Pleberio's World

Abstract

His of historical interpretation at conclusion of DeJence extends (as Bruns says of Ruskin's a d Pater's thinking) beyond history into realm of value and personal visio : Poets are . .. t e tru pets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; influence which moved not, but moves. The concluding passage of Shelley's DeJence was lifted essentially without change from his unfinished and unpublished A Philosophical View of Reform, written in 1819. In that work, passage composes bulk of next-to-last paragraph of Chapter i, which traces history of European despotism from decline and fall of Roman Empire to French Revolution with glances at Americas, India, and Turkish Near East. In this work famous passage which closes DeJence firmly and obviously tied to history. am mindful of Wendell Harris' appropriately questioning the authority to be given to unpublished material and thus limits of its legitimate use (Modern Philology, 1970). Shelley wrote to Hunt, 26 May 1820: Do you know any bookseller who would publish for me an octavo volume entitled A Philosophical View of Reform ? More significantly, Shelley uses history repeatedly in his dramatic and narrative poetry. In Queen Mab, lanthe's Soul rewarded with a historical reviewthe past shall rise-and profits from experience: I know / The past, and thence will essay to glean / A warning for future, so that man / May profit by his errors, and derive / Experience from his folly. In The Revolt of Islam, Woman, in explaining fight between eagle and serpent, begins with the earliest dweller of world. She knows the dark tale which history doth unfold. Better known are two historical spectacles used to torture Prometheus in Act I: crucified Christ and France after Revolution (the disenchanted nation). From early Queen Mab to late and incomplete The Triumph of Lie?, Shelley characteristically uses historical imagination both in his search for meaning-what life?and in his validation of meaning-'Poets are unacknowledged legislators of world. The major thrust of Shelley's thinking characterized by movement, process, and transformation. Like Arnold's, his concern is a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming rather than in having something (Culture and Anarchy). And like Ruskin in Modern Painters, Shelley finds meaning and intelligibility in what has been, web ordered by time. His writing requires therefore an act of historical imagination. encourage Bruns to extend his article to book Prumn