The Uses of High Places

 

 

    Great heights have long been inspirations fora sense of the sublime, the physical altitude stimulating high thoughts. In China scholars and poets like Tao Qian, Wang Wei, and Han Shan found contemplative roosts in the mountains and even today contemplatives meditate in Tapovan near the source of the Ganges. Symbolic heights like ziggurats, pyramids (in Egypt and Mesoamerica), and soaring Gothic cathedrals encouraged people’s consciousness upward while, even to the less spiritual, mountain views are universally considered beautiful, even exhilarating.

     Having recently lingered for a spell in the Colorado Rockies, I was struck by the distinctly American use to which some of the grandest regions in our magnificent mountains have been put. Our most glorious sites have been bought up by the one percent. Though they must tolerate hoi polloi to some extent, it is only as intruders in their bought-and-paid-for domain.

     Vail, Colorado, is scarcely a town at all, but more closely resembles an upscale shopping mall. It came into existence only with the development of ski resorts in the ‘sixties, and now housing of one sort or another has usurped the most scenic spots. As a single-family dwelling currently averages over two million dollars in the community, a difficulty has arisen in figuring out where to put people to do the plumbing and landscaping and childcare and stock the shelves in the local market. 

     Aspen looks something more like an actual community, but even the tidy, well-kept cottages are in fact second homes for the fatter among the fat cats. Here the average price is fourteen million. An airport with no scheduled flights accommodates only the wasteful jets of America’s oligarchs.  A company boasting it offers "the world's largest yachts" has a showroom here, a thousand miles from the sea.  In Jackson, Wyoming, homes average two million while the existence of working people in the outskirts is attested by the average income of Teton County: a mere half million.

     Even before the ever-increasing wealth gap enabled this usurpation of areas which are indeed national treasures, turning them into trophy leisure locations, of course, the Rockies were viewed through a different financial lens. While the mountains were simply an obstacle to those seeking level farmland further west, the discovery of gold, silver, and other metals brought settlers hoping for more rapid wealth than agriculture could bring. Their eyes were focused on the subterranean realms in which the minerals were hidden, scarcely on the grand landscapes above ground. For these pioneering prospectors the conditions were harsh, at times dangerously so. The industrialization of mining brought dangerous and exploitative working conditions for miners and ferocious repression to any who tried to better their condition. Hundreds died in Cripple Creek, Telluride, Coeur d’Alene and elsewhere, victims of the rapacious greed of the bosses.

     When the ore was exhausted, mines were abandoned and their structures allowed to deteriorate. Now the workers’ struggles are forgotten and even the ugly heaps of tailings are perceived as “historic,” and thus, to the Chamber of Commerce, as assets. As a practical account book matter, the mountains were significant to the land's owners only as a shipping inconvenience.

     Apart from the reduction of mountains either to a marker of prestige or a source of money, they are today a focus of athletic activity. In recent years skiing has vastly increased while hiking, rock climbing, biking, and other strenuous activities have grown as well.  Physical exertions are, of course, wholesome, yet for me the stink of money lingers about the fit bodies one encounters in these glorious mountains.  Whereas George Mallory originally rejected carrying oxygen as “unsporting,” and Edmund Hillary went up Everest wearing hunting tweeds, today special clothing and costly equipment are as significant as performance, signifying affluence like country club membership did for golfers in the past.  The high peaks remain incidental, appreciated by many only for the glamorous background they provide for a display of one’s physique and one’s sophisticated gear. 

     The poets can remind us how to regard mountains as mountains.  Their suggestion is consistent over the centuries.  The old Tang poets knew the proper uses of high places.  Han Shan who adopted the mountain’s name as his own, collapsing the gap between ego and object, atman and Atman.  The mountain is all but invisible, since he inhabits it.

 

Bird-song drowns me in feeling.

Back to my shack of straw to sleep.

Cherry-branches burn with crimson flower,

Willow-boughs delicately trail.

Morning sun flares between blue peaks,

Bright clouds soak in green ponds.

Who guessed I’d leave that dusty world,

Climbing the south slope of Cold Mountain?

                      (translated by A. S. Kline)

 

Almost half a millennium later Shiwu’s motives are the same.

 

Forty-some years I've

Lived in the mountains,

Ignorant of the world's

Rise and fall.

Warmed at night by a stove

Full of pine needles;

Satisfied at noon by a bowl

Of wild plants;

Sitting on rocks

Watching clouds and empty thoughts;

Patching my robe in sunlight;

Practicing silence

Till someone asks

Why Bodhidharma came east,

And I hang out my wash.

                    (trans. By Bill Porter)

 

     And a similar poetic respect for mountains as mountains appears no less in European literature, in Shelley, for instance. 

 

from Mont Blanc

                                     V

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

 

     In Shelley’s Mont Blanc he finds “the secret Strength of things” all the more present when “none beholds them there,” since their power transcends human vision.  Though “voiceless,” the mountain signifies Ultimate Reality for the poet specifically because he cannot encompass its vastness.  No further commentary is needed (or even possible) since the mountain is neither more nor less than itself. 

     For Gary Snyder the mountain setting has a purgative effect, clearing his mind of obstacles and distractions, allowing the consciousness to focus with precision. 

 

 

    Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

 

    Down valley a smoke haze

    Three days heat, after five days rain  

    Pitch glows on the fir-cones

    Across rocks and meadows

    Swarms of new flies.

    I cannot remember things I once read

    A few friends, but they are in cities.  

    Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup  

    Looking down for miles

    Through high still air.

 

     Getting a perspective on the landscape may be elusive for today’s visitor to Vail.  Procuring a parking space and ten-dollar scoop of ice cream may rise to the foreground of thought for today’s mountaineer.  But the high altitude remains in spite of exploitation and development, in spite of skis that cost thousands of dollars and lifts that cost hundreds, the cold is there and the indifferent thin air and now and then even an affluent athlete, we are liberal enough to observe, may catch a whiff of what’s real and what will last.  The shops, like the miners, may prove in the end a brief and passing phase.

The Phantom of Artistic Truth

     Artists have no privileged access to truth.  This qualification in no way diminishes their expertise in their own métiers.  They are specialists in the making of beautiful objects only and are no more likely than anyone else to have accurate ideas about other topics.  While this proposition may seem self-evident, it nonetheless contradicts assumptions accepted from archaic times until quite recently.  Further, it also challenges the intuitions of many readers who feel they find in works of literature, for instance, a depth of understanding of not only grand themes such as philosophy, divinity, mortality, but also usable lessons in human psychology and the ordering of society. 

