Directing the ‘Unfinished Scene’: Utopia and the Role of the Poet in Shelley's Hellas

Abstract

Hellas; A Lyrical Drama (1822) reveals profound tensions in Shelley's thinking about the role that poets play in writing the future. In the Preface, Shelley invokes his ‘poet's privilege’ to imagine the outcome of the ‘unfinished scene’ – the ongoing Greek War of Independence – but the final chorus, which begins by triumphantly announcing the return of a ‘great age’, also voices an anxiety that it may be impossible to imagine a future that is unbound by the failures of the past. This essay examines the ways in which Shelley imagines the outcome of the Greek War in Hellas, especially in dialogue with the claims he makes for poetry and poets in A Defence of Poetry (comp. 1821). I argue that what emerges in Hellas is a fraught form of utopian thought that is defined by hazardous struggle, but which may ultimately direct humanity towards a better future.