Shelley’s Conflicted Campaign for Catholic Emancipation

Abstract

While Wordsworth turned to Britain’s past as a recoverable resource, Shelley, in his 1821 ‘Defence of Poetry’, amalgamates history with all that is regressive: the corporeal, the local, the specific and the traditional. The rejection of the past, however, presents a problem for this radical proponent of Catholic Emancipation, which itself promised to recall the banished historical ‘papist’ back into modern civil society – a seemingly regressive goal. Unlike Wordsworth or Inchbald, Shelley launches a stadial historical framework to describe the interdependent development of poetry and civilization. He does not answer Thomas Love Peacock’s argument for the historical obsolescence of poetry in ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ by heralding the contemporary return of a primitive poetic genius, as does Blake. Instead, he recounts the countercultural emergence of the poetic capacity in the classical age, the so-called Dark Ages of the ‘Christian and Chivalric systems’ and the Reformation. The poet in each stage of this progressive history leaps forward beyond the confines of his contemporary setting. This is particularly pronounced in Dante’s relationship to Catholicism and Milton’s to Christianity. Thus, Shelley describes each generation of poets as a ‘new birth’ of the type that has occurred within the ‘literature of England’ (‘Defence of Poetry’ 535). Poets are deemed to belong to ‘all time’, to respond to an ‘indestructible order’ that is outside of history and to participate within the ‘great poem’ that transcends all cultures (516, 512, 522). Those caught up in historical wounds or associated with the particularities of their age will remain trapped in their own stage of history. They will suffer the relegation Peacock describes, while poets like Shelley become productive and fertile – to them belongs the future.KeywordsEternal TruthIrish PeopleRecoverable ResourceAlternative EthicProgressive HistoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.