. Browning and Tennyson came strongly under his spell. Alastor, Epipsychidion, and Adonais are the longest and most elaborate of Shelley's personal poems. In them he utters his deepest and most personal feelings as lyrically as in the Ode to the West Wind or the Lines Written in Dejection at Naples.
Word music, as well as the music of sound are noted characteristics of Shelley's verse. The subjective note or personal element—a description of personal feelings and emotions, joys and sorrows—enters largely into his poetry. Shelley either blends wails of personal despair with some aspects or phenomena of Nature, or colors Nature with his own mood of joy or sorrow. A good example is the Ode to the West Wind. His total identification of self with the thing, he describes is a unique feature of his lyricism. Here also the Ode to the West Wind is a good example:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:Be thou, spirit fierce,My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
As Stopford Brooke writes: "He passes from magnificent union of himself with nature and magnificent realization of her storm and peace to equally great self-description, and he mingles all nature and all himself together; that he may sing of the restoration of mankind—Shelley's love-lyrics portray a variety of moods and emotions. But running through them all is the note of ideality—the pain of unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desire, the craving for a relation that should satisfy the highest needs of human nature and a spirit of self-immersion and self-effacement. Unity of thought and emotion which is an essential condition of a good lyric is perfectly achieved by Shelley Spontaneity of utterance marks all his verse. In none of his poems is there any sign of strain or effort. He sings zin profuse strains of unpremeditated art,' and this is why he is called the most poetical of poets."
Shelley holds a very high place in lyric poetry. In lyrics, he is among the greatest of the world, because of the purity at once of his melody and of its inspiration. Whatever art, he brought to bear upon his poems, he never allowed it to descend into artifice; he sang the truth as he saw it and felt it, with a sincerity quite unsurpassed; and when the chaff has been winnowed from the grain in his works, there remains an abundance of rich music of the most exquisite tone, according to E.W. Edmunds:
"Lyrical poetry is, in the main, the expression of personal mood or feeling, and the essential qualities of mind of a writer of lyrical poetry are extreme sensitiveness, great emotional and imaginative power. Shelley possessed each of these qualities in an unusual de- gree," says Newton.
Clutton-Brock has pointed out that movement is his chief means of expression and even of representation. No poet has succeeded so perfectly in welding music and thought - of synchronizing, as it were, the vibrations of rhythm and emotion. His lyrics are also marked by spontaneity and ease. No praise would be excessive for the ecstasy of feeling, the lightness and grace, the felicity of phrase, the glorious melody, and the verbal magic of such poems, for example, as To a Skylark, The Cloud, The Sensitive Plant, the Ode to the West Wind, and Lament.
The thought of many poems is compressed in the lyric, 'When the lamp is shattered.' It is in his nature lyrics—The Cloud, To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind—that Shelley has won his greatest popularity. The most ethereal of English poets, he loves to write of the heavens, of light in all its forms, and of the flowers. Shelley makes nature ghostly: it is a spirit that he seeks behind the cloud and the rain. The Skylark illustrates aptly this point; the poet's spirit pours itself out in stanza after stanza all illustrating one idea; the bird is likened to a poet, a maiden in her bowie; a glow-worm, and a rose. Ode to the West Wind is perhaps the best of all his lyrics. Though his melancholy appears here also, the song ends in an unusually hopeful strain. "Exquisite in its imagery; emotional, and yet restrained to an unusual degree, this is one of the treasures of English literature." The rhythmical structure of the West Wind should be studied as a typical example of Shelley's power to make the moment of verse embody its mood. In this ode, the impetuous sweep and tireless overflow of the terza rima, ending after each twelfth line in a couplet, suggest with wonderful truth the streaming and volleying of the wind, interrupted now and then by a sudden lull. Likewise in The Skylark, the fluttering lift of the bird's movement, the airy ecstasy and rippling gush of its song, are mirrored in the rhythm in a thousand subtly varying effects. And such a poem as To Night ("Swiftly walk over the western wave") marks perhaps the extreme limit of the romantic divergence from eighteenth-century strictness of form; but it obeys a higher law than that of regularity; and with all its waywardness it is as perfect in shape as a flower as Dr. Reed points out.
