The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form by Ronald Tetreault

Abstract

Ronald Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). 290. $35.00 The Poetry of Life is a title bearing the burden of such breadth and vigorous grandeur that it must needs surprise us to see it bestowed upon a dignified scholarly-critical study such as the present one by Ronald Tetreault. The book’s subtitle (Shelley and Literary Form) brings us briskly back to earth: this will be, after all, a study of Shelley’s communicative use of traditional formal — rather, generic — structures. Still, there is no adumbration of despair here and we begin with the hope, however tenuous, that we are to trace, in the poet’s developing mastery of technique and structure, a corre­ sponding happy mastery of his ideas about the world itself. And indeed, at the very outset, Tetreault remarks that Shelley is above all a committed poet, confident in his belief that it is not too late to make a better world. Yet his commitment is not merely to social and political reform — his career is a dedication to language itself, for Shelley is pre-eminently a poet committed to the worth and power of poetry. “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” . . . is hardly the assertion of a skeptic. . . . The enigma of Shelley’s poetry, then, is not its skepticism but its unremitting testimony to his poetic faith. (6) Commitment, dedication, confidence, faith: these words will present Tetreault with a problem. To be sure, when he says that Shelley’s “ creative genius can­ not be explained on the basis of so negative a concept as disbelief alone; because his thought is characterized by skepticism it does not follow that his poetry must be marked by incredulity,” he wisely makes careful distinctions while opening up manifold interpretive possibilities. Yet one cannot help but feel that the optimistic tenor of his argument (Shelley’s commitment to and confidence in life’s image and truth) demands the kind of sanguine narrative sketched above, where technical mastery and mastery of “life” develop hand in hand. We know — Tetreault knows — that this is not exactly true: for Shelley, life’s triumph, the sad torn processional of self, is not a happy one, its final interrupted images of light paradoxically obscure. But the need for a fortunate resolution lingers in the critic’s mind, apparently; and although at the end of his study, considering The Triumph of Life, Tetreault admonishes us that “ the poem’s very incompleteness . . . ought to serve as a warning against drawing overly definite conclusions from fragmentary evidence” (248), he does indeed draw conclusions not long after, when he decides that the poem “is a detour from the main line of [Shelley’s] successful work . . . , a regression to an earlier state of perplexity, and ultimately a dead end, poetically speaking.” (Something of this same attitude, this affective chronol­ ogy, appears in his negative criticisms of Adonais, which he finds throughout 23 tinged with “fatal imperfection” [229].) In spite of the acknowledged indebt­ edness to De Man and Derrida here, Tetreault would like a supportively clear narrative line to Shelley’s life and work; not finding it, he is reduced to calling Shelley’s last considerable poetic effort a “detour” from some annoyingly incomplete schematic programme. I do not wish to disparage this book, which has given me pleasure, has opened up new areas in Shelley studies, and has developed the analysis of the poetry productively in the direction of post-structuralist critique. I shall want to say something, below, about the book’s excellence, the scholarly and critical thoroughness of its author. But first, one should note that Tetreault’s text is (at least) two texts. It is a critical palimpsest: over the ground of formalist procedure have been inscribed the strategies of post-structuralist method; but the inscription is sometimes faint, and the under-text often shows through. More than this, Tetreault constantly introduces elements from several critical theories, including some from the early nineteenth century, without differen­ tiating among them, or seeming to divine that their inherent value-systems might contradict each other. There are traces here of everything from Cole...