     The origins of this idea are ancient indeed.  Though decorative art existed in prehistoric times, much sculpture, poetry, and dance of oral cultures is religious or magical, promising rewards beyond the aesthetic, including otherwise unavailable truths.  The conflation in the roles of poet with wise man and priest is universal at that stage and appears in Classical antiquity as inspiration by the gods or the Muses reflected in the Latin use of “vates” (prophet) for poet. [1]  The archaic kinship of special poetic knowledge with shamanistic trance is evident in the etymology of that Latin word for priest which has been traced to Proto-Indo-European *weh₂t- (“excited, possessed”), the same root that gave rise to Old and Middle English wod meaning mad or frenzied.  In Asia, Africa, and America as well as in Europe, artists were thought to benefit the community by providing the insights they gained from their special insight.  The evidence from modern hunter-gatherer cultures is quite clear.  Artists were considered capable of traveling in supernatural realms and then returning with more authoritative truth than was available to others.  They certainly provided spectacle and entertainment, but they were also considered to be the source of functional answers to the profoundest questions.  What is real?  From where does the rain come?  How should people behave?  What should we do next?

     By historical times a bifurcation had occurring, separating the delivery of messages from higher entities from the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, what the Romans called “nugae” (trifles) meant for amusement.  With the coming of Christianity the source of prophetic wisdom moved from the Muses to the Holy Spirit as Bede’s story of Caedmon‘s inspiration in the field makes clear.  Bede says explicitly that he was given the gift of song “not from people or through people,” but rather, like the apostle Paul, by God himself. [2] 

     In spite of his reaction against a youthful taste for the theater, Augustine had come to allow a place for art if it facilitated access to religious truth and thus promoted salvation.  Due to the authority of the church, the poet no longer needed no longer to communicate directly with deities, allowing others at least vicariously to experience the divine; poets might adopt the more modest expectation of reformulating accepted teaching.  This didactic role is prominent in Philip Sidney for whom “virtuous action” is “the end of all earthly learning,” and poetry, as the likeliest method to “bring forth” virtue, has the “most just title” of prince of all pursuits.  Similarly, even for the atheist Shelley, poets are not merely “the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society.”

      The association of poetry with truth likewise is central to Matthew Arnold’s view that only culture could, by influencing people’s behavior, save society from anarchy, and Eliot’s wish to link his art with his Christianity, just as Ginsberg and Kerouac among the mid-twentieth century Beats, who reacted against Eliot, sought to proselytize Buddhism or to reinvent prehistoric spirituality like Snyder and Rothenburg.  All regarded poetry as a unique medium for conveying the highest truth.  

     The same assumption of art as a source of truth is evident in most middlebrow discussion of books (especially in today’s group discussions) which address “issues” raised in reading and insights offered by the author.  Pedagogical practice likewise generally centers on theme.  Teachers will deploy the dreadful expression ”What is the author trying to say?” as though that answer will sum up the reading.  Encouraging students to “learn something” from the text is far more conveniently handled in class than attempting to cultivate a taste for beauty or an understanding of artistic practice. 

     Indeed, through the years, probably the most consistent justification for literature is the claim that it reveals a truth otherwise unavailable.  Yet how might artists attain this privileged access to truth?  They have no unique source of knowledge and must depend like all others, on their own all-too-fallible judgement, sensibility, and experience.  Judging from artists’ biographies and English Department faculty gossip, neither the writing nor the reading of quantities of poetry seems to produce people of extraordinary good sense or exceptional morality. 

     The truth of art does indeed exist, though, in spite of the artist’s knowing no more than anyone else.  It is precisely because no one has privileged knowledge yet everyone is intimately familiar with one version of subjectivity.  Whatever medium might be used, the artist constructs in durable form a work that reflects an individual take on reality, a plausible representation of consciousness, not imitating experience but twisting, altering, and refracting it in ways that paradoxically make it more real.  What art records may not always look sublime, but that is because human experience is not regularly conducted in the empyrean.  Art records human consciousness, drawing on all the objects and events that compose a life, and making concrete not merely an impression of a physical milieu and a set of actions, but adding as well the elements that make life meaningful to our species.  Unlike other fields of intellectual work, the artist’s product incorporates the affective tone which with endless variety accompanies our every moment.  The retreat from pain and pursuit of pleasure that characterizes all conscious life is incorporated into every objet d’art.  The aesthetic imagination is, like our ordinary consciousness, more likely to be directed by irrational motives than by logic, Art can precisely express the contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries everyone experiences but which resist the reductive simplicity of most propositions. 

     In all these ways art delivers the “truth” of human experience far more meaningfully and, indeed, accurately than other modes of discourse.  These very same factors that make human accounts of events significant also differentiate the stories that art tells from those that science relates.  The scientist describes what happens in the laboratory and seeks results that others can replicate, whereas in life every event is experienced differently by each person present and that singularity is as significant as any common ground. 

     Thus art thrives within the limits of subjectivity.  Yet even there its truth is problematic.  From the start it is already at one remove from lived experience.  Rather than trying to reconstruct a photo-realist rendering of memory, the author builds a new one, making aesthetic choices at every word.  Every poem or novel might begin with the words, “This is how someone, sometime, might have thinking; this is what that someone might have seen.”  The reader may then experience, not so much another’s vision of truth as a simulacrum of reality, constructed in imagination, though using, of course, materials derived from the writer’s past.  Using different language, Aristotle described the same contrast when he says poetry is more “true” than history. [4]  

     Artists have no particular grasp on truth other than their skill in putting together what looks to their fellows like a vision frozen in words, sometimes flamboyantly idiosyncratic, sometimes accepted by others who see in it their own humanity in a novel form.  We know nothing but our precious subjectivity and it is there that art makes its stage, there where all that matters most to our species is transacted, there where desire’s imperatives are acknowledged.  In that territory a claim to objective truth seems not so much fraudulent as irrelevant.     

     When Emily Dickinson wrote “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,“ she implied the same superiority of artistic imaginative truth over mere observed facts.  The obliqueness of poetry arises from the techniques that have been found to be effective in infusing a wholly synthetic representation of experience with those subjective elements ordinarily absent from discourse and in this way lending life and a profounder sort of truth to a fantasy.  Like mythology and religion, art is truer than true, yet the artist crafts a creation without access to any knowledge beyond that possessed by others.  The strength of art lies in fact specifically in the fact that a mediated, obstructed, partially invisible truth is in its very deficiencies a human truth; certainty is unavailable to anyone.  The artist embraces this limitation and proceeds to make something beautiful, meaningful, and moving.  Because the artist is “whistling in the dark,” proceeding with no reassuring foundation of verities, that art is poignant and appealing and human and as true as anything can be on the surface of this dark earth.