George Saintsbury observes: "What the subject was mattered very little (to Shelley); extravagantly revolutionary ideas in politics, religion, and morals, dramas, songs, and mystical adaptations of classical myths—all turn to a glorious effect of poetry, often indistinctly outlined, but always bathed in splendid hazes of light and color
"If there is any drawback to this characteristic (of insubstantiality), which certainly makes Shelley like Spenser, rather a poet's poet and lover's poet than one for the average person, it must necessarily show less in short lyrics, where solid substance is not expected. And few competent critics deny that, taking volume and quality together, Shelley is the greatest lyrics poet in English, if not in the world's literature. But even his wife complained of a certain, 'want of human interest' in some of his work."
Shairp avers: "Other lyric poets.....sing of what they feel. Shelley in his lyrics sings of what he wants to feel. The thrills of desire, the gushes of emotion, are all straining after something seen after but unattained, something distant or future; or they are wails of passionate despair, utter despondency for something hopelessly gone. 'Vet it must be owned that those bursts of passionate desire after ideal beauty set our pulses a throbbing with a strange vibration, even when we do not really sympathize with them. Even his desolate wails make those for a moment seem to share his despair who do not really share it. Such is the charm of his impassioned eloquence, and the witchery of his music."
(viii), Shelley As a Prophet: Shelley has his place, says Prof. Elton, apart and secure among the English prophets, in the great line from King Alfred to Carlyle. "He has a clear and sublime vision of the hopes of mankind. He wishes to see the world freed from all the enslavements of the brain, and from the sloth that besets the heart and imagination. He imagines an age of mental light, with the law of love and beauty for its principle. To this vision of a regenerated earth, he comes by many paths. He is an artist as well as a prophet. He is more constantly a poet than any Englishman of the idealizing type, except possibly Spenser; and his teaching is rarer and more inspiring than Spenser's while his style is not less instinctively right and lovely." Liberty equality and the brotherhood of man were the ideals which presented themselves to him as objects capable of attainment, and he set himself with fervor to denounce the existing order of things and assail the barriers which checked the free development of the human spirit. Animated by theories of William Godwin, he attacked government and religion, kings and priests. He seriously wished to reform the world by replacing tyranny with love. On this point he was a fanatic, for he was completely obsessed by this idea.
The prophetic tendency of Shelley is apparent everywhere in his poems. He longed to reform the world in his own ideal way This prophetic tendency is prominent in the last Stanza of the Ode to the West Wind:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth,The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
(ix), Love of Freedom, Love and Beauty: Freedom is the breath of Shelley's work—freedom not only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the tyranny of religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in pseudo atheism, and in complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct and in writing.
Liberty, equality, and fraternity were ideals which presented themselves to him as objects capable of attainment, and he set himself with fervor to denounce the existing order of things and assail the barriers which checked the free development of the human spirit. Animated by the theories of William Godwin, he attacked Government and religion, kings and priests, with an enthusiasm which inverted all traditional estimates of character and conduct. He regarded the dissemination of his theories as a sacred mission.
Shelley's idea of love was Platonic. It did not 'deal with flesh and blood.' "The doctrine of free love is inwrought by him with the other doctrine, adapted from Platonism, of ideal or intellectual love. His study of Dante's Vita Nuova and Canzoniere, with their history of a rarefied and spiritualized love, also counted for much." Shelley may be called a love-mystic, as Wordsworth may be called a nature-mystic. Shelley was always searching for ideal love. He conceives that love pervades the whole universe.
The pursuit of the spirit of beauty and love dominates all his work. "He spent his life," says Crump, "in the quest of a perfection which he sometimes called freedom, sometimes beauty; sometimes love to Shelley the three were synonymous; perfect liberty was impossible without perfect love, and perfect beauty was the outcome of these two. Liberty of man could be obtained only in a universe controlled by love."
There are plenty of Shelley's short lyrics, expressing the sentiment of love, tender, sometimes fanciful and sometimes full of unsatisfied craving, but always aspiring beyond the actual and sensual—always seeking for an ideal consummation of this sentiment. The different types and aspects of love contemplated by Shelley are summed up in the Epilepsy chid ion. He makes love the main principle in the universe, and pays his homage to it for its manifestation in beauty.
"Shelley and Keats were creators of beauty. Shelley's vision is more metaphysical: beauty for him is 'intellectual' a spirit living and working through the universe and ultimately indistinguishable from the 'love' which 'sustains' it. The Keatsian vision of beauty, on the other hand, is predominantly a rapturous exaltation of the senses. Both the Shelleyan and the Keatsian visions of beauty are mirrored finally in the poetic instrument of expression, as Herford says—
"Shelley shared with Keats the perception of lovely form and color and expressed it with magic utterance, but concrete beauty was not lovely to him, as it was to Keats, for its own sake. Where Keats gave a value to every detail of his landscapes, dwelling with particular emphasis upon each manifestation of earthly beauty which he saw, Shelley reduced his detail to a me^e silhouette against a background of supernatural radiance or to indistinctness in a pervading atmosphere of dazzling light," points out Hamilton Thompson.
