Shelley as a Romantic Poet.

Percy Bysshe Shelley - A Romantic Rebel

The Romantic era was not only idyllic pastorals and longing for the simple and
natural; it was also a time of revolution and protest. The “old ways” of society
were challenged by a generation of angry young men and women. In pamphlets
and articles they attacked the established values and institutions. The Church,
Christianity, the educational system, the legal system, and not least the aristocracy
and Royalty were all the targets of a harsh and defiant criticism from these radical
writers. One of them was Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose short and dramatic life
stands as a symbol of the revolutionary ideas and strong emotions of the romantic
period.

The Rebel

Shelley seems to have been rebellious by nature. He was a highly intelligent boy
and was interested in science and literature; he was particularly fascinated by the
Gothic tradition which was popular at the time. But his school career was to be a
line of disciplinary reproaches from day one at Sion House Academy in Sussex
until he was expelled from Oxford in his freshman year for “contumaciously
refusing to answer questions”. At Eton, he had picked up on radical literature and
was reading the works of philosophers like Hume and Voltaire. He also developed
a scepticism towards Christianity, and at Oxford he wrote and published a
pamphlet called “The Necessity of Atheism,” which was a contributory factor for
his expulsion from Oxford.

Love and Morality

In London, Shelley met Harriet Westbrook, who probably was his inferior
intellectually – but she was madly in love with him. Shelley was flattered and
entered a relationship with Harriet, possibly as some sort of a fling. But as she was
disgraced by her parents for being associated with an atheist and a rebel, he was
provoked into marrying her. He was nineteen and she sixteen; and entering a
marriage on such premises would, not surprisingly, prove to be a mistake. The
young couple travelled in Scotland and in Ireland, where Shelley wrote and gave
speeches to encourage the work for political reforms. He and Harriet had two
children together, but their marriage was withering, and when he, in 1814, met 17-
year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Goodwin, he was lost; their mutual attraction was
electric. They eloped to Switzerland for the summer, and when they came back,
Harriet drowned herself in Hyde Park in London. A few years previously, Shelley
had published his first important poem, “The Queen Mab,” expressing his socialist
criticism of society and his denunciation of Christianity. This, in combination with
his somewhat infamous conduct of life was the reason why his appeal for custody
of his children was turned down by the authorities; he was seen as “morally unfit,”
they proclaimed in the verdict.

In Exile
Percy and Mary moved to Italy in 1818, both because of his bad health and
because he felt exiled by the verdict. In Italy they socialised with other English
expatriates, like Lord Byron and Edward Trelawny. During his stay in Italy, his
writing became richer and more poignant due to influential friends and
circumstances that moved him emotionally, for example the death of his little
daughter Clara. Percy and Mary had a son when they lived in Florence, which
brought some happiness into their lives. Still, Shelley was often depressed and felt
anger and pity for “the ways of mankind and the wrongs of the world”. But all this
inspired his writing. One of his best love poems,“Emilia,” was inspired by a
beautiful Italian woman (with whom Shelley probably was in love) who was
locked up in a convent because she refused to marry the old nobleman her parents
had promised her to. The death of his friend, John Keats, in 1821, also moved
Shelley to produce some of the finest poetry in English literature. Mary was also
active writing, and her famous “Frankenstein” was written during their stay in
Italy.

The Death of a Poet

Shelley died in 1822, 30 years old, and the circumstances around his death and
cremation were truly befitting a romantic rebel. After a meeting with colleagues in
connection with the launching of a new periodical, The Liberal, Shelley and a
friend were sailing homewards along the Italian coast. A violent storm broke, and
they capsized and drowned; their bodies were found washed up on the shore two
weeks later. Italian law required cremation, so the friends who had gathered (Lord
Byron was one of them) decided to burn the bodies on the beach. As the flames
picked up, and Shelley’s body slowly decomposed, Edward Trelawny stepped out
and snatched his heart out of the flames, and presented it to Mary; a strong
symbolic act resembling the dramatic scene in “Frankenstein,” where the monster
rips the heart out of Elizabeth’s bosom. Another mystic element of Shelley’s death
was his own forewarning of the way he died; in one of his latest works, “Adonais,”
which was “a vindication of all poets and their immortality,” there are several
passages that give a detailed description of death by drowning.

There are many examples of how poets and writers live their literature, or become
what they write. Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of them; his short life and dramatic
death certainly became a true analogy of the rebellious and ardent ideas that
characterized the romantic era.

Grierson did rightly say, “Classic and Romantic are terms no attempts to define
which will ever seem entirely convincing to ourselves or others”. So everyone tries
to attribute one’s own views to “Romanticism”. For, to Hein and Beers,
Romanticism is synonymous with Medievalism; to Elton it is “thought
confounding words”, to Victor Hugo, “Melancholy” is the distinguishing mark of
romantic art; to Abercrombie “Romanticism is a withdrawal from outer experience
to concentrate upon inner experience”; to Pater it is ‘an addition of strangeness to
beauty’; to T.S. Eliot Romantic signifies, “The individual” and even
‘revolutionary’; to Herford ‘liberty or imagination’ So in short, we can say
anything novel is romantic.