 

 

1.  See Vergil, Eclogue 9.34 and Ovid Amores 3.9 and a great many other passages. 

2.  Ecclesiastical History IV, 24.  Bede alludes to Galatians 1:1 which notes in the Vulgate that Paul’s authority came “nōn ab hominibus neque per hominem, sed per Jesum Christum, et Deum Patrem.”

3.  Sidney’s emphasis was surely influenced by the fact that his essay was a response to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth (1579) which was provocatively addressed to him.

4.  Generally translated “more philosophical,” the word φιλοσοφώτερον is rendered “more scientific” in in Poetics 1451b by W.H. Fyfe.  Surely what Aristotle meant was simply “truer.”

Scandals of the Romantic Poets

 

     This, like my piece on “The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers,” is meant to be more semi-journalistic and descriptive than scholarly.  This time, though, I did not suppress the endnotes.

 

      Artists today are often expected to be to some extent counter-cultural, displaying bohemian behavior and radical opinions, but this assumption is largely a recent one in the last two hundred years.  In Great Britain and in Europe, writers associated with the Romantic movement adopted a combative attitude toward their own societies, leading to the use of the term, originally military, avant-garde.  [1]  This general characterization of artists as rebels, often compounded of a mixture of reactionary philistine prejudice and accurate observation, though never encompassing all writers and painters, has been critical in the arts since. 

    In their own day the British Romantic poets were accused of every sort of immorality and, though it has no bearing on the evaluation of their writing, there was a good deal of substance to many of the charges against them. [2]  Many did seek to challenge the received ideas of their day, and these views, along with personal irregularities which may occur among all classes (but are perhaps more highlighted among artists) led to their condemnation by the guardians of propriety.  Drug abuse, irreligious views, and political radicalism, as well as lurid sexual irregularities were all alleged of the writers associated with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron.  Without inquiry into why many of the principal poets of the day behaved, at least in youth, in ways that strayed so considerably from the norm, an assemblage of some of the data exploited by their critics looks hardly less sensational than stories from the National Enquirer. 

     In the Romantic era, the non-medical use of psychotropic drugs lacked a good deal of the cultural significance it has since acquired.  Opium and cannabis were not associated with artists; they were not even illegal and were soon to be ubiquitous in the formulation of panaceas.  Then as now, many addicts began with a doctor’s prescription.  Yet semi-recreational use existed as well.  Southey and Coleridge joined in “experiments” at the Pneumatic Institute inhaling nitrous oxide with such prominent scientists as Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, and James Watt. [3]   

     With the conquest of India by Great Britain, opium became widely available and closely followed alcohol as the chief active ingredient of patent medicines.  Though consumed throughout English society, the medicinal preparation called laudanum was popular among the poets to such an extent that a number of books have focused on their use. [4]  Coleridge attributed “Kubla Khan” to an opium dream, and the poet’s lifelong use of the drug and his attempts to control, if not to cease, his consumption are documented in letters and memoirs.  Even more notorious was his friend, the essayist Thomas De Quincy, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was a sensation in 1821.  Shelley took to carrying laudanum on his person to take against anxiety.  Crabbe, Jane Austen’s favorite poet and admired in his day by Byron and Scott, took opium for forty years.  Keats’ use of the drug is certain, but his degree of use is not. 

     Scholars continue to debate to what extent opium use influenced poetry.  Though opium’s effects are primarily soporific, many writers reported psychedelic effects on sensation and imagination, perhaps using the drug to justify flights of fancy and sublimity they would have experienced in any event.  Very like the drug users among the Beats, the Romantics drug use both to an expansion of vision and to a view of the artist as transgressive.  Whereas most earlier writers had striven either to cultivate connections with the power structure in the interests of patronage or, by the eighteenth century, to appeal to a bourgeois readership, this group considered themselves a counter-culture, and the subjective heavens and hells of opiate use doubtless intensified their belief in the primacy of the imagination. 

     Though opium consumption was no crime, admitting to unorthodox religious views not only attracted the strongest social opprobrium but was illegal as well. [5]  Shelley was expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity  of Atheism. [6]  He developed a sort of pantheism, claiming that “the universe is God” and arguing that Deism was reasonable and Christianity supported only by emotion.  He must “war against [the Christian god] for the sake of truth.” [7]  Wordsworth in his early work sounds very like a pantheist and Coleridge described him approvingly as “at least” “a semi-atheist,” [8] though both came to defend the Established Church later in life. 

     Coleridge himself had become a free-thinker upon reading Voltaire as a schoolboy, before slowly drifting back through Unitarianism to orthodoxy.   Often labeled an atheist, Byron throughout his life expressed an ambivalence about Christianity.  In his preface to his Vision of Judgement, an encomium praising George III, Southey (who had been in political and religious questions as radical as other Romantics) attacks the “Satanic school” of poets as “men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve.”  [9]  Conservative forces claimed that Byron’s clubfoot indicated his diabolism. [10]  In his youth Southey had been known as an atheist, though he was always willing to acknowledge “an intelligent first cause.” [11]  To the public the poets’ behavior considered along with such literary projections as Byron’s Manfred and Cain and Shelley’s Prometheus to leave little doubt that the whole group were rebels against heaven. 
     In politics virtually all the Romantics were originally supporters of the French Revolution, a view which made them radicals in their day.  Wordsworth made two trips to revolutionary France where he attended meetings of the Jacobin Club and the National Assembly and composed his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” who had criticized the revolutionary regime.  He rapidly turned conservative in politics as well as religion, by 1818 advocating what he called a “softened feudalism” [12]

     Shelley, on the other hand, maintained a consistently revolutionary view.  His “Song to the Men of England” could hardly be plainer:

 

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robes ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears.

 

And there is perhaps no more bitter line of political poetry in English literature that the first of Shelley’s “England in 1819” which calls George III “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King,”  The poem concludes with a hopeful prospect of a glorious Phantom” which “may burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”  Indeed Marx’s daughter was proud to claim him as a socialist.  [13] 

     Likewise supporters of France, Coleridge and Southey planned an egalitarian commune in America, to be governed by the principles of "pantisocracy," meaning rule by all and “aspheterism” or the collective ownership of all property.  Unsurprisingly, the project was never far advanced.   The two collaborated on The Fall of Robespierre commenting on the events in France.  In 1796 Coleridge published a short-lived newspaper The Watchman in Bristol which argued for the universal suffrage and the abolition of the slave trade.