(x), Extraordinary Musical Gift: No poet has succeeded so perfectly in welding music and thought - of synchronizing, as it were the vibration of rhythm and emotion. "He changes the rhythm, not only from Stanza to Stanza and line to line, but from word to word, with every slightest variation of feeling." "Shelley has the gift of lending poetry the sweetest and most liquid harmonies, not the most sonorous and sensual, but pure in their vehement intensity. The flowing ease with which the words merge into one another at the same time as the ideas they call forth join up together, goes to prove that for Shelley; the most poetical of poets, the psychological melody and the cadence of syllables, as spontaneous the one as the other, naturally formed but one music. He has experimented with all rhythms: the suppleness and variety of his prosody are extraordinary, the Spenserian Stanza of Adonais, the "terza rima" of The Triumph of Life, the metrical combinations of Prometheus, are the variations of a master upon accepted themes, or the inventions of an original genius, even when the form testifies to the poet's negligence, and as it were to his impatience. When it lacks the finish only to be acquired from an industrious art, it retains the felicity of inspired expression; and that language, like that measure, so individual, through their characteristic turn, their liquid but ever undulating flow, which is a continual creation, and not the forced adaptation of a rhythmic utterance to a preconceived framework, convey to us the poignant impression of contact with the innermost pulsations of the artist's heart." "In Shelley's rhythm there is natural magic, and the Skylark poem is a very happy example of this". The beauty and variety of his rhythm is remarkable (for example, 'Swifter far than summer's flight' the 'Ode to West Wind,' 'Rarely, rarely comest thou,' the 'snatches and fragments,' The Sensitive Plant, etc) Word-music as well as the music of sound are noted characteristics of Shelley's verse.
(xi), Varied Imagery: Shelley deals less with actualities than does any other English poet. His imagery is that of a dream-world, peopled by ethereal forms. The world of spirits was more real to him than our world of hard facts. "So habitual and familiar," says Raleigh, "was Shelley's converse with this spectral world that both in his thought and in his expression it held the place of what is commonly called the real world. The figures of his poetry illustrate what is strange by what is familiar, and it is the shadows and spirits that are familiar." Even when he borrows imagery from Nature, it is from a nature heightened and rarefied by passage through his own temperament. The autumn leaves scurrying before the wind remind him of 'ghosts from an enchanter fleeing' (Ode to the West Wind.) The Skylark in the heavens is 'like a poet hidden in the light of thought.' It is hard to imagine anything more remote than:
ShapesSuch as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep.
All his imagery is thus dream-imagery It is also a "dazzling shifting imagery" He is at the other pole from Wordsworth's homeliness and large acceptance of Nature as she is. Wordsworth's imagery embodies; Shelley's imagery disembodies. Hence an air of unreality rests over all of Shelley's work, an unreality made more conspicuous by his unpractical theories of conduct and society "No poet, ancient or modern," says Courthope, "has equalled Shelley in the power of accumulating successions of sublime images in flowing verse; no poet has ever exhibited such inexhaustible resources in finding words metrically suited to the subtle and intricate windings of Spiritual thought."
We find kaleidescopic fertility of imagery in Shelley's poetry. Some of the best examples of this quality are found in the first two Stanzas of the Ode to the West Wind and the poem "When the lamp is shattered.' Shelley's imagery is always shifting. Sometimes there are abrupt transitions, (vide The Flight of Love, Stanza IV and Ode to Night Stanzas 11 and III, the transition of 'her' in line 11 to 'his’ in line 19 with reference to ’Day'.) This rapid transition of thought and imagery sometimes entails obscurity. Besides, his imagery being mostly unreal, is vague. Many a time, he is found describing a perfectly definite object or scene by a figure drawn from the most complex abstract conception. Thus he would speak of the 'dead leaves of trees' being 'driven before the West Wind,' under the similitude of 'ghosts before an Enchanter flying'.
"Shelley has created the wondrous myths and the cosmic scheme in which the elements, the planets, the Clouds and the west wind, become quickened with their individual existence, and speak a language that we can understand." This mythopoeic faculty i.e. the faculty of making new myths means giving life, motion and human attributes to the forces of nature, or thinking of them in terms of human personalities. This faculty reveals Shelley's Hellenism. Poems like The Cloud and Ode to the West Wind illustrate Shelley's mythopoeic faculty In them he personifies the forces of nature.
