Shelley's Poetry Research Articles

Shelley's Scattered Words in China

This essay reflects on Percy Bysshe Shelley's peculiar afterlife in twentieth-century China. It first traces Shelley's reception history by discussing his introduction during the late Qing era, the Republican popularisation of Shelley, and Communist China's curious endorsement of him. From this almost undisrupted trajectory of increasingly enthusiastic advocacy, sharply contrasting with Shelley's controversial English critical heritage, the essay argues that Chinese readers of Shelley radically appropriated him. It then attempts to tease out the complex forces at play in this process by proposing two major means of appropriation: reduction and transmission. Reduction was achieved by censoring unacceptable elements in Shelley's poetry, philosophy, and biography. Meanwhile, Shelley was almost exclusively transmitted through an authoritarian critical discourse. Linguistic transmission played a crucial role as well, and Chinese translation often toned down certain quintessential Shelleyan stylistic features. The essay concludes that the uneasy relationship between Shelley's poetics and politics might have encouraged Chinese appropriation which, ironically, was made by an authoritarian state ideology and institution – the very powers that Shelley had so fiercely opposed.

The Victorian Salon and Pre-Raphaelite Melopoetics

The Victorian Salon and Pre-Raphaelite Melopoetics Mary Arseneau (bio) Phyllis Weliver's Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon breaks new ground in describing the political, intellectual, aesthetic, and social history of the important semipublic space of the Victorian salon. As Weliver's book illustrates, Mary Gladstone's influential weekly gatherings assembled political, intellectual, musical, artistic, and religious leaders and facilitated a network of liberal thought and activity. I believe that this very convincing approach and argument can be expanded to include another circle—the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. Whereas in the Gladstone home illustrious and prominent statesmen, Anglican clergy, Oxbridge intellectuals, and artistic geniuses gathered,1 the Fitzroy Square set was decidedly more bohemian and unofficial: as Justin McCarthy describes in his Reminiscences, during the period contemporaneous with the Gladstones' salons, an artistic London Bohemia developed around Fitzroy Square, "the home of many painters and sculptors, authors and actors, journalists and politicians."2 As we shall see, Pre-Raphaelite associate and painter Ford Madox Brown was hosting regular gatherings at his Fitzroy Square home, "brilliant parties"3 that were held "[f]ortnightly from 1866 for about 8 years"4 and were regularly attended by the core group of the Pre-Raphaelite circle including Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Rossetti; William Holman Hunt; Algernon Charles Swinburne; William Morris; and many more. In Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work, Madox Brown's grandson Ford Madox Ford (born Ford Madox Hueffer) goes on to say that "Music was represented by Theo Marzials and Dr. Hueffer, who championed the music of the future in those past days."5 In addition, there were a substantial number of social and artistic events that involved music—many of which have been largely overlooked in Pre-Raphaelite records and scholarship—events that gathered key figures in the Pre-Raphaelite circle as well as a broader network. It must be acknowledged that there is a pattern of omissions that resulted in a failure to record and include musical events in the Pre-Raphaelite [End Page 215] history; also ready to be acknowledged is a synergy between the Gladstone and Fitzroy Square salon circles, the individuals who moved between both these sets, and the important cultural outcomes fostered by both. Indeed, there were many intersecting salon circles in the 1870s, and many of these included music in their gatherings. There were certainly religious, aesthetic, poetic, and musical areas of convergence between the interests of these sets, such as, for instance, a July 6, 1887, concert of music based on Shelley's poetry, hosted in William Michael Rossetti's home for the Shelley Society, organized by his wife Lucy Rossetti and her friend, composer and professional musician Mary Grant Carmichael (who also set poems by Christina Rossetti and Oliver Madox Brown),6 and featuring an instrumental ensemble under the direction of Sir C. Hubert H. Parry performing his choral cantata, Scenes from Prometheus Unbound, among other works. Parry, in addition to being a regular and significant presence in the Gladstone salon, was a leading composer and later head of the Royal College of Music, who also set poetry by Christina Rossetti. Parry's composition Scenes from Prometheus Unbound (a work in which Shelley, music, and political circles and ideals coalesced in fascinating ways, as Weliver has demonstrated7) has been identified as the inaugural moment of the English Musical Renaissance.8 The English Musical Renaissance and the Royal College of Music, significant developments that were instrumentally supported by the Gladstone set, had enormous impact on the immediate and long-term presence and visibility of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, owing to the English Musical Renaissance goal of setting excellent English poetry to music and the Royal College of Music's mission to train excellent native musicians and composers. Pre-Raphaelite poetry enjoyed serious and continued attention, participating in this wave of musical development. There is a significant overlap too between the two salon circles' involvement in the English folk music revival. The Pre-Raphaelites also continued the vision shared by the Gladstone set of music as instrumental in civic and spiritual health—a movement that began in the 1840s as the rational recreation movement and blossomed...

