The Gift of the Name in Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

Abstract

The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language ... --A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients, Relative to the Subject of Love (1) I. Given Names THE TITLE OF SHELLEY'S HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY, as has often been pointed out, situates the poem within a tradition that it will attempt to displace. Naming itself a hymn, Shelley's poem invokes a Christian concept of divinity that it ironizes and thereby calls into question. As Earl Wasserman, Spencer Hall, and Richard Cronin have shown, the incorporates Christian thematics throughout, only to disfigure them by way of a series of reinscriptions of canonical doctrine. (2) Not only does the poem's speaker decry the name of in championing the secularized virtues of Love, Hope, and Self-esteem (37), he also refers by negation to the love of God, hope of salvation, and faith in a transcendent divinity. (3) Of course, the hymnic genre predates the Christian tradition's appropriation of it, and there are also many questions that remain unanswered concerning the Greek influences in the poem: formally, that of the Greek hymnic tradition, and conceptually, that of a Platonic metaphysics. (4) This latter, much derided hypothesis has received no shortage of criticism over the last sixty years, and mostly with due cause. (5) Motivated largely by the Platonic resonances of Shelley's title and his avowed interest in Plato's thought, this position has been condemned not only for its oversimplification of Shelley's stance and tendency to reduce it to mere Platonism, also for its neglect of Shelley's philosophy and the sophistication of his reading of Plato, which would much better be expressed as reflective than merely mimetic. One need not look very hard to see extra-Platonic elements infiltrate the Hymn, most notably those empirical or utilitarian items such as the world that, as Pollin has pointed out, are to be consecrated alongside the transcendent ones. (6) If, nevertheless, the question of Plato's influence has remained persistent for readers of the Hymn to Beauty, it is ultimately less by virtue of any Platonism in the poem than by the title's inscription of a more or less Platonic phrase--a phrase that Shelley himself would use to translate Plato. Yet critics of the seem destined to remain conflicted even on this point, for it was not until nearly two years after Shelley's composition of the Hymn to Beauty on the shores of Lake Geneva that he would translate that fateful line: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as, but [he] would turn towards the wide ocean of intellectual beauty, in his rendering of Plato's Symposium (Shelley 449). (7) The translation would then be a transcription from his to Plato's Symposium, and this in the most literal sense of the word. For it would here be a matter of writing across texts, from one context to another, from one body, title, or text to another, also from one language to another. We could call this a trans-crib-lation, for it departs at the same time from Plato's textual source and his own Hymn, which ought to be, is not, foreign to it. Intellectual Beauty (as a phrase) is then both more and less Platonic. For, as is evinced by the chronology of the poem's composition, it is born out of Shelley's own work, only to converge with Plato at a later date. That the phrase Intellectual Beauty, moreover, only appears in the Hymn's title, as though it were a leftover or supernumerary of the text, further exacerbates this already tenuous relation between the poem and the Platonic tradition. Yet for all of these difficulties, Shelley's title nevertheless suffices to articulate a bond that no amount of disapproval, dissuasion, or disavowal would be capable of fully denying, and not only because of the possibility that Shelley had read Plato's Symposium prior to composing the Hymn, nor, conversely, simply because he may have translated the Symposium with his in mind. …