(xii), Vagueness and Unreality: Shelley's poetry has been much criticized and much condemned by Matthew Arnold and others, because of its vagueness,—what Arnold called its "fatal lack of substantiality." He described Shelley as a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. "Beautiful he certainly is, but is he ineffectual? Because he is vague and unpractical, because he regards history as a dirty record of crime and brutality, practical politics as a waste of time, and dogmatic religion as an unnecessary evil, and yet provides us with no moral, political and religious code in their place, is that to say; he is ineffectual? It has been said that his scheme was to reform the world, but that he demonstrates the impossibility of his ideas in his poetry where his ideals are pictured and his theories realized in another and an ideal world; and thus he leads us to the conclusion that love cannot, as he hoped, bring the millennium. But, even if it were granted that this too were true, it would not prove him ineffectual."
"The very vagueness of Shelley's poetry is an essential part of its charm. He speaks the language of pure emotion, where definite perceptions are melted into the mood they generate. Possessed by the desire of escape, he gazes calmly and steadily on nothing of earthly build. Every visible object is merely another starting point for the cobwebs of dreams." Like his own poet in Prometheus Unbound:
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,But feeds on the aereal kissesOf shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses:He will watch from dawn to gloomThe lake-reflected sun illumeThe yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,Nor hear nor see, what things they be;But from these create he canForms more real than living man,Nurslings of immortality
And the inhabitants are even less definite in outline as Sir Walter Raleigh observes; the spaces of his imagination are:
Peopled with unimaginable shapesSuch as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep.
(xiii), Melancholic Strain: Shelley was profoundly melancholy; His poems are permeated by "the still sad music of humanity". This melancholic strain is present everywhere in Shelley's poetry He says in To a Skylark:
Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought
Again he says:
Most wretched souls—Are cradled into poetry by wrongThey learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Shelley says in the Ode to the West Wind:
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed.
"Though Shelley is profoundly melancholy," says Bradley "even his saddest poems, even the Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, and the Lament, swifter far than summer's flight, do not make me sad, and hardly make me pity him. In this sorrow, however forlorn and deep, there is no bitterness; and in the soul that feels it, and can so utter it that sorrow becomes more beautiful than beauty's self, there is something above sorrow and beyond its reach."
(xiv), Romantic Element: Romantic element is very strong in Shelley's poetry. Among the Romantic poets Shelley held a distinctive place. His poetry is permeated by the very spirit of Romanticism. His poetic style and his imagery are essentially romantic. He was the idealist of the revolutionary moment. While Byron represented merely the destructive side of the revolution and Keats sang of beauty alone, Shelley played the role of a poetic prophet of faith and hope in a world which for the moment had lost both.
(xv), Shelley's Conception and Treatment of Nature: Like all Romantic poets Shelley had a new attitude towards Nature. Shelley's reading of Nature was transcendental, which to some readers may be vague and misty. But vague it assuredly is not, since Shelley's philosophy of Nature is perfectly clear and consistent, and in his finest lyrics, such as The Cloud and The West Wind, there is a logical power of development, and when the poet is so disposed, a scientific accuracy, that is too often overlooked by the slovenly reader.
Shelley's love of Nature was ardent. He conceived Nature, like Wordsworth, as a conscious spirit, a living and breathing presence pervading the whole universe. But the spirit which permeates Shelley’s Nature is love. His nature-poems reveal his love of that which is indefinite and changeful. His soul seems to have been naturally attracted to the phenomena of the clouds and the sky. Their shifting colors, their changefulness, their dissolving views, he can best present in lines of superb imaginative beauty and enchanting melody
"As a poet of nature," says Stopford A. Brooke, "Shelley had the same idea as Wordsworth, that nature was alive: but while Wordsworth made the active principle which filled and made nature to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. The Natural world was dear then to his soul as well as to his eye, but he loved best its indefinite aspects. He wants the closeness of grasp of nature which Wordsworth and Keats had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than they of describing the cloud-scenery of the sky, the doings of the great sea, and vast realms of landscape. He is in this, as well as in his eye for subtle color; the Turner of Poetry"
To Shelley, Nature conveyed an impression of something deeper than mere sensuous beauty. Nature is to him, as to Wordsworth, the incarnation of an eternal spirit. His descriptions of sunset, dawn, cloud, and storm are very picturesque. But Shelley is hardly so close an observer of Nature as Wordsworth. While Wordsworth spiritualizes the results of his observations, Shelley rather etherealizes his impressions. Again he says in the Alastor:,
Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!