Shelley's Quest for Love: Queering Epipsychidion

This paper employs the concept of queer to examine Percy Bysshe Shelley's Epipsychidion. Shelley's idealism towards love was widely received in atheism, materialism and Platonism. Compared with other Romantic poets, Shelley exercised his concept of love very differently. Shelley's quest for love is particularly discussed in most of his love poems. Among them Epipsychidion is a long poem that Shelley wrote to demonstrate his philosophy of love. In his later life, Shelley worked on translating Plato's philosophy, particularly The Symposium, which partly focuses on Greek love, and further pondered on his own sexuality. Shelley started to draw on atheistic materialism and Platonic metaphysics. Epipsychidion extends Shelley's early concept of love, namely "a soul within our soul," and dramatizes his narrator's love towards a female character named Emily. Different from major perspectives from Shelley critics (Notopoulos, Wasserman, Sperry, Peterfreud) who particularly pay attention to Shelley's love affairs, heterosexuality, as well as the real identity of Emily in Epipsychidion, the paper instead focuses on this poem to testify Shelley's homosexuality. The closeted poet honestly, but vaguely, discloses his traumatic love towards his male "Emily" and eventually his potential suicide with the man. I argue that a queer reading of Shelley's poetry helps to reexamine Shelley's philosophy of love in Epipsychidion.

The Fisher, The Spear, and the Fortunate Fish: Premature and Dissolving Endings in Shelley's Poetry

The Fisher, The Spear, and the Fortunate Fish: Premature and Dissolving Endings in Shelley's Poetry

Signs of Change: Percy Shelley's Language of Mutability as Precursor to Darwin's Theory of Evolution

AbstractThis essay argues that the poetry of Percy Shelley may have contributed to Charles Darwin's ability to conceptualize forces of change in the natural world. The work of Shelley occupies a key position in the development of pre‐Darwinian thought about change and transformation. His early interest in Lockean empiricism and his knowledge of the natural sciences have long been recognized by scholars working on romanticism and science. Less explored are the ways in which the poetry of Shelley has a bearing on the intellectual challenge Darwin faced in interpreting signs of change in the natural world. Shelley's poetry offers an account of how such change reveals itself: an account based not on a priori concepts of divine language, but on material evidence of the power of natural phenomena to convey information. In this way, poetry and science come into relation with each other.Like most young men of his time, Darwin would have been aware of Shelley's controversial reputation. What survives of the correspondence between the young Darwin and his friend the aspiring poet Henry Matthew, who was his contemporary at Cambridge, indicates that the two men had intense debates about Shelley's work, and about his notoriety as a materialist and atheist. Though no details are given, the correspondence does indicate that both of them read the poet's work and had conversations about it.Shelley's use of an evolving poetic/mythological vocabulary, putting pressure on the conventional meanings of words (a kind of linguistic change) to enable the reader to conceive of global processes of change, strongly advanced Romantic‐era thinking in this regard. Shelley's enthusiasm for the materialist philosophy of Lucretius provided him with good authority for the belief that the natural world was inhabited by forces that would powerfully impinge upon the minds of humans. His mature poetics remained open to the idea that observing the operations of these natural forces, traceable in the geological record, would reveal signs of terrestrial change and prepare the awakened mind for a future transformed world. Darwin (for all his well‐known anxiety about challenging Christian beliefs) would have had in Shelley's poetry a productive model for conceptualizing the processes of nature, combining in such works as “Mont Blanc” and Prometheus Unbound changes in the referentiality of linguistic signs with observed changes in the forms of nature.

“I feel a giddy sickness of strange awe”: Chillingworth, Cenci, and the Silent Pleasure of Pain

