Myth, Subjectivity, and the Problem of Historical Time in Shelley's "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills"

Abstract

Shelley's Lines written among the Euganean Hills suffers from a certain inconsistency of vision and voice that is not unfamiliar to readers of his poetry. Rather than focus on that inconsistency as a poetic failing or attempt to remove it by appealing to a putatively higher level of discourse in the poem, I wish to explore this inconsistency on a basis of literary and intellectual history. In this way I wish to make some contribution to a genealogy of the peculiar split vision, evident both in individual words and phrases and in the poem's larger thematic units, that many have remarked in Shelley's lyrics. A number of literary conventions-some quite old, even ancient, others quite new-come together in Lines written among the Euganean Hills. The poem clearly descends from sublime landscape description of the eighteenth century. At the same time it is a meditative exercise in self-recollection for which the landscape, more than a sublime aspect, is an escape and shelter from the world. Moreover, the poem's rendering of the landscape is, in Harold Bloom's terms, a mythmaking one.1 These conventions relate Shelley's poem to a series of literary precedents from Pindar to Petrarch, Rousseau, and Wordsworth. But in addition to these features Shelley's poem includes a level of explicit historical consciousness, for the landscape that the poet surveys is one populated by cities; cities whose present is remarkedly different from their past. The speaker's awareness of this historical and temporal difference strikes me as decisive for the poem in a way that commentators thus far have never guessed, or at least said. I would like to locate the inconsistency of Shelley's vision and voice in this lyric in his split attitude toward the historical past. While Shelley, as the poem's speaker, recognizes in the landscape in front of him the historical worlds of Venice and Padua, at the same time he is ready