The Human Minds Imaginings

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

In his seminal text, The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson refers to the period 1815 to 1819 as ‘the heroic age of popular radicalism’ and interprets these levels of heightened reformism as an indication that Britain was poised on the brink of revolution. Given this context of radicalism, it is hardly surprising that many critics have observed highly sophisticated political visions within Shelley’s poetry, dismissing Arnold’s portrayal of Shelley as ‘a beautiful & ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’ as inaccurate. However, this distinct disparity between critical interpretations is actually highly significant in revealing a fundamental tension within Shelley’s poetry, as the personas of idealist and political activist co-exist, and have both been overstated. This underlying tension is discernible throughout Shelley’s poetry and arises from the internal conflict between a desire to instigate reform by capitalising on an atmosphere of radicalism, and an acceptance that language is limited in its capabilities to produce such an effect. However, Dowden portrays Shelley as ‘the representative of the Revolution in its pure ideal’ not despite this tension, but because of it. This is because Shelley’s mastery of the poetic form simultaneously allowed for both a synthesis of numerous ideas and a conscious incompleteness, which mirrored perfectly a reform movement which lacked unity of method or direction.

Undoubtedly, Shelley was a highly sophisticated political thinker whose mastery of language allowed for lucid expression of complex ideas; however, the extent to which these ideas were ‘radical’- when defined as relating to originality and innovation – is debateable. Indeed, in The Young Shelley Cameron is right to emphasize the significance of the ‘radical framework’ under which Shelley developed his ideas, as concepts originating in the works of political thinkers such as Godwin, Paine, and Bentham are evident in much of Shelley’s writing. For example, Shelley’s pamphlet ‘A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote’, published in 1817 under the alias of the Hermit of Marlow, cemented his position within a group of radical writers who responded to and provoked one another’s publications within radical journals such as Wooler’s ‘Black Dwarf’ and Cobbett’s ‘Political Register’. Whilst the ‘Black Dwarf’ reached a relatively large reported circulation of 12,000 copies per week in 1819, it is significant that this audience accounted for less than 0. 1 per cent of the population. Thus Shelley’s originality arises from his acknowledgment of the necessity to reach a wider audience, as seen by the translation of these political ideas into his poetry. Scrivener describes this as a process of ‘rhetoric duplicity’, a direct lifting of concepts from more advanced political thinkers. Similarly, Cameron cites Burdett’s open letter on Peterloo as a source for ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, and certainly Burdett’s statement: ‘Can such things be and pass us by like a summer's cloud, unheeded?’ closely mirrors the concepts in the phrase ‘A rushing light of clouds and splendour,/ A sense awakening and yet tender/ Was heard and felt’ and even reveals a direct lifting of imagery. However, to present Shelley as a mere duplicator is a gross oversimplification and fails to acknowledge the processes of expansion and alteration which occurred. For example, Shelley’s phrase the ‘Ghost of Gold’ could allude to Cobbett’s criticisms in the essay ‘Paper against Gold’; however, Shelley was himself sensitive to paper money as a cause of inflation, with prices doubling between 1790 and 1815. Indeed, whilst Cobbett advocated lowering the interest paid on the national debt, Shelley’s words ‘It was employed at the accession of William III less as a resource of meeting the financial exigencies of the state than as a bond to connect those in the possession of property with those who had, by taking advantage of an accident of party, acceded to power’ instead place the blame on the wealthiest, advocating a return to laissez-faire policies which would undermine the alliance between government and business forged by the Bank of England. Thus, whilst Shelley’s political vision was undoubtedly fostered by an atmosphere of radicalism and the writings of various reformists, it is conducive to highlight an expansion of pre-existing concepts - rather than to seek originality - as evidence of his political sophistication. Indeed, Shelley’s originality is not necessarily rooted in his political ideas, but in his ability to transform them into more flexible and aesthetically pleasing forms in his poetry.

