‘Time is flying’: Lyrical And Historical Time in the Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Abstract

The quotation in the title of this essay is taken from a manuscript fragment composed by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley a few weeks before his death in July 1822. As a reflection on the calamities which time can unleash, this fragment might seem eerily prescient. But as this essay shows, Shelley’s fragment – together with his contemporary poem ‘The Triumph of Life’, left unfinished at his death – is only the latest instance of a sustained interrogation, in Shelley’s poetry, of the nature and implications of time. Shelley’s major political works often headline confidence in a linear, progressive interpretation of historical progress, with natural and social processes cooperating to produce meliorative change over long periods of time. Beneath this prima facie confidence, however, these same works often betray an anxiety that time might rather be an unbroken and unbreakable, catastrophic cycle of creation and destruction. My essay traces this tension in a selection of Shelley’s political and lyrical verse and links it to key contemporary debates in political theory and natural philosophy. Studying Shelley’s engagement with time sheds new light not only on Shelley’s thought but also on the ways in which Romantic poetry could embody this key facet of human experience.