Over and above, Shelley like Tennyson, has a tendency to weave scientific facts of Nature into the texture of his poems. The Cloud is a brilliant example. The following lines are specimens:
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,And the nursling of the sky:I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores,I change, but I cannot die.
"Almost the whole of Alastor is occupied with descriptions of wild and marvelous scenery—mostly amongst mountains and rivers. Shelley's descriptions are rarely mere adornments—never when he is writing well; they are in a sense dramatic. They contribute something essential to the subject matter of the poem. But Nature brings no peace to him, as she does to Wordsworth. The bright skies, blue isles, and snowy mountains (i.e. in the Stanzas Written in Dejection) but remind him that he has neither hope nor health, nor peace within, nor calm around.
Some times Shelley conceives of Nature as a purely elemental force, with which human thought or human association has nothing to do. The Cloud is notably such an example. Sometimes he makes Nature blend with his anguish of soul, and Nature is in fact a reflection of his own self in such a case. Grand descriptions of nature are abundant in Shelley's poetry. Mont Blanc illustrates Shelley's description of the sublime beauty and majesty of the mountain-scenery. Alastor, The Sensitive Plant, Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples, Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills, also contain many superb passages of nature description. To Shelley as to Wordsworth, everything in Nature is full of life and movement.
Shelley's weaving of scientific truths into his poetry may be illustrated from The Cloud and the Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark. The following lines also illustrate this:
When the cloud is scattered,The rainbow's glory is shed(When the lamp is shattered)
Keen are the arrowsOf that silver sphere,Whose intense lamp narrowsIn the white dawn clearUntil we hardly see, we feel that it is there.(To a Skylark)
Mysticism: Shelley believed in a soul of the Universe, a Spirit in which all things live and move and have their being. His most passionate desire was for the mystical fusion of his own personality with this spirit.
(xvii), Pantheism: "Shelley," says Stopford A, Brooke, "was not an atheist or a materialist. If he may be said to have occupied any theoretical position, it was that of an Ideal Pantheist. Wordsworth, a plain Christian at home, wrote about Nature as a pantheist. The artist loves to conceive of the universe, not as dead but as alive. Into that belief Shelley in the hour of inspiration continually rose and his work is seldom more impassioned and beautiful than in the passages where he feels and believes in this manner. The finest example is towards the close of the Adonais. In his mind, however, the living spirit which in its living, made the Universe, was not conceived of as Thought, as Wordsworth conceived it, but as Love operating into Beauty".
Shelley's Style and Diction: Shelley's poetry varies considerably in style. He was a more accomplished man of letters' than the other Romantic poets; he could vary his manner successfully to suit the tone of his work; as in The Cenci, his stage play, or in familiar or humorous poems such as Julian and Maddalo and Peter Bell the Third. His style is unique and inimitable. His descriptions of natural scenes, for instance, are full of delightful suggestiveness for the imaginative reader.
Spontaneity and fluidity are the proof of his wealth of imagination. There is no effect of laborious artistry about Shelley's style at any time. "The language is poetical through and through" says Bradley; "not, as sometimes with Wordsworth, only half-poetical, and yet it seems to drop from Shelley's lips. It is not wrought and kneaded; it flows. The spontaneity and fluidity in Shelley's writing are present almost equally in the Spenserian narrative of The Revolt of Islam and the dramatic blank verse of The Cenci; and fully; though not constantly, in his highest flights; and they help to make the best of his quieter lyrics comparable with the best Elizabethan songs."
"The variety of Shelley's poetic style" says Professor Elton, "is great. In a poem like the Hymn of Pan or To Question it can be called romantic, in the more special sense; it is rich, and joyous, and full of colors and odors and liquid bird notes, approaching in character to the style of Keats." He could vary his style successfully to suit the tone of his work. In his short lyrics his art of overture, development and close, and his choice of meter correspond with his mood and emotion. But his skill in poetic construction is fitful. In The Revolt of Islam, it is slight or null, but it is at its highest in The Cenci, and in his lyrics.
Shelley's diction is marked by directness, clarity, purity, magnificence, and strength. In vocabulary and phrase his diction is almost unsurpassedly pure; it seldom aims at strangeness, and it shows none of that anxious testing and adoption of Elizabethan forms which Leigh Hunt taught to Keats. His gift of musical diction and movement is unique.
