Apocapolitics: Allusion and Structure in Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy"

Abstract

The Mask of Anarchy occupies a curious place in modern criticism of Shelley's poetry. It has been praised as uncharacteristic of Shelley's work by F. R. Leavis,1 admired for its political content by Richard Holmes,2 and ignored by Harold Bloom and by Earl Wasserman in their influential studies.3 There will always of course be disagreement as to worth of a particular poem, but perhaps most striking in this instance are reservations expressed by some of those who have written about The Mask with greatest degree of interest. For Thomas R. Edwards, is a fine poem, in its earlier parts very nearly a great one, but clash of attitudes between what Edwards sees as Shelley's overt political intentions and his lurking despair about politics makes result a demonstration of how a certain kind of poetic imagination can damage its own admirable concern for public world.4 Although Richard Hendrix takes issue with this conclusion, praising The Mask's of dramatic form ... with political insight and populist attitudes, he concedes that the blend was imperfect.5 Michael Scrivener, who has illuminatingly discussed The Mask in relation to popular radical iconography, finds poem contradictory, at war with itself, not entirely resolved; and Stephen C. Behrendt finds in it an ambivalence of voice [that] is potentially dangerous, for poem implicitly condones a variety of violence it explicitly condemns.6 I suggest that these positive but uneasy views are responses to something deeply embedded in structure of The Mask of Anarchy: relationship between apocalypse and millenium.