How Poetic is Shelley's Poetry?: (A Centenary View)

Abstract

Poor Shelley's after-fame is now almost as fluctuant as that scene of his ending, just a hundred years ago, when the waves bore him “darkly, fearfully, afar” (July 8, 1822). The centenary of his death finds his status as a poet involved in peculiar uncertainty. Writers who have agreed fairly well on other matters have differed widely in their evaluations of Shelley's style, particularly as compared with the styles of Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. And almost any company of immediate poetry-lovers—I mean, those who maintain a healthy distrust of professional critics and a warm faith in their own predilections—can wax uncommonly disputatious if one of their number affirms that Shelley was a very real poet, or a very unreal one. Apparently his art is quite singular in its capacity to captivate and to repel. It so repelled Matthew Arnold that it appeared to him a maze which wise men should rather walk around than penetrate. Though he surveyed it tellingly, he never passed right through it with his hand on an unbroken clue; nor have his followers done so. Critics of another type have yielded themselves so fully to the poet's fascinating meanders that eventually they could not emerge, with undimmed vision, into the open country beyond. In short, it has proved very difficult to bring the captivating and the repellent qualities of Shelley's work under a single impartial scrutiny. But at least it should be clear that such a scrutiny should now confine itself to Shelley's poems, submerging all other sources of impression. Extensive enquiry into the poet's life, theories, and affiliations was called for by the singular nature of his case. But this enquiry has become entangled, rather obscuringly, with the question which in the end must stand alone: How poetic is Shelley's poetry?