Echoing There is good evidence to suggest that Nathaniel Hawthorne deeply admired the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Early in his career, he clearly studied Shelley's writing closely, checking out a volume of his works from the Salem Athenaeum on two separate occasions: first on July 22, 1833, then on June 23, 1835 (Kesselring 47). Later, Hawthorne bestowed high praise on Shelley in his own fiction. In his 1844 tale, "Earth's Holocaust," for example, he writes: "[M]ethought Shelley's poetry emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day" (10:397). And in "P.'s Correspondence" (1845) Hawthorne articulates the consequence of such "light": an oeuvre whose best work "rest[s] upon the threshold of the heavens" (10:372). Given Hawthorne's high esteem for the British Romantic poet, it is little wonder that he would pay particularly close attention to what Shelleyans have often considered "the most significant serious play of its century written in English" (Curran 33): Shelley's Cenci (1819). Highly controversial in its time, The Cenci stages the crucial events preceding Beatrice Cenci's legendary sixteenth-century death: rape by her father, Francesco; his murder at her instigation; and her subsequent death sentence by a Papal court. In his preface to the work, Shelley dwelled with special emphasis on a portrait he encountered at the Palazzo Colonna in 1818. It portrays a young woman from the waist up, wrapped in turban and white, flowing drapery and bearing an expression that, Shelley said, emanated a blend of "exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow" to produce a countenance "inexpressibly pathetic" (144). Though of uncertain origin and attribution, this portrait was thought, when it attained a nineteenth-century cult status, to be of Beatrice Cenci, painted by the celebrated Guido Reni just prior to Beatrice's execution. Hawthorne, while residing in Rome, was similarly mesmerized. After viewing the painting for himself, he replicated Shelley's praise, calling the portrait "the very saddest picture that was ever painted" (14:92). The portrait's presence in The Marble Faun (1860) is, consequently, keenly felt. For this reason, perhaps, scholars who have analyzed Hawthorne's textual engagement with Shelley have frequently centered their inquiries almost exclusively on how The Cenci resonates through The Marble Faun. Such analysis has often entailed a tracing of explicit textual links, so that features of The Marble Faun become a kind of roman a clef for the Cenci story. Thus, for example, Frederick Crews sees Miriam as a sort of stand-in for Beatrice Cenci, whose history unlocks the closed door of Miriam's unspeakable past (227-28). More recently, critics like Charles Watts have been attentive to the peculiarly refracting quality that Shelley's version of Beatrice Cenci had on both Miriam's and Hilda's interrelated portrayals. Watts suggests a triangulation of Beatrice, Miriam, and Hilda so that both Miriam and Hilda perform versions of Beatrice, even as they become "doubles" of each other, thus "interpenetrating an innocence with an experience of vision" to establish the "basis for the action of Hawthorne's novel" (445). While such a tracing out of correspondences has, to a degree, been illuminating, the methodological approach that seeks textual parallelism as its interpretive end has also tended to suffer from the limitations integral to such a self-contained approach to source study. More interesting, arguably, than a delineation of relatively straightforward correspondences is the discernment of what I will call, following John Sallis, a more diffuse set of "textual echoes": reverberations of "semantic or syntactic elements" that move in less predictable fashion across texts and time to enrich new works in surprising ways (12-13). My interest, however, is less in the "excess of signification" (1) that Sallis notes as he considers the echo's proneness to semantic multiplicity than in Salis's recasting of the Thoreauvian echo. …

Romantic Survival and Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”

Scholarship on Percy Bysshe Shelley tends to assume a certain deconstructive logic at work in his poetry whereby destructions entail remainders, thereby guaranteeing futurity. In this article, I argue that if we take the historical allusions in “Ode to the West Wind” seriously, then we discover a notion of destruction that leaves behind no remainder whatsoever and thus threatens the future in a way more radical than a “constitutive threat” does. While working from “within” deconstructive readings of Shelley as rigorously as possible, I suggest not only that Shelley's poetry puts pressure on the deconstructive “to come,” but also that it portrays a type of absolute erasure that has remained unaccounted for by “deconstructive” and “historicist” readings of Shelley alike (both of which tend to assume that what is destroyed will haunt or remain in one way or another).

“Materials for Imagination”: Shelleyan Traces in Felicia Hemans's Poetry After 1822

This essay takes its title from a phrase used by Maria Jewsbury in a review article of 1831, which discusses Hemans's mid-career change towards a more expressive and imaginative poetry. The essay illustrates how traces of Shelley's writings pervade the poetry of the 1820s and afterwards, and, without slighting the intertextual relations that Hemans's work has with the poetry of Byron and Wordsworth, it argues for a fuller sense of the uses to which Hemans puts Shelley's poetry. It contends that Hemans has a productive awareness of Shelley's capacity for self-conflict, and that she is able to infuse Shelleyan notes into her work in ways that help us account for her poetry's rich mingling of moods and effects.