     Leigh Hunt, though less read now than his friends Keats and Shelley, was a political influence on the Romantic circle.  In a series of journals beginning with The Examiner he published articles critical of the British government and, in particular, of the Prince Regent, later George IV.  Charles Lamb’s “The Triumph of the Whale” ridiculed the “Prince of Whale’s” corpulence and dissipation.  Hunt’s own piece “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day” (with epigrams by Lamb) in which the prince is denounced as “a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity." [14]  This language was sufficient to get Hunt and his brother (the printer) arrested for libel.  Though the Hunts had before been charged with libel, English juries had refused to convict them.  This time, however, the two were found guiltyand sentenced to two years in prison.  Something of a cause célèbre, Hunt took advantage of the corrupt practices of the day to make his accommodations in Surrey County Gaol a comfortable two-room private suite in the infirmary.  There he decorated his living space, concealing the bars behind Venetian blinds, papering the walls with floral prints, painting the ceiling with a cloudy sky, and importing flowers, books, and a piano, as well as comfortable couches.  According to Lamb, “there was no other such room, except in fairy tale.”  Attended by a servant, he there received a stream of visitors including Lamb, Byron and Thomas Moore. [15]  After he had served his term, when he went to Italy at Shelley’s invitation, the motive was in part to publish ta political paper not subject to British censorship. 

     It is a measure of the degree to which ideas of radical reform permeated the poetic scene of the day that even Keats, far less an activist partisan than others, left nevertheless no question of what side he was on in the contradiction between the wealthy and the working class.  His sonnet “Written On The Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison” attracted an attack from Blackwood’s Magazine.  Perhaps the best statement of his political views is contained in a long letter from September 1819 in which he laments that the French Revolution stimulated a reaction which “spread a horrid superstition against all inovation and improvement – The present struggle in England of the people is to destroy this superstition. What has rous’d them to do it is their distresses – Perpaps on this account the pres’ent distresses of this nation are a fortunate thing – tho so horrid in the[i]r experience.”  To Keats “This is no contest beetween whig and tory – but between right and wrong.” [16]  The primary thrust of the aggressive ridicule of Keats in the conservative journals was his class origin.  The term “the Cockney school” [17] focused with unashamed class prejudice on the “plebian origins and education” of Keats and others.

     Byron defended the Luddites in the House of Lords where he had associated himself closely with radical reform.  For instance, in a stirring speech in 1812 he declared that Luddite demonstrators dismissed as a mob were in fact nothing but the country’s working people.

 

it is the mob that labour in your fields and in your houses – that man your navy and recruit your army – that have enabled you to defy all the world and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob but not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.   [18]

 

 

Byron wrote for the radical British publication The Liberal and joined a secret society of Italian nationalists, and ultimately, of course, he died in service to what might be called an anti-colonial struggle. 

     While drug use and transgressive religious and political beliefs might offend many Britons, they surely took an even greater interest in the writers’ sexual lives.  Wordsworth had had a child with Annette Vallon in revolutionary France, and others of the Romantics had turbulent personal lives, but the real scandals concerned Shelley and Byron, who were accused of immorality based on behavior that, even today, would be condemned by most. [19] 

     Shelley had said of marriage in Queen Mab of marriage that "a system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness.”  Still, he eloped and married Harriet Westbrook, daughter of the owner of a thriving coffee house and schoolmate of his younger sister, in 1811 just after her sixteenth and his nineteenth birthdays.  Though they had two children, they had all but separated by the summer of 1814, when he eloped once more with Mary Godwin, herself sixteen at the time.  Her illegitimate step-sister Claire Clairmont accompanied them to Europe and remained with the ménage becoming Byron’s lover and mother of his child Allegra. 

     The complexities of life among these free-thinkers is suggested by the fact that some biographers think that, while socializing with Godwin’s family, Shelley had also been a lover of Fanny Imlay,  (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American businessman) in 1814.  She committed suicide two years later as did Harriet Shelley, who was five months pregnant (there is debate about who the father may have been).  Meanwhile, Harriet’s sister Eliza had moved in with the couple and Shelley had conceived a passion (apparently unconsummated) for Elizabeth Hitchener, an unmarried schoolteacher, and suggested that she join the household, sharing all property. [20]  T. J. Hogg, the co-publisher with Shelley of The Necessity of Atheism, flirted with Harriet only -for Shelley to assure him he could not be jealous.  Later, he may well have encouraged Hogg and Mary to sleep together. [21]  During Shelley’s residence abroad, he fathered a child in Naples (falsely claiming when registering the birth that his wife was the mother).  He was involved as well in romantic attachments with Jane Williams, who lived with her lover in the same building as the Shelleys, as well as Sophia Stacey, who was staying at the same pension in Italy, and Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, teen-age daughter of the governor of Pisa and the muse of Epipsychidion.

     If providing even a brief summary of Shelley’s erotic involvements is difficult, to do the same for Lord Byron is impossible.  He was constantly pursuing both men and women.  His gay liaisons began the Trinity College choirboy John Edleston during his college days, and included his servant William Fletcher who attended Byron from 1804 until his death.  When he traveled to Greece, he felt much freer about homoerotic relationships and took numerous lovers including the fourteen-year-old Nicolas Giraud.  He indefatigably pursued his teenaged Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, and, finding him uncooperative, managed to locate many who were more complaisant, reporting to his gay friends in England that he had managed over two hundred "pl and opt Cs,” a code for sexual indulgence derived from the phrase "coitum plenum et optabilem" in Petronius's Satyricon.

     He had as well an extraordinary number of heterosexual affairs, becoming perhaps the leading sex symbol of his time.  Most notoriously, he had an affair for years with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and very likely had a child with her.  In his “Epistle to Augusta” he imagines the joy of “a home with thee” and declares sentimentally, “The tie which bound the first endures the last!”

     In the interest of both cash and respectability he married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, but, following the birth of their daughter Ada the following December, she found his constant philandering (during this period he was linked to actress Charlotte Mardyn and Lady Caroline Lamb among many others) and she concluded that she could not live with him and sued for divorce. 

     The combination of his infamy and his debts caused him to go abroad in April 1816.  Though his reputation for sexual misdeeds was known to all, he was doubtless fleeing exposure for his gay lovers.   He was attacked in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in an article describing him as diabolical.  “It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, -having drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs, — were resolved to show us that he is no longer a human being even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend, laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed.”  As a result, Byron complains "I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure my most intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under apprehension of violence from the people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage." [22]  In Europe he cultivated an affair with a married woman Marianna Segati in whose house he was staying, then with another married woman, Margarita Cogni.  When he broke up with this last lover, she committed suicide.  He turned then to the Countess Teresa Guiccioli with whom he lived for several years.  At the time of his death he was lavishly patronizing a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl. 