However, many critics have argued that this aestheticisation of political thoughts undermined their validity, rendering them mere utopian visions. Expanding on Arnold’s dismissal of Shelley as an ‘ineffectual angel’, Eliot suggests that the ‘ideas of Shelley were the ideas of adolescence’, lacking any practical political validity. However, to dismiss Shelley’s poetry as merely ‘utopian’ is inaccurate and fails to account for their repeatedly self- conscious tone. ‘Alastor’ is frequently mentioned as an example of Shelley’s ‘youthfully idealistic’ vision, with the poet as a ‘spirit of solitude’ who is isolated and able to produce a unique insight on the world. For example, Mellor intimates that ‘Alastor’ affirms ‘a Romantic ideology that represented its poems as self-consuming artefacts within a never-ending dialectical process’, supposedly explaining the hero’s solitary death at the end of the poem. However, it is more accurate to assess Shelley’s poetry as consciously idealistic and as inherently linked to his theory of history as constantly progressive and aided by cultural evolution, as shaped by poets. For example, in ‘Queen Mab’ the lines:

He has invented lying words and modes,

Empty and vain as his own coreless heart;

Evasive meanings, nothings of much sound,

To lure the heedless victim to the toils

portray history as a series of false stories and ‘lying words’ told by rulers as a means of repression; thus poetry becomes a more ‘reliable’ representation of the past and a vehicle for positive change. If History is perceived as a series of stories, Shelley’s statement: ‘A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts all that should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted’ largely reflects the Aristotelian notion that ‘poetry is a more philosophical and serious business than history’, and thus it is the very aesthetic nature of poetry which gives it political weight. Nonetheless, whilst at first seeming to affirm Shelley’s position as a utopian idealist, the futuristic vision that ‘A garden shall arise, in loveliness/ Surpassing fabled Eden’ consciously undermines itself. For example, the use of the word ‘fabled’ acknowledges that the very standards on which progress is judged are false. Furthermore, the ‘garden’ is frequently thought to refer to Rousseau’s ‘elysium’ garden which advocates the superiority of the natural wilderness of humans, yet the very form of a garden is an artificial human construct, a work of art. Shelley was therefore conscious that his poetry elevated realistic political theories to a utopian vision; however, this augmentation was deliberate, and a necessity, as Shelley perceived art – in particular, poetry- as integral to a cultural evolution which had the potential to generate gradual historical progress and thus political reform.

If Shelley’s theories of historical progress are accurate, his position as a ‘radical’ seems unquestionable. However, disturbing this notion is the fundamental question as to whether poets shape public opinion or merely respond to and articulate pre-existing concerns of the ‘masses’. In his ‘Defence of Poetry’, Shelley states: ‘poets…are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society’, implying that poets have the ability to direct and ‘teach’ the public as originators of ideas. Indeed, in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ the Terza rima rhyming stanzas evoke a flowing pace and sense of progress which embodies the trope of wind as a method of spreading change through poetry. Similarly the syntactical mirroring between the phrases: ‘the leaves dead’ and ‘my dead thoughts’ is significant, as the leaves become pages of a poetry book recording transient ideas of former generations. The final query: ‘O Wind/ If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’, whilst exposing a level of uncertainty, is predominantly positive in tone, and thus the poem epitomises Shelley’s desire to evoke change through his writing. However, Liu's thesis in Wordsworth: The Sense of History that the poet's ‘sense of history’ is visible in his ‘denial’ of it, reveals a fundamental difficulty when analysing poetry as, rather than shaping history, Shelley is merely responding to subtle antecedent historical context. Indeed, this presumption appears correct when poems such as ‘England in 1819’ are situated within their historical context. For example, E. P. Thomson’s statement ‘we start in 1819 with Peterloo, and English Radicalism appears to be a spontaneous generation of the Industrial Revolution’ implies that the ‘radical’ tone of Shelley’s work merely imitated an atmosphere of discontent amongst the very working class whom he was attempting to influence. Hendrix suggests that ‘Shelley persistently tried to translate his ideas into action’; however, lines such as ‘Rise like Lions after slumber/ In unvanquishable number’ which aim to incite change are perhaps redundant and aloof if the ‘masses’ are perceived as having an unconscious impact on Shelley’s writing, rather than the poems provoking change amongst the masses. Thus Shelley must be considered largely a product of his time, whose radical power lay in his distinctive ability to articulate the mood of his contemporaries, rather than his ability to instigate change.