Hardy’s Browning: Refashioning the Lyric

Ostensibly, Robert Browning (1812-1889) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) have little in common beyond their shared fascination with Percy Shelley's poetry, an idiosyncratic poetic idiom, and mutual attendance at London gatherings of literati in the 1880s. (1) Even though the elder poet's reactions to Hardy and his writing remain unknown, Robert Browning had a measurable impact on his successor. Hardy may have expressed his extreme frustration in a letter to Edmund Gosse over Browning's optimism and faith; yet owned five editions of Browning's poetry, including one given to him by Florence Henniker in 1894, which annotated; also possessed copies of privately-printed criticism by Browning, as well as Pen Browning's catalogue of the sale of his father's property; even saved reviews of Browning's various volumes. Indeed, read and re-read Browning's work for sixty years. (2) Hardy transcribed lines from the poetry into his notebooks and commented on them; copied excerpts from the Brownings' letters to each other and, in an essay for Academy, selected their published letters as one of two favorite books of the year 1899. In a marginal comment in the Browning section of his copy of English Poets, now in the Dorset County Museum, described Browning's processes of thought as often scientific in their precision and remarked that Browning's conclusions to his poems were sudden. (3) Hardy also read G. K. Chesterton's 1911 biography Robert Browning. Finally, forty years after its publication, Hardy inserted verses from Browning's By the Fire-Side (1853) among the ghostly literary voices that Jude Fawley hears in Oxford. Browning thus indubitably attracted Hardy, both personally and professionally. It is hardly surprising that Hardy's favorite Browning poem should have been The Statue and the Bust, with its emphasis on the lost chances and postponed fulfillment that become ironically translated into inert, mutually regarding statues of lovers (Felkin, p. 206). That Shelleyan conjunction of desire and art spoke to Hardy so deeply that repeatedly quoted it in his short stories and novels: The Waiting Supper, An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress, A Changed Man, Desperate Remedies, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. As readers of Well-Beloved know, The Statue and the Bust directly informed Hardy's final farewell to fictional romance and English Romanticism. Hardy's investment in Browning also led him to sites associated with both the Shelleys and the Brownings. On an Italian holiday with his first wife Emma in 1887, not only visited the Piazza dell' Annunziata where The Statue and the Bust was said to have been set, but also paid his respects at Elizabeth Barrett Browning's grave (Millgate, p. 200). Hardy sent a presentation copy of Wessex Tales to Browning for his birthday in 1888; decades later, when ill and confined to bed, the eighty-seven-year-old Hardy was still coming to terms with his predecessor. On the evening before died, asked his second wife, Florence, to read aloud Browning's Ben Ezra. following evening near dusk, he asked his wife to repeat to him a verse [the four-line stanza] from the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm, beginning Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth--, a stanza that linked the two poems' contrary responses to the Biblical potter image from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Romans. Hardy died that day (Millgate, p. 480; see also Paulin, p. 70). Hardy's wish to hear these two excerpts could have been arbitrary, but the details suggest otherwise. His illness had become severe enough to make household members suspect was dying. verses in question went to the center of his life's work. Hardy's critics have pointed out that whereas Browning's Rabbi constructs man as a pot perfected by God, Fitzgerald's speaker constructs man as a pot molded and abandoned by an uncaring universe. Was Hardy giving each view a hearing? …

The Shelleys and the Art of Suffering

AbstractMary Shelley's posthumous editions of Percy Shelley's poetry and prose have been regarded as striking examples of collaborative literary achievement, but in her editorial annotations Mary represents her husband's work as the result of his innately solitary genius. She does so in particular by associating his creative power with his constitutional ill‐health. Via a reading of Percy's Julian and Maddalo, I argue that this connection between creativity and bodily debility does not imply that his poetry annuls the social context of its writing; instead, Mary seeks to ameliorate the conflict between philanthropy and sociability that she detects in Percy's work.