     So the bill of particulars one wishing to condemn the Romantic poets might compile is varied, lengthy, and, in large part, well-substantiated.  Since then the actions of the poètes maudits, the Lost Generation, denizens of Greenwich Village, and the Beats have likewise been condemned.  Whatever the ethical lapses in the lives of the poets in any age, their behavior can have no relation to the evaluation of their work.  As much as the perceived contrast in beliefs and lifestyles between unconventional artists and those exemplifying the status quo may reveal about the social codes of their times and our own, such data have nothing to do with the reason we remember these men at all: their work.  In the evaluation of art terms such as immorality or blasphemy, sedition or dissipation can carry no weight.

     Yet the partial displacement of the arts from the central power structures of society has made a difference in both themes and styles.  It may be that a lineage of creative types stretching back to archaic semi-psychotic shamans, through wandering Old English scops like Widsith, gypsy goliards, minstrels and showpeople has long tended to act and think in somewhat more independent fashion than the local masters who, for all their wealth, were obliged to accept the assumptions of their time.  The bourgeois may have envied as well as condemned the free-thinker and free-liver, but it was not until the time of the Romantics that it came to be expected that artists often live by different rules than others. 

.

 

 

1.  The term was first used to describe art by was first used in the cultural sphere in 1825 by the Saint Simonian mathematician Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel.”

2.  Similar claims have been made concerning virtually every avant-garde movement since, often, as in the originating example, with some reason.  The attacks on Keats and Hunt focused more on their supposed “plebeian origin and education” to quote the letter from Z. (John Gibson Lockhart) in Blackwood’s for May 1818 now so8und thoroughly out of date.

3.  Laughing gas remained a subject of interest.  In the late nineteenth century William James and his associates used it in an attempt to experience mystical states.  See lectures XVI and XVIOI of Varieties of Religious Experience (1901).  James had earlier written an anonymous article on “The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy” in The Atlantic Monthly as well as an 1898 piece in the Psychological Review on “Consciousness Under Nitrous Oxide.”

4. The classic study is still M. H. Abrams The Milk of Paradise (1971), but see also the earlier Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter (1968) and Elizabeth Schneider’s Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan (1983).  Nicholas Roe claims in his John Keats: A New Life (2012) that Keats, too, was a regular user. 

5.  Britain’s blasphemy laws were not abolished until 2008 in England and Wales and 2021 in Scotland.  A similar law remains in effect in Northern Ireland.  The last conviction in England in 1977 involved a gay publication so doubtless homophobia played a role in that case.

6.  In  1834 a proposal to allow attendance by Dissenters was defeated in Parliament.  Until 1854 in order to matriculate at Oxford a student needed to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglican faith.  In Cambridge the requirement lasted two years further and only in 1871 were non-Anglicans allowed to teach in those institutions. 

7.  Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, June 20, 1822.

8.  Letter from Coleridge to John Thelwall May 13, 1796.

9.  Byron was then inspired to write his own Vision of Judgment in response and in his own preface he aggressively denounces Southey for rushing in “where he had no business” and accusing him of being a traitor to the progressive views he had once held. 

10.  One example is The Dorchester Guide; or, a house that Jack Built (1819), a satirical pamphlet of 1819.  The anonymous publication warns that “the mind is corrupted” by Byron’s “sweet and harmonious” poetry and says his real identity is revealed to those who “look at his feet,” a reference to his club-foot, for proof of his association with the devil.

11.  Letter of Robert Southey to John Prior Estlin, 9 April 1797.

12.  See his “Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland.”  He had accepted the patronage of Lord Lonsdale since 1813.

13.  Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, “Shelley and Socialism,” To-Day, April 1888.

14.  The Examiner, 22 March 1812.

15.  See Leigh Hunt, Autobiography.

16.  To George & Georgiana Keats, September 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 1819.

17.  The term, referring primarily to Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt, originated in a series of eight hostile reviews in Blackwood's Magazine in 1817 and 1818.

18.  George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron including the suppressed poems complete in one volume (Paris, A. and W. Galignani, 1828), p. 555.

19.  While far greater latitude in lifestyle had been accepted through the twentieth century, the last few decades have seen a renewed wave of condemnation of certain artists and politicians on the basis of what is deemed by their critics unacceptable sexual behavior.

20.  Bieri, James (2008). Percy Bysshe Shelley: a biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 170, 193–5

21.  Richard Holmes, Shelley, the Pursuit (London:1974), pp. 391, 594, 678.

22.  “Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,”  Blackwood’s, August 1819.  The response was unpublished until John Murray’s 1833 edition of The Works of Lord Byron.

 

The Primacy of Poetry in Sidney’s Defence

     The crisis in the prestige of poetry that occasioned Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie [1] is far more evident in contemporary society, Timely though his theme may be, his concept of poetry is an obstacle for modern readers’ sympathetic reception of his essay. To him a part of the grandeur of poetry is that the word may be stretched to embrace all work of imagination. His emphasis on art’s role in fostering morality, quite out-of-place for many modern readers, further raises the barrier. Though the author adopted the pose, fashionable in his day, of pitying “the evill luck” that might bring a reader “to read this inck-wasting toy of mine,” his essay contains an original and persuasive theory of verbal art featuring a sophisticated understanding of mimesis that goes beyond the ideas inherited from Plato and Aristotle to anticipate elements of semiotic theory.
     Sidney’s essay opens with a lament for the decline in poetry’s position. “Poetrie,” he complains “from almost the highest estimation of learning, is falne to be the laughing stocke of children.” Today poetry is generally ignored. Sidney’s own practice indicates that in his day, poetry retained sufficient cachet to be a required skill for courtiers, whereas today poetry has fallen further yet to the extent that competence in the art, even as a consumer and even among the educated, is rare today. [2] A poet-politician would in modern American society be a freak.
     Sidney describes accurately the paramount position of poetry in traditional societies. For him the ancient Greeks provide the most convincing evidence. He says that they considered poetry “above all names of learning.” In part this prestige is associated with the idea of poetic inspiration and poets’ “prophetic” role, but it also assumes an obsolete broad definition of poetry. To Sidney and to the ancients, poetry could mean all imaginative intellectual work, including not only prose works and philosophy but science as well. From poetry, he says, “other learnings have taken their beginnings.” Thus for him, not only is Homer a poet, so are Heliodorus the author of a prose romance, Herodotus the historian, and Manilius the astronomer.
     Sidney, however, distinguishes poetry from other forms of knowledge which have external objects, claiming that poetry is “directed to the highest end of the mistress-knowledge, by the Greeks called archetektonikē.” For Aristotle the coordinating “master art” is politics, because it orders the affairs of humans with artful design setting out social organization and ethical imperatives with the aim of the good of all. [3] Sidney, however, names the poet as “moderator” of “the school of learning.”
     Thus poetry holds the executive function overseeing all sorts of learning of which “the finall end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate soules made worse by their clay-lodgings, can be capable of.” To Sidney both producing and consuming intellectual and artistic work make a person at once more human and more divine, more excellent in general, and certainly more moral.
     An authoritative reference work quotes Northrup Frye’s devastating judgement on literature’s ethical value. “Any attempt to align [art] with morality, otherwise called bowdlerizing, is intolerably vulgar” [4] though the same source calls the relevance of ethics to literary criticism the issue “with the most sustained written tradition” in all of literary history. [5] Sidney would have thought he was expressing a simple and generally accepted commonplace when he defined poetry by moral parameters, saying “that faining notable images of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delightfull teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a Poet by.”
     Indeed, the encouragement of morality can sound like the principal role of art.