(xix), Shelley's Position in English Poetry: Shelley does not belong to the same rank as Shakespeare or Milton. He has neither Shakespeare's sweeping vision and intimate knowledge of human nature and his genial and sunshiny humor, nor Milton's puissant and splendid imagination, workmanship and grand style. Like Shakespeare, he has never explored the recesses of the human heart or the motive-springs of human will or sounded the whole gamut of human passion. Certainly Shakespeare's range and variety and depth of knowledge and experience was beyond the reach of Shelley who died prematurely only at the age of 29. Shelley's superiority lies not in drama or epic but in the domain of lyrical poetry in English literature. Here he reigns supreme. He has enriched English poetry with superb imagery and enchanting melodies. His spontaneity is marvelous. Shelley is regarded as the greatest lyric poet in English. In lyric, he is among the greatest of the world. Saintsbury remarks that "few competent critics deny that, taking volume and quality together; Shelley is the greatest lyric poet in English." "As a lyrical poet Shelley is," says Prof. Cazamian, "the greatest that England or perhaps modern Europe has produced."
Yeats observes: "From these scattered fragments and observations, and from many passages read in their light, one soon comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the liberty of Political Justice that it was one with intellectual beauty, and that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the regeneration many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come in its perfection till the hours bore 'Time to his grave in eternity"
T.S. Eliot says: Shelley both had views about poetry and made use of poetry for expressing views. With Shelley we are struck from the beginning by the number of things poetry is expected to do; from a poet who tells us in a note on vegetarianism, that 'the orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and the number of his teeth', we shall not know what to expect. The notes to Queen Mab express, it is true, only the views of an intelligent and enthusiastic schoolboy but a schoolboy who knows how to write; and throughout his. work, which is of no small bulk for a short life, he does not, I think, let us forget that he took his ideas seriously. The ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of adolescence—as there is every reason why they should be. And an enthusiasm for Shelley seems to me also to be an affair of adolescence: for most of us, Shelley has marked an intense period before maturity, but for how many does Shelley remain the companion of age? I confess that I never open the volume of his poems simply because I want to read poetry; but only with some special reason for reference. I find his ideas repellent; and the difficulty of separating Shelley from his ideas and beliefs is still greater than with Wordsworth. And the biographical interest which Shelley has always excited makes it difficult to read the poetry without remembering the man: and the man was humorless, pedantic, self-centered, and sometimes almost a blackguard.
Herbert Read feels that the whole tendency of Shelley is towards a clarification and abstraction of thought—away from the personal and particular towards the general and universal.....
But the highest beauties of Shelley's poetry are evanescent and imponderable—thought so tenuous and intuitive, that it has no visual equivalent; no positive impact.....
.....such poetry has no precision, and the process of its unfolding is not logical. It does not answer to the general definition of any kind. It is vain to apply to it that method of criticism which assumes that the ardor of a verse can be analyzed into separate vocables, and that poetry is a function of sound. Poetry is mainly a function of language—the exploitation of a medium, a vocal and mental material, in the interests of a personal mood or emotion, or of the thoughts evoked by such moods or emotions. I do not think we can say much more about it; according to our sensitivity we recognize its success. The rest of our reasoning about it is either mere prejudice, ethical anxiety, or academic pride.
(xx), Resume of the Symposium: Shelley was a man of lofty and generous character. He was filled with a passion for reforming the world. He idealized Love as the saving emotion of humanity; to him Love was what Beauty was to Keats, the guiding principle of life. He was no mean thinker though sometimes vague and misty His poetry is vague because he was quasi-metaphysical: because he clings continually to his view of the abstract truth, and because the visible world and the world of thought mingle themselves inextricably in his contemplation of it. For him there is no boundary-line between the two worlds; the one is as real and actual as the other. It is a vague world but it is a beautiful world—a world where music and moonlight and feeling are one, a world, moreover, where Shelley reigns absolutely master. His verse is strong as well as beautiful. His genius was essentially lyrical; his lyrics express the complex and aspiring emotions and vibrate sweet music and verbal witchery. He influenced Browning and Swinburne. He was romantic in his vivid individuality, and was full of lofty aspirations and idealizations. "The countless beautiful forms and images in Shelley's poetry, the radiant color investing them, the spontaneity and freedom of his lyric utterance, and the matchless rhythm of his verse—all have their unique charm."