Thus, whilst Shelley’s political vision is highly sophisticated in theory, in practice the stated methods through which such a vision materialises are overly idealistic, as it seems implausible that poetry would have a direct effect on political circumstances. Despite this, it is important to recognise an underlying ambiguity in Shelley’s poetry which acknowledges these limitations of language and, subsequently, poetry. This raises the question as to whether Shelley was attempting to accomplish the same outcome through his poetic works and his more explicitly political prose. Cameron’s argument that it cannot ‘be claimed that Shelley had one social philosophy for his prose and another for his poetry’ correctly emphasises an overlapping of ideas, but it is important to acknowledge that Shelley’s essays and poetry sought to instigate reform through different methods. For example, Shelley defines a ‘Philosophical View of Reform’ as ‘instructive’ and ‘appealing from the passions to the reason of men’, an aim which contrasts that stated in the preface of ‘The Revolt of Islam’ that ‘the Poem therefore... is narrative, not didactic.’ It is arguable that Shelley perceived poetry as a far more subtle, and thus effective, means of instigating change, particularly as enshrouding political vision within allegory allowed him to project his ideas whilst avoiding censorship or charges of libel. For example, in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ the phrase ‘Be your strong and simple words/ Keen to wound as sharpened swords’ syntactically places language in the same semantic field as weapons, revealing an optimistic belief in the power of language. However, the opening line: ‘As I lay asleep in Italy’ perhaps undermines this link to some extent, as the narrator’s words seem to reveal a subconscious guilt on the part of Shelley at his lack of direct action - as he had emigrated to Italy - and an over-reliance on the ‘visions of Poesy’ and power of language to incite this action in others. This ambiguity is emphasised throughout ‘Prometheus Unbound’, as the phrase: ‘This was the shadow of the truth I saw’ alludes to Platonic theories regarding the independence of language and reality, and reflects the inability to accurately transcribe an event into an accurate image in poetry, and presumably the correlating inability to transform an image into an event. Similar questions of perception are again visible in ‘Mont Blanc’ where the final question:

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

if to the human mind’s imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

emphasises the human mind as a projective entity, where existence and reality are only accessed – or reaffirmed- through the imagination. Thus, when Keach describes ‘the unique but imperfect relation between language and thought’ this is not necessarily a negative relationship. Instead, Shelley’s statement in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ that ‘reason is the enumeration of quanitites already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quanities’ emphasises the tentative notion found consistently throughout Shelley’s poetry that it this very imperfection and ‘shadowing’ quality of language that provides the abstraction and flexibility necessary to give power to poetry, as the only way of transmitting and perceiving such complex ideas is through the imagination, rather than didactic prose. However, Shelley’s work still reveals a consciousness that even the power of aesthetic language as found in poetry is limited in its ability to instigate political reform.

Whilst the complex use of imagery and allegory therefore partially serves to reiterate the sophistication of Shelley’s political vision, there are various ambiguities when interpreting precisely what this ‘vision’ consists of and the extent to which it was a ‘radical’ position. Shelley’s contemporary, Hazlitt, perceived Shelley as a ‘philosophic fanatic’ with ‘fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain’, who was uncontrollably ‘radical’ and who lacked restraint. Conversely, McNiece portrayed Shelley as having a strong ‘sense of limits’ and ‘thoughtful consideration of mind and reality’, undermining the notion of Shelley as uncompromisingly ‘radical’. Certainly, McNiece’s description is far more accurate than Hazlitt’s, and Shelley advocated gradual reform rather than an anarchic revolution. For example, in ‘England in 1819’ the phrase ‘An army, which liberticide and prey/ Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield’ is an allusion to Matthew 26:52: ‘All that take the sword shall perish with the sword’, highlighting Shelley’s insistence on warning his readership against violence. This is particularly significant within the context of the failure of the French revolution, which Shelley blamed not on its ideological motivations but on the violence through which they were enacted. (cite: He cites the French Revolution, which "although undertaken with the best intentions, ended ill for the people, because violence was employed) Whilst Cronin views the prose style of a ‘Philosophical View of Reform’ as ‘an incitement to revolution’, this seems highly implausible given statements such as ‘any sudden attempt at universal suffrage would produce an immature attempt at a republic’, which are overly caution in tone, advocating gradual reform over rapid change enforced through violence. Whilst Behrendt has analysed phrases in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ such as ‘Slash, and stab, and main, and hew’ as retaining an ‘ambivalence of voice that is potentially dangerous, for the poem implicity condones a variety of the violence it explicitly condemns’, it is more accurate to focus on the overriding tone of cautiousness. Indeed, Shelley portrays violence as antithetical to progress, as the poem refocuses continually on the image of the massacre of Peterloo, associating forcefulness with tyranny. Frosch has argued that this intermittent aggressive imagery represents Shelley’s conscious effort to resist an urge towards violence, stating that ‘he adopts the reformist position and bends over backwards to be moderate’; however, the overriding tone of both Shelley’s poetry and prose explicitly condemns this violence and thus perhaps negates the notion that Shelley is inherently ‘radical’. Instead, the sophistication of his political ideas comes from an acknowledgment that implementation must be gradual, and may not occur within his lifetime.