Telling Stories: Southey and Romantic Narrative

In Francis Jeffrey's piece on Thalaba Destroyer for Edinburgh Review (October. 1802), he infamously designated Southey as belonging to sect of poets, that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years. The practices of this sect show, in Jeffrey's words, that they are dissenters from established systems in poetry and criticism (Madden 68). is not difficult to convert Jeffrey's via media put-down into spirited, anti-Establishment praise for Southeyan non-conformism, even if one should think of 1790s Southey as being with Coleridge what Daniel E. White calls kind of dissenter from Dissent (White 155). But implications of dissent aesthetically, what it implies for handling of genre and conduct of narrative, deserve attention, too, during current revival of Southey's fortunes. Hostile critics are often most involuntarily perceptive. Leavis notes that is certainly a sense in which Shelley's poetry is peculiarly emotional, and when we try to define this sense we find ourselves invoking an absence of something (Leavis 194), scarcely aware that in doing so he has offered a key to explaining poetry's elusive, haunting power. Southey's own gibe at The Rime of She Ancyent Marinere as Dutch attempt at German sublimity turns out, as Seamus Perry has argued, to be a mean-spirited and unintentionally illuminating expression of tension ... between diversitarian attention to minute particulars and unifying ambitions of gathering consciousness (Perry 290) typical of Coleridge's self-divided, doubling genius. Jeffrey himself takes us close to centre of Southey's peculiar but real distinction as a poet of narrative and romance when he writes of poet and his tribe: is nothing that appears to them so meritorious as perpetual exaggeration of thought ... all their characters must be in agonies and ecstasies, from their entrance to their exit. He goes on to generalize that It is delightful, now and then, to meet with a rugged mountain, or a roaring stream; but where there is no sunny slope, nor shaded plain, to relieve them--where all is beetling cliff and yawning abyss, and landscape presents nothing on every side but prodigies and terrors--the head is apt to grow giddy, and heart to languish for repose and security of a less elevated region (Madden 75). Jeffrey aligns Southey's narrative landscapes with scenes from Hamlet and Gothic novel, thus exposing fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in reviewer's philosophy and involuntarily demonstrating Southey's narrative commerce with realities in which fantastical has its reasons that reason cannot know. Jeffrey contrives, too, to bring out controlled, driving relentlessness of verse. Thalaba obeys, as Herbert Tucker has shown, the operation of a plot that has been looped all along in gyres of self-fulfilling prophecy (Tucker 88), a plot obedient to moral spelled out at start of Book 11: O fool to think thy human hand Could check chariot-wheels of Destiny! To dream of weakness in all-knowing Mind That his decrees should change! To hope that united Powers Of Earth, and Air, and Hell, Might blot one letter from Book of Fate ... (Thalaba, book 11, lines 1-7) Thalaba Destroyer--of evil--is pure will and pure passivity; he has become his avenging function. And yet steely white light of his progress through poem continually plays against variety of seeming accidents. Spenser is a forerunner here. But Spenser's poetry of encounter--the Red-Crosse Knight's encounter with Despair, for example--dallies, dwells, delves, and deepens. Despair finds a language for promptings in Knight himself. What seems like an external enemy turns out to be a powerful inward impulse. Allegory finds its spiritual and psychological voice and entwines itself with existential reality. …

A. C. Bradley's Views of Shelley's Poetry and Poetics

Critical reception is central to the existence of Romantic legacies, and, in turn, takes on the function of a legacy for subsequent interpreters. In what follows I seek to recover a sense of the contribution made by A. C. Bradley to our understanding of Shelley.1 Convinced that there is much value in reviewing and re-considering past criticism which is now relatively neglected, the essay embodies the hope that thinking about the ways in which an author was once considered will involve, at least implicitly, reflection on current critical modes.

Shelley and Plato’s Symposium: the poet’s revenge*

Shelley's translation of Plato's Symposium has been studied primarily for the insights it provides into Shelley's poetry. The translation, however, also deserves study as a contribution in its own right to the Classical tradition. Shelley's translation is flawed due to Shelley's refusal to use a lexicon, the speed at which the translation was com posed, and Shelley's largely Neoplatonic interpretation of the dialogue. These same factors, however, also contribute to the translation's unique sensitivity to the rhythm of Plato's prose and the counterplay within the dialogue of abstract ideas and concrete detail. Shelley's translation succeeds largely because he does not attempt simply to re produce Plato's particular balance of abstract against concrete, but rather substitutes instead his own, Neoplatonic, sense of the counterpoint of the ideal and the physical.

RAPTUROUS FORMS: MATHILDE BLIND'S DARWINIAN POETICS

Inspired whilst on holiday in 1893, the poet and literary critic Mathilde Blind speculated on the potential for intimacy in great poetry: “The poet only truly lives when he feels the rapture of communion; when his soul mirrored in a sister soul is doubled like the moon glassed in the Lake of Nemi” (Commonplace book36; hereafterCB). Blind here alludes to the belief that from the shores of Lake Nemi, located just southeast of Rome, one might witness a perfect reflection of the moon upon the lake's still waters. Like the moon that casts its light down on the lake, Blind imagines the poet radiating outward toward her readers and experiencing with them “the rapture of communion,” a flash of sympathetic confederacy. It was an ideal Blind had considered from her first volume of poetry in 1867 to her recently publishedDramas in Miniature(1891), and it had determined most notablyThe Ascent of Man, Blind's 1889 poetic re-writing of Darwinian evolution. In her work as a literary critic as well as in her poetry, Blind singles out moments of passionate communication, such as lines of D. G. Rossetti that “set[] ones nerve tingling” (Correspondence; letter to Richard Garnett, 10 October 1881), and Shelley's poetry, which is like an “electric telegraph of thought flashing its fiery spark through the dull dense world of sense” (“Shelley” 97). At its best, poetry fuses an “intensity of feeling, [a] depth of thought, music, and form” (Correspondence; letter to Richard Garnett, 26 January 1870) so as to resonate most effectively with what Tennyson called “the deep heart of every living thing” (Poems1: 85).

Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Sciences

AbstractThe poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) followed advances in the sciences with enthusiasm. This essay sketches the biographical details and historical context of Shelley's interest in science, and shows how past and present literary criticism has interpreted the influence of science on Shelley's poetry.

Shelley among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language by Stuart Peterfreund (review)

MLR, 99.3,2004 755 pression (in the material field) or the despair of that minority of writers (most notably Byron) who were disenchanted by the 'crowning carnage'. Brief review necessitates simplistic summary. It is unfair to the flexibilityof Shaw's nuanced and highly theorized account. The text readily leaps to overarching generalities to redefine Romanticism, drawing (often uncritically) upon authorities such as Lacan (not an obvious figure to quote on Waterloo) or Christensen. Some of the leaps are demanding. Thus Coleridge's Zapolya is claimed to reveal, as 'the meaning of Waterloo', 'the renunciation of endless erotic play in the resumption of symbolic castration' (p. 137) and Wordsworth's guilty confession of pleasure in the narration of battle is argued to show how, 'in the symbolic order [. . .] the poet's participation in a culture of sacrifice [. . .] finds a perverse form of reassurance, to invoke Rene Girard's analysis, in rehearsing the spectacle of its own dissolution' (pp. 140-41). This kind of writing functions at a high level of abstraction which, forthe 'pedestrian muse' of this reviewer, sometimes recalls Byron's comment on Coleridge (in the Dedication of Don Juan): 'I wish he would explain his explanation.' What exactly is meant, for instance, by the words 'real' and 'other' (with or without capitalization) in a statement such as 'With Coleridge there remains [. . .] the pathos of having failed to reach the place ofthe Real in the Other' (p. 130)? In contradistinctionone might claim that had Coleridge got to the 'real' he would have outsoared not only Plato but St Paul! Cardiff University Malcolm Kelsall Shelley among Others: The Play of theIntertext and theIdea ofLanguage. By Stuart Peterfreund. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. xiii + 4o6pp. ?38.50. ISBN 0-8018-6751-7. Stuart Peterfreund's aim is ambitious and laudable in a critical climate which is still redolent of fragmentariness and almost compulsory patchiness: 'to produce a com? prehensive study of Shelley's poetry, including most ofthe major poems and many of the so-called minor poems as well' (p. ix). This endeavour situates Peterfreund's book among those studies which attempt to draw together the idealistic and the politically grounded dimensions of Shelley's work, to make 'Shelley whole' so to speak, but it also acknowledges the heteroglossic nature of Shelley's thought and work. Broadly, Peterfreund attempts to discuss 'the intertextual and linguistic conceptions and prac? tices that Shelley himself deployed in seeking and claiming forhimself a place in the Western literary tradition' (p. ix). Peterfreund emphasizes the importance of philo? sophy, psychoanalytic criticism, and theories of language forhis own analysis and for Shelley' s understanding of the role of poetry in society. More specifically, Peterfreund examines what he understands 'Shelley's idea of language and its play to be, and how [he understands] this idea to inform the formal and thematic elements, as well as the social focus, of his poetry in general and of several of his major poems in particular' (p. 2). For Peterfreund, Shelley's play of language, throughout his ceuvre, centres primarily on the continuous tension between metaphor and metonymy: 'It is the drama of moving beyond historical contingency if not beyond temporality outright, the drama of fostering the reign of metaphor and forestalling the reign of metonymy, of fostering heteroglossia and forestalling the advent of a common language, that is the basis for the [sie] both the artistic and the social engagement of Shelley's poetry' (p. 24). So far so good. This focus on the tension between metaphor and metonymy, however useful as a starting point, is unfortunately reduced to a rather rigid instrument of evaluation, and, as a result, the texts under scrutiny suffer from readings which do not reflect the ongoing exploratory and probing struggle for elucidation so often at the heart 756 Reviews of Shelley's poetry. In some ways I read Shelley as a poet of obstinate questionings, who has, in Michael O'Neill's words, 'a dislike of reaching conclusions' (Romanti? cism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 131). Peterfreund 's interpretations, however, are geared towards conclusions which are coloured by the predominance of either metaphor or metonymy: 'Metaphor...

Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology by Lynda Palazzo (review)

756 Reviews of Shelley's poetry. In some ways I read Shelley as a poet of obstinate questionings, who has, in Michael O'Neill's words, 'a dislike of reaching conclusions' (Romanti? cism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 131). Peterfreund 's interpretations, however, are geared towards conclusions which are coloured by the predominance of either metaphor or metonymy: 'Metaphor is forward-looking, whereas metonymy is backward-looking. Metaphor is the figure of love expressed; metonymy, the figure of desire repressed. Metaphor projects while metonymy reifies' (p. 30). Metonymy is associated with 'bad'; metaphor with 'good'. For some texts, such as The Mask ofAnarchy, this makes sense, but some texts, e.g. The Cenci, clearly do not benefit from the simplified morality underlying the metonymy/metaphor ten? sion. For Peterfreund, Shelley's poetic development is characterized by 'the hope of a language that can somehow transcend the contingencies of the material and the temporal' (p. 270), which is in itself not a new idea, but this does not justify, I think, the rather strained over-reading of 'Ode to the West Wind', in which 'lyre' is read as a pun on 'liar' (and its connotations of limitations). Peterfreund is at his best in close readings, when he seems to forget about the restrictive framework he has set up; these readings?I particularly enjoyed sections on The Revolt of Islam?are informed by a formidable command of allusions and sources. His study is comprehensive indeed, but Shelley's poetic dramatization of humanity and its aspirations, however perverse, fortunately resists a late twentiethcentury moralistic framework. I am sure that many critics will vigorously debate Peterfreund's readings, and that we can expect exciting times ahead in Shelley scholar? ship, particularly now that we have farmore definitive texts of his work available to us. Victoria University of Wellington Heidi Thomson Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology. By Lynda Palazzo. (Cross-Currents in Re? ligion and Culture) Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. xiv+ 165 pp. ?45. ISBN 0-333-79469-9. Although important articles by,forexample, Coleen Hobbs (A View from the "Lowest Place": Christina Rossetti's Devotional Prose', Victorian Poetry, 32 (1994), 40928 ) and Joel Westerholme (' "I Will Magnify Mine Office": Christina Rossetti's Au? thoritative Voice in her Devotional Prose', Victorian Newsletter, 84 (1993), n-17) have begun to sketch the ambiguities and paradoxes of a devout Anglo-Catholic woman intervening in theological matters, Christina Rossetti's devotional prose and poetry continues to be neglected. Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology is therefore welcome as the firstbook-length study of Rossetti's diverse and demanding devo? tional prose volumes, Annus Domini (1874), Seek and Find (1879), Called to Be Saints (1881), Letter and Spirit (1883), Time Flies (1885), and The Face of the Deep (1892). Palazzo's discussion works best as a clear, readable, and accessible introduction to these works, carefully explaining their religious contexts, symbolic structure, and key negotiations with the Bible (in particular the wisdom texts). Furthermore, and again as a crucial introductory tool, the study establishes a strong sense of teleology in Ros? setti's developing confidence as a religious prose writer,her evolution into a Victorian sage, and the shifting grounds of her theology. Overall, according to Palazzo, Rossetti's theology developed into a 'web ofwomen's experience' and 'from the wholeness and sense ofthe relatedness of things' (p. 139), located in marginal figures such as Mary in her early novella Maude but also, and especially as she grows in confidence and is prepared to take liberties with Scripture, in the mundane minutiae of everyday commonplace life. Palazzo presents a postRomantic and political Rossetti, who reinterprets Tractarian theology through S. T. MLR, 99.3, 2004 757 Coleridge's work on symbol and allegory and through a specifically female response to the repressions of patriarchal religion that deny the validity of women's experience and bodies. Rossetti develops an active theology that insists on its accessibility and relevance to the detail of women's everyday life. Furthermore?and this the book's most significant achievement?this argument challenges the dominant view that Ros? setti's religion was based on renunciation and repression, initiated in accounts by...

Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley

1. of / With my unlidded I TAKE THE TITLE OF MY OPENING SECTION FROM KEATS'S SONG OF FOUR Fairies, and specifically from its rhapsody on flame. While spirits of air and water are left their own delights, Dusketha, spirit of earth, promises join Salamander, spirit of in congress, be bedded in flames (93): Sprite of fire! I follow thee [and] / at thy desire, / Touch of / With my unlidded (80, 84-86). (1) In an otherwise unremarkable poem, these remarkable lines on supreme of spirits also propose an allegory of reading that at first sight can only appear be an allegory of blindness: by promise recorded in these lines make eyes into organs of touch, Dusketha guarantees in process deprive them of sight. But something is gained by such self-blinding; for it is only by searing touch of eyes that this encounter with the of fire can be consummated. What, moreover, is pulse of fire other than its beat, its metrics? Thus, press bare unlidded fire's is read a reading which blinds on contact. Once this reading is bedded, it promises give desire a voice, become a speaking, a poetics of tongued flames. The poem does not pursue further ramifications of this conjunction. But since Keats often plays with in his poems, Dusketha's lines announce an incendiary poetics that I would like explore in their more detailed and adventurous forms. This entails turning from very of fire figures that we might read without same fear of blindness, figures that lend this lyric illusion of a history, figures that transform into a narrative of burning--namely, figures of kindling and ash, fire's origin and outcome, cause and consequence. To be bedded in flames is thus point from kindling of spirit of ashes of its result. To kindle means, of course, set on ignite. Figuratively, it can mean inflame, excite, animate. And, as is often case in Shelley's poetry, it can also take an intransitive form, as in to take fire, commence burning. As a noun, kindling means either act of causing burn, or material, easily lighted, that starts a fire. Ashes are earthly or mineral residue left when combustible material is thoroughly burned. Ashes are cinders, signs and traces of a burning. I am interested in ways in which ashes are textual residue, signs and traces of what I am calling a which is kindled at certain critical instances in poetry of both Shelley and Keats. This radical aestheticism is not reducible aestheticisms that we have come associate with or assign Pater, for a radical aestheticism is nothing that can be espoused. (2) But these days nothing is less likely be espoused than an aestheticism of any sort. In fact, if there is one thing in fractured field of what used be called literary studies that a conservative humanist, a critical Marxist, a rhetorically oriented deconstructive critic, and a practitioner of cultural studies can actually agree on, it is likely be a rejection of aestheticism. It is certainly ironic--perhaps even symptomatically so--that major critical currents of late twentieth-century literary analysis can find agreement in an aversion aestheticism, even as they often ascribe an aestheticism their various opponents. Critical approaches as divergent and even irreconcilable as structuralist poetics and hermenuetics, feminism and New Criticism, myth criticism and New Historicism could all be said share this aversion aestheticism. Conservative critics continue oppose it on basis of many of same moral and ethical objections raised against it at end of nineteenth century. …

'MONT BLANC': TRANSCENDENCE IN SHELLEY'S RELATIONAL SYSTEM

'MONT BLANC': TRANSCENDENCE IN SHELLEY'S RELATIONAL SYSTEM

Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics

In this work, a full-length critical analysis of the dialogue between Shelley's poetry and its contemporary reviewers, Kim Wheatley argues that Shelley's idealism can be recovered through the study of its reception. Incorporating extensive research in major early-19th-century British periodicals, Wheatley integrates a reception-based methodology with careful textual analysis to demonstrate that the contemporary reception of Shelley's work registers the immediate impact of the poet's increasingly idealistic passion for reforming the world. Wheatley examines Shelley's poetry within the context of Romantic-era politics, a heightened language of defenisveness and persecution incorporating Miltonic and apocalyptic imagery that paints adversaries as Satanic rebels against the orthodoxy. A simultaneously empowering and disabling dynamic, the paranoid style embodies a preoccupation with the efficacy of the printed word, thus singling out radical writers such as Shelley for personal attacks. Using Shelley's Queen Mab as an example of his early radical poetry, Wheatley demonstrates that the poet, like his contemporary reviewers, is caught up in the paranoid rhetoric. Failing to challenge the assumptions of paranoid politics - conspiracy and contagion - Shelley takes merely an oppositional stance. However, Shelley's later poems, exemplified by Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, introduce a boldly innovative approach. These less explicitly political poems transcend the dynamics of paranoid politics by incorporating an experimental language that creates an interplay between poem and reader. Shifting to an apolitical conception of the aeshetic, Shelley's poetry is able to move beyond cultural paranoia. The final chapter of this study argues that the posthumous reception of Adonais uniquely replicates the elegiac moves and complex idealism of the poem, concluding with a discussion of how the Shelley circle aestheticized the poet after his death. The book offers a new approach to the question of how to recuperate Romantic idealism in the face of such literary criticism as deconstructionism and historicism. The use of reception-based methodology should make this book valuable not only to specialists of the Romantic period but also to anyone interested in literary criticism.