“For these indeed do meerly make to imitate, and imitate both to delight & teach, and delight to move men to take that goodnesse in hand, which without delight they would flie as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodnesse whereunto they are moved: which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them.”


     The proposition that literature fosters good behavior is not only uncongenial to modern critical thinking in theory; it is hardly supported by the irregular reputations of not a few poets or the simmering gossip in certain university English departments. [6]
     Sidney’s lofty principles were in part partisan, of course. He was writing in reply to Stephen Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse. Yet he seems to undercut his own claims about poetry’s ennobling effects with the opening in which he cites Pugliano‘s verbal praise of horsemanship as his model. [7] This inspiration may seem to trivialize poetry, reducing it to the status of a long list of other courtly accomplishments, but such a judgement is anachronistically anti-feudal. While the association seems to moderns to put poetry on a par with ruffled collars and the like, to Sidney (under the tutelage of Castiglione) the aristocrat sought to exemplify genuine excellence in every way. Just as a Victorian author implies a socio-aesthetic standard in calling ethical behavior “gentlemanly,” or, more simply, “manly,” to an Elizabethan high birth was associated with high-mindedness.
     Poetry is not, however, for Sidney purely didactic, a “medicine of cherries” in his phrase. Ironically, in part due to his being borne aloft by his Renaissance neo-Platonism, Sidney overcame the reductive identification of art with imitation that led Plato to belittle poetry as “an imitation of an imitation.” Declaring “Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” Sidney discards any simple notion of mimesis, suggesting a more sophisticated semiosis, a refracted reality centered in the poet’s imagination which is, in fact, distinct from the world itself though always linked to it.
     In this way he finds Xenophon’s literary picture of Cyrus, a historical figure, while not “wholly imaginative” to be “another nature,” an original creation resembling divine creation. Deviations from perceived reality are no deficiency but rather poetry’s particular glory. Because of such non-imitative elements, the artist’s work is enabled to be “either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature.” Escaping “the narrow warrant of her [Nature’s] gifts,” the poet is capable of “freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.”
     For Sidney, though, this increase in verbal power comes not from the generalizing of all Cyruses into a Platonic form of Cyrus, but in particularity of the artist’s design. “Let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger, than finding in the schoolmen his genus and difference.”
     While not contradicting the mimetic principle he inherited, Sidney is careful to expand it for his own analysis. “Poesie therefore, is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speake Metaphorically.” Immediately after affirming his authority, he introduces new terms that suggest his view of poetry conceived in the poet’s imagination. A “re-presentation” goes beyond a “presentation,” a “counterfeit” is etymologically, something made “in opposition” to a model, and, most significantly, “to speake Metaphorically” is quite different from speaking literally. This non-imitative shift moves the poet’s image from realism to something greater. For Sidney, poetry is man’s distinctive capacity, the activity in which he displays his divinity more than in any other.
     The value of metaphor is that it can offer rich and precise objective correlatives for experiences, conveying them with far more information than other forms of discourse. One way in which poetry is distinguished from other forms of discourse is by its affective component. Poets are “Fathers in learning” generally, but they are alone in possessing “hart-ravishing knowledge.” While non-aesthetic texts usually allow scant expression of emotion, poetry often foregrounds feelings, and to Sidney, “moving is of a higher degree than teaching.”
     Sidney rejoins Aristotle in asserting poetry’s privilege over history, imagination over facts, metaphorical meaning over literal. The potential of poetry arises in the first place from the ability of the author to construct a work that reflects, not the appearance of things, but their meaning, their significance, including the associated emotions. This total picture untethered to observed facts corresponds to the true greater reality of human experience which includes not only subtle shades of insight that might escape the gross terms of literalism, but also allows the inclusion of self-reflection, ambivalence, contradiction, tension, and mystery as well as that unique variety of pleasure called beauty.




1. So-called in Posonby’s authorized first edition (1595). It had been titled An Apologie for Poetrie in Olney’s earlier printing. While I shall use the title Sidney apparently preferred, I recognize the advantage of Olney’s title because of its distinction from Shelley’s equally celebrated A Defence of Poetry.

2. Even in academic departments the study of relatively recent fiction has, to a unprecedented extent, displaced poetry.

3. Nicomachean Ethics I.2.

4. Frye was, of course, a devout Christian. Note how even his denunciation of morality’s claims on art is cast in aesthetic terms. The comment occurs in Fearful Symmetry, p. 121 in the Collected Works edition.

5. “Ethics and Criticism” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

6. It is likely true that literary critics and scholars are more righteous in that they are inclined to the left politically, but this is not likely due to their specific training, but rather is characteristic of all educated people.

7. Sidney’s Defence is itself cast in the most classical form of an oration. A detailed description of his debt to Quintilian and Cicero appeared in Kenneth O. Myrick’s Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. A more recent study is John Webster’s “Oration and Method in Sidney's ‘Apology’: A Contemporary's Account,” Modern Philology 79.1 (Aug., 1981), 1-15.