Instead, a more applicable definition of ‘radical’ to Shelley is that of ‘advocating thorough or far-reaching political or social reform’. Thus it becomes meaningless to praise the sophistication of Shelley’s political vision without defining precisely what this ‘vision’ consists of. Bagehot is highly critical of this vision, arguing that ‘the love of liberty is peculiarly natural to the simple impulsive mind. It feels irritated at the idea of a law; it fancies it does not need it: it really needs it less than other minds. Government seems absurd,’ suggesting an arrogance on the part of Shelley. However, Shelley sought to overturn something far more complex than the existing political system. This explains the unresolvable tension found in the phrase ‘Ye are many-they are few’, which highlights the fact that the government could easily be overthrown by its citizens. This for Shelley is the central problem; he needs the desire for change to occur on a widespread individual level and for the masses to instigate reform through personal change, as corroborated by his assertion that ‘when all men are good and wise, Government will of itself decay’. This explains a notable discrepancy in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, where the phrase ‘I met Murder on the way - He had a mask like Castlereagh’ is interpreted by Franta as a sign ‘that these masks do not disguise but rather reveal’. However, I would argue that Shelley is doing something more subtle, and the fact that Murder is wearing the mask ‘like’ Castlereagh could imply that it is not politicians on an individual level who are the problem, but instead that they merely epitomise and symbolise wider evils, a larger ‘power’. Thus Shelley’s implies that an anarchic revolution overthrowing the current government would not achieve progress in the long-term. Shelley frequently refers to the notion of ‘Liberty’ as a means to overcome such evils, but it is unclear exactly what form liberty takes and how it will materialise. For example, in his ‘Ode to Liberty’ ‘Liberty’ is merely ‘The lightning of the nations’ and in ‘England in 1819’ a ‘glorious phantom’. Liberty is therefore a sublime phenomenon, and the etymology of the word ‘phantom’ is significant as its meaning derives from its early definition of ‘something having the form, but not the substance, of a real thing’. Thus perhaps the success of Shelley’s political vision derives from its very imprecision, as he advocates a general shift towards ‘the levelling of in-ordinate wealth, and an agrarian distribution, including the parks and chases of the rich, of the uncultivated districts of the country’ yet consciously resists giving Liberty a precise form due to the variations in what freedom means to every individual. This represents an acknowledgment that true reform and social harmony will only be achieved through personal implementations of change, and thus Shelley’s poetry can be recognised as a cathartic process through which he sought clarification and individual development.

Therefore, Shelley’s political vision can be viewed as highly sophisticated, but perhaps its sophistication originates in a consciousness that it must remain incomplete and flexible. Indeed, Shelley is only ‘radical’ in the sense that he seeks total reform, and he consciously avoids advocation of rapid reform through violent methods. Thus critics who place emphasis on Shelley as ‘radical’ perhaps fail to recognise a tension in his poetry which recognises the limitations of language as a political force. Indeed, Shelley is painfully aware of the improbability that his poetry will have a genuine impact, admitting that ‘Prometheus was never intended for more than 5 or 6 persons’. So if Shelley recognised the improbability that the visions of change which his poetry framed would materialise, why did he continue writing? Bateson’s suggestion that ‘the political facade that Shelley's poems retain was a form of unconscious hypocrisy — the tribute of the escapist to the social conscience’ seriously underestimates Shelley’s political sophistication, but is perhaps accurately describes Shelley as an escapist. This is because whilst Shelley acknowledged the limitations of poetry to evoke immediate change and to directly influence a wide audience, his faith in the notion of cultural evolution and poetry’s ability to immortalise ideas in a body of work which could have relevance to future generations justified his continued attempts. Thus it is arguable that the process of writing poetry was a cathartic and personal process for Shelley, allowing him to fulfil his desire to do all he could to instigate change, and allowing him to explore the complex relationship between language and historical progress.