Shelley’s Repudiation of Conscious Artistry

Abstract

SH ELLEY'S REPUDIATION OF CONSCIOUS A R TISTRY LLOYD ABBEY University of British Columbia T h e English Romantics inherited and developed classical formal devices, the very exercise of which implied a consciously-wrought artistry. At the same time, however, they were committed to an aesthetic which emphasised, in varying degrees, spontaneity, the sanctity of unconscious impulse, and the impossibility of fully embodying, within the limitations of art, the transcen­ dent intimations of the imagination. Nowhere is the conflict inherent in this situation more evident than in the work of Shelley. Shelley's “ Defence of Poetry," for instance, fulfils the Aristotelian criteria for successful rhetoric, beginning with an introduction (in which poetry and poets are defined) and following this with an exposition-narration (giving us a history of poetry from the time of Homer onwards), a proof of poetry's "utility," a formal refutation of Shelley's opponent Peacock, complete with rhetorical questions ("To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty ... is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging ... labour?"),1 and a ringing peroration which both recapitulates the main points of his argument and, through metaphor, heightens the reader's response to that argument.2 The classicist Peacock would undoubtedly have appreciated the learned construction of his friend's essay. Nevertheless, as this paper will show, the essay itself celebrates, not learned construction, but organic form and unconscious artistry. Similarly, Shelley's "Adonais" employs all the trappings of classical elegy in order to repudiate the validity of classical elegy and of all art as an expression of eternity's "white radiance." Despite the brilliance of Wasserman's study of "Adonais," I am personally puzzled by his refusal to acknowledge that Shelley's concluding exhortation to the reader ("Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!" - lines 464-65) is, in Woodman's phrase, "a metaphysical defence of suicide."3 Shelley, after all, is very explicit here: life and all the things that go with it, including art ("ruins, statues, music" - line 467), constitute a "stain," blotting out the "white radiance" that may be fully attained only through transcendence of both life and art. Thus here, as in the "Defence of Poetry," art repudiates itself. Wasserman's study of the structural interrelation of stanzas 1- 17 (esp. lines 16 -18 , 48-54, 136-37), 18-37 (esP- lines *58/ i7 2-75)/ and 38-55 (esp. lines 373-74, 440-41, 466-68, 478) admirably demonstrates how in "Adonais" English Studies in Canada, i , 1 (spring 1975) 63 Shelley's Repudiation of Conscious Artistry Shelley's imagination "dissolves, diffuses and dissipates" environmental im­ pressions, recreating them into the monistic death-world of section one, the man-nature dualism of section two, and the Platonic time-eternity antithesis of section three. Since, in these last stanzas, it is the transcendence attained by Keats-Adonais which prompts Shelley's ultimate decision to transcend this world through death, the Keatsian echoes of stanzas 2 (cf. lines 17 -18 and "Isabella", stanza 54), 6 (cf. lines 46-49 and "Isabella", stanza 54), 9 (cf. lines 73-77 and "Ode to Psyche", lines 5-6, 50-67), 17 (cf. lines 145-49 and "Ode to A Nightingale", "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles", "Hyperion", 11, lines 224-28), 20 (cf. lines 172-76 and "Isabella", stanza 54), 25 (cf. lines 217-18 and "Ode On Melancholy", lines 25-30), and 40 (cf. lines 357-58 and "Ode to A Nightingale" stanza 3) are ultimately given a specifically Shelleyan significance. The echoes of Keats's poetry in "Adonais" transform that poetry's significance for the reader; viewed from a Shelleyan perspective, Keats's poetry finally becomes a harbinger of transcendent reality. When one turns from "Adonais" to the "Defence of Poetry," one discovers that this latter significance may be ascribed, not only to Keats's work, but to all great poetry, since the imaginative inspiration prompting poetic composition is as "the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own" (vu, 136). Shelley warns, however, that since "the mind in creation is as a fading coal ... the most glorious...