Thomas Love Peacock and the End of Poetry

     Thomas Love Peacock’s satiric essay “The Four Ages of Poetry” is far less well-known than the essay it inspired in response, Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry.” While the popular disparity is adequately explained by the second author’s far greater eminence, it is also true that Peacock’s ideas have little currency today while the exalted notions of the poet’s role set forth by Shelley remain widely accepted. The first appeal of the text to a contemporary reader is likely Peacock’s acerbic wit; he refers, for instance, to the Lake poets as an “egregious confraternity of rhymesters” and to Wordsworth in particular as “a morbid dreamer.” [1] 

      The essay like the conversations in Peacock’s entertaining romans à clef, can scarcely be taken at face value [2]. Indeed, one of the principles set forth in the essay is that poetry, which is to say, imaginative writing in general, is designed only to entertain and not to embody truth. Nonetheless, the radical objections Peacock makes are not peculiar to him or to his age, but rather are similar to points made by earlier critics. To cite only two examples, Plato condemned poetry in the Republic as an inadequate imitation of reality and as an exciter of unruly and uncontrollable passions that weakens rationality, and Bacon considered poetry to be merely “a dream of learning,” a sort of “feigned history” without a role in the advancement of knowledge. A response (reasoned, perhaps, as well as passionate) is therefore appropriate to the essay, though the critic of Peacock the critic will find himself seriously answering claims which to the writer may have been primarily facilitators of a most enviable wit.
     Peacock maintains that poetry has value as entertainment only, lacking any capacity for expressing truth. Its prestige in the past was, he argues, due to the primitive state of more effective forms of investigation by the likes of “mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists.” From a point of view shaped by eighteenth century rationalism, he likewise condemns the aesthetic emphasis on emotions and pleasure.
     Unsympathetic as the contemporary reader may be to these conclusions, certain of Peacock’s points are compelling. The fact is that Peacock’s concluding claim that poetry’s downward slip is bound to continue, its weaknesses making Parnassus appear “far beneath” the eminence occupied by scientific, factual, and technological thinkers, might seem to have been substantially confirmed. No one could deny that poetry has been far further marginalized in the nearly two hundred years since the essay appeared in the Literary Miscellany. [3]
     In addition, despite the limited information available in Peacock’s day about ancient (and modern oral) poetry, his survey of the history of poetry is in part consistent with more recent researches. The trajectory with which he predicts poetry’s diminished future arises from his accurate observation of its central role in earlier ages, though here his raillery begins to interfere with his facts. He notes that poets had been in archaic times “not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators” engaged in “delivering their oracles ex cathedra, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity.” His satiric vein intrudes to the detriment of his argument when he claims that the result of the poets’ “reputation of inspiration” is their “faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.” Though “the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age,” their “knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths.”
     His selective view is apparent in his characterization of “iron age” poetry as wholly sycophantic, serving primarily “to disseminate the fame of [a chieftains’] achievements and the extent of his possessions.” He sounds very nearly like a vulgar Marxist before the time of Marx when he states categorically, “This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.” According to Peacock this was a period of undisguised selfishness and raw power in which poets serve to gratify the egos of the strong, their business being “to disseminate the fame of [the local nobleman’s] achievements and the extent of his possessions.”
     Here he mistakes the part for the whole more than promulgating outright error. Surely the professional role of the early poet -shaman-priest-legislator cannot be justifiably reduced to that of a pure mountebank, the epithet Peacock uses for poets. If the intellectual leadership of the species had been an utter humbug, the scientific progress Peacock admired could never have occurred. He writes in the same vein that primitive religion, apart from serving the vanity of rulers, was nothing but “ignorance and fear.” a more balanced view of the facts would recognize that oral poetry engages many themes other than praise of the ruling house, and that early religion embodies considerable subtle symbolic figuration of the order of the world having little to do with ruling class propaganda.
     It is certainly true that one function of literature is to confirm received ideas, to reassure readers of what they have always thought was true. A portion of this reinforcement of socially accepted views is undoubtedly to confirm the nobility and excellence of the powers that be, and thus to encourage peace and social order. However, only a portion of art is conservative in this sense. Poetry may also cause its consumers to conceive new ideas, to question assumptions, and to perceive contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries. Some works tend more toward the one end of this spectrum; some toward another, but in neglecting the critical potential of poetry, Peacock is guilty of distortion. (For him, this may be no error, but merely the set-up of a clever line. He notes that the bards of old times were always pleased to celebrate the strength of their lord, “being first duly inspired by that of his liquor.”)
     In any event he considers poetry an inappropriate tool for investigating reality. Poets such as Wordsworth who “had retreated from the world for the express purpose of seeing nature as she was” instead can see only what “she was not,” “a sort of fairy- land which they peopled with mysticisms and chimaeras.” In his enlightened modern times, Peacock confidently declares, “with the progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction,” making poetry obsolete.
     Apart from complaining that poetry cannot lead to truth, Peacock objects as well to its association with pleasure and emotion. To him the beauty of poetry’s melody is for the naïve and simple, “pleasant to the ears of uncultured men, who are easily caught by sound.” He dismisses the harmony of metrical patterns as nothing but “language on the rack of Procrustes.” The reader realizes that in Peacock’s semi-utilitarian view, all pleasure is necessarily trivial and child-like.
     Similarly, to judge by this essay emotion for Peacock amounts to little more than “puling sentimentality.” He ridicules “sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head.” Far from praising the cultivated sensibility of the poet’s audience, he considers them vulgar, “that much larger portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to any thing beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, and exalted.” They are nothing but “a multitude of listless idlers, yawning for amusement, and gaping for novelty.”
     Overstated (and amusing) as this may be, it is misleading as well in this context. All organisms seek to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; the principle is fundamental to our species no less than to other animals. Further the world, even in modern times, is hardly as clear and simple as Peacock’s argument would imply. However clever our rationalizations may be, we are governed by emotion and by irrational motives, and we are beset by ambiguities, contradictions, and insoluble mysteries, especially when contemplating the chief concerns of our lives: love, death, and the divine. These are specifically the areas in which factual, “scientific” discourse fails, and poetic discourse excels. What Peacock repeatedly calls “chimaeras” is in fact the daily stuff of our consciousness.
     Toward the end of his piece, almost like a punch line, Peacock says that, as so many excellent poems are already in existence, no more need be written. But this provocative claim is undercut by the fact that its author has seen fit to compose a highly literary essay using all the devices of rhetoric to present it. In very much the same manner as a lyric or a short story, Peacock is inviting his readers to imagine, “What if one were to say this . . .?” If the result is Bacon would call “feigned history” few would wish to substitute unimaginative prose, however transparent. The significant objects of contemplation are never emptied out by analysis; there is always a further word to be added. There is no end of poems and there is no end of essays.




1. The entire passage following is worthy of quotation.
“”While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruizes for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek Islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic. Mr. Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons; and Mr. Coleridge, to the valuable information acquired from similar sources, superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of German metaphysics, and favours the world with visions in verse, in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, Jeremy Taylor, and Emanuel Kant, are harmonized into a delicious poetical compound. Mr. Moore presents us with a Persian, and Mr. Campbell with a Pennsylvanian tale, both formed on the same principle as Mr. Southey's epics, by extracting from a perfunctory and desultory perusal of a collection of voyages and travels, all that useful investigation would not seek for and that common sense would reject.”

2. Shelley wrote to Peacock on March 21, 1821, calling his own essay “an antidote” to Peacock’s, but minimizing their differences, saying “ You will see that I have taken a more general view of what poetry is than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions, without considering your own touched.” It has been suggested, for instance by P. M. Yarker in the introduction to the Everyman edition of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, that Peacock conceived the “Four Ages” intentionally playing straight man to Shelley’s vatic poet.

3. In this twenty-first century, it seems that any politician’s appeal for support for schools must insist that education is centered in what is today called the STEM curriculum. Not poetry alone, but the very ideal of a liberal education has withered.

Every Reader’s Shelley

This is the first of a series of essays meant to engage non-specialists, indeed, non-English majors, with the work of important poets. In spite of my own inclination toward the abstruse I mean to limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography. I vow to avoid tempting byways and to include no footnotes whatsoever.


     Shelley was a poetic bad boy, sharing something of the notoriety of latter day rock and rollers. Denounced, often with good grounds, for subversive and irreligious opinions and for practicing an immoral lifestyle to match, Shelley was a counter-cultural campaigner since his youthful expulsion from Oxford for his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. He attacked monarchy, meat-eating, and pollution, and his active support for Irish independence brought him to the attention of royal investigators. He called for sexual freedom and acted on his convictions. Yet in his work this hostility toward much of what the world believes is overwhelmed by the enthusiastic afflatus of his neo-Platonism, capable of carrying readers aloft to dizzying heights. When he is not ecstatic, however, he can be subject to self-pity as in the exclamation “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” Such language set an influential pattern for histrionic poetry whose continuing sway is evident in coffee house readings yet today.
     Still “Ode to the West Wind,” the poem in which these lines appear, is powerful indeed, addressing the wind as a deity, both “Destroyer and Preserver.” Rather than viewing the autumn foliage as merely picturesque, like “leaf-peepers” who peer out the windows of New England tour buses, Shelley sees instead “pestilence-stricken multitudes.” As the lines tumble over each other in expert terza rima, he welcomes the tumultuous change of season as a Romantic visionary, not with fear or an unrealistic desire to halt time, but with exhilarated exultation, as a dazzling display of energy, awesome as a cataract, grand as a rugged peak, inspiring uneasy awe.
     He then enlarges his view from the leaves themselves to storms, violent yet surpassingly beautiful, “angels of rain and lightning, “bright hair uplifted from the head/Of some fierce Mænad.” The past year is being most grandly buried in a “vaulted” and “vast sepulcher,” which inspires the poet’s awe. He imagines the wind sweeping over the ancient resort of Baiæ where with the almost neurasthenic sensibility he cultivated, he says the flowers are "so sweet, the sense faints picturing them.” (One might imagine the secondary school scenes the young poet endured in which -- while gaining an excellent classical education -- he suffered the brutality of the British public school system with corporal punishment from the faculty and “fagging” by older students, in his case intensified into daily bullying his school-mates called “Shelley-bashing.”)
     Identifying with the wind as one inherently “tameless, and swift, and proud,” the poet feels “chain'd and bow'd” by “a heavy weight of hours” to the point that he can only envy the uncontained force of nature. His neo-Platonic impetus toward the ideal abstract, toward a sort of ill-defined yet numinous impersonal divinity is marked by his use of that ugly word he so favored “skiey.” Like an ancient invocation, the poem ends with his prayer to the wind to be his spirit as well. Magical incantation as well as prayer, serving not only a mystical longing but poetic ambition as well, he asks that his words be the cause of “a new birth,” prophetic “ashes and sparks” “to quicken” the world in the continuing cosmic cycle.
     Shelley’s radicalism is foregrounded in “England in 1819,” surely one of the fiercest sonnets ever composed. What can be said after the unforgettable first line: “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King”? George III, by this time in his eighties and eight years into the regency of his reasonably sane yet irresponsible son, serves as an excellent, if cruel, image for the superannuated feudal system. To Shelley aristocrats are parasites, “leeches” as the poem says, consuming the people’s blood. Yet the poem ends, as does the Ode to the West Wind” with a prophetic expectation of an apocalypse to come, bringing out of “graves” a new and more enlightened order of society. Ferment was certainly in the air. Eighteen-nineteen was the year of the Peterloo Massacre in which the cavalry charged a demonstration of sixty to eighty thousand citizens who had gathered in Manchester to demand some reform in the direction of universal suffrage. The current assumption that most poets, artists, and intellectuals are likely to take a radical position dates from the period of Romantics like Shelley and, indeed, to my mind, there is far too contemporary a sound to his denunciation of the ruling class. The leaders are out of touch; the people are betrayed and suffer from want; the army is an instrument of oppression; the church itself “Christless, Godless.” Blake had expressed a similar protest in his “London” in 1794.
     “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni” is a rather grand articulation of Shelley’s views on nature, poetry, and the divine. With Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads clearly in mind, he described the poem as having come to him “under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe: and as an undisciplined Overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang." To the poet the river Arve which begins mysteriously deep in the high peaks and then rolls ever stronger downward resembles his own ever-changing consciousness through which flows “the everlasting universe of things.”
     In conscious contrast to Coleridge whose "Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” in which the same view inspires “prayer” and “worship of “the Invisible alone,” and which concludes "Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God,” to Shelley the spectacle is unsettling. He uses adjectives like “wandering,” “unfathomable,” “hideous,” “rude,” and “awful.” It is populated by predators like wolves and eagles, yet it induces a “trance sublime and strange.” The closest approach to resolution is his claim that “Poesy” is a “witch” who seeks in these “wild thoughts” some “ghost” of truth.
Human senses mediate reality such that even direct experience can provide only a phantasmagoria of phenomena, “many-colored, many-voicéd” (the reader recalls the characterization in “Adonais” of life as “a dome of many-coloured glass,/ [which] Stains the white radiance of Eternity). The glacier and the river suggest some grand Truth. Magnificent though they are, their significance arrives only with the engaged human eye of the observer.


The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?


     Shelley shaped generations of poetry since his day with his philosophic flights to the sublime, his passion for social justice, and his self-dramatizing poses. In his influential “Defence of Poetry” he elaborates on Aristotle with his claim that the poet records “actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.” If Shelley lacks the sweet concreteness of Keats, the plain language of Wordsworth, and the wit of Byron, he provides instead ample passion, verbal dexterity and lofty themes to engage virtually all readers.