Romanticism against Classicism:

For Pater, classic signifies measure, purity and temperance whereas romantic
signifies an addition of strangeness to beauty. Abercrombie says Romanticism is
an attitude of mind—an element of art. Classicism is not an element at all but a
mode of combining elements in a just proportion. For him there is no antithesis
between Romanticism and Classicism. Classicism includes the romantic element in
its balance, for all good art is first romantic, and then becomes classical.

Of all the Romantics, Shelley is the one who most obviously possessed the quality
of genius-quickness, grasp of intellect, the capacity for learning languages rapidly,
ability to assimilate and place scientific principles and discoveries. Yet he is more
criticized for his ‘falsity’ and ‘lack of grasp.

Love of Nature:

Like the other Romantic poets, Shelley too was an ardent lover of Nature. Like
Wordsworth, Shelley conceives of Nature as one spirit, the Supreme Power
working through all things. “The one spirit’s plastic stress/ Sweeps through the dull
dense world.” Again he personifies each object of nature as an individual life, a
part of that Supreme Power, Nature. He celebrates nature in most of his poems as
his main theme such as The Cloud, To a Skylark, To the Moon, Ode to the West
Wind, A Dream of the Unknown.

In his treatment of nature, he describes the things in nature as they are and never
colors it. It is true, he gives them human life through his personifications, but he
does it unintentionally for he felt they are living beings capable of doing the work
of human beings. His mythopoeic power had made him the best romanticist of his
age. In Ode to the West Wind, he personifies Nature as the Destroyer and the
Preserver, and in the Cloud, the cloud is a possessor of mighty powers.

He also believed in the healing aspect of Nature and this is revealed in

his EuganeanHills in which he is healed and soothed by the natural scene around
him and also the imaginary island. In The Recollection we see the same idea of
healing power of Nature.

Love, Beauty and Thought Love:

The idea of Love and Beauty in Shelley is greatly influenced by Plato. Love to
Shelley, as to Plato is the perfection of all that is good and noble in life.
In Epipsychidion, he says that love is not bound to one object at a time and when
love fades away, we need not be faithful. He adds that love conquers death and
beauty, and even goodness and truth originate in it:

True love differs in this from gold and clay

That to divide is not to take away.

In fact, Shelley was in love with love itself,

I love Love, though he has wings

And like light can flee.
Beauty:

Beauty, to Shelley, is an ideal in itself and a microcosm of the beauty of Nature

and he calls it ‘Intellectual Beauty’. He celebrates Beauty as a mysterious power.
In the de arts, to Intellectual Beauty he says that when Intellectual Beauty departs
this world becomes a “dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate” and if human
heart is its temple, then man would become immortal and omnipotent:

Man were immortal and omnipotent

Did’st thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state
within his heart.

Imagination:

‘Facts’ said Shelley, ‘are not what we want to know in poetry, in history, in the
lives of individual men, in satire or panegyric. They are the many diversions, the
arbitrary points on which we hang and to which we refer those delicate and
evanescent hues of mind, which language delights and instructs us in precise
proportion as it expresses.’ Shelley calls poetry “the expression of Imagination,”
because in it diverse things are brought together in harmony instead of being
separated through analysis. In this he resembles Bacon and Locke, but differs from
them in his idea of imagination as man’s highest faculty through which one
realizes noblest powers.
Shelley made a bold expedition into the unknown and he felt reasons should be
related to the imagination. His expedition was successful when he made the people
understand that the task of the imagination is to create shapes by which reality can
be revealed to the world and this is heralded as the best romantic note by his
successors.

Idealism:
Shelley’s idealism falls under three subheadings Revolutionary, religious and
Erotic.

(i)Revolutionary Idealism:

His revolutionary idealism is mainly due to the French Revolution. Through

his Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, and Prometheus Unbound he inspired people
to revolt against tyranny by scorning at the tyranny of state, church and society and
hoping for a golden age which too is not immune from pain or death. His political
idealism makes him a prophet.

(ii) Religious idealism:

Though Shelly was rebel, he wasn’t an atheist. He believed in the super power of
God, and he imagined God as Supreme ‘Thought’ and infinite Love. His Platonic
conception of Love was the base of his metaphysical idealism. He believed in the
faith of one mind, one power and one all-pervasive spirit.

(iii) Erotic idealism:

Just as he is a revolutionist and a pantheist, so also he is a theologist. He believed

in the abstract quality of love and beauty-love as infinite and beauty as intellectual.
He celebrates love as a creator and preserver in his Symposium, and beauty as
Supreme Spirit with which man becomes immortal in his Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty
.
Melancholy:

Though Shelley was a man of hope and expectation and spiritualistic about the
future of mankind, yet he represents himself in his poems as a man of ill luck,
subject to evil and suffering. He expresses this in his Ode to the West Wind:

Poetic Style and Music:

Shelley’s poetic style is also romantic. The series of gorgeous similes in The
Skylark show the romantic exuberance of Shelley. He never uses any ornamental
word and every word fits in its place and carries its own weight. They express the
diverse feelings of the poet with the notes of music which appeal to every human
being’s ears.
Conclusion:

In brief we can say every bit of Shelley’s poetry is romantic— in temper and style.
Whether they are short or long, whether they are lyrical or odes, with Shelley’s
element of imagination they rise to an expectation which is far beyond our reach.
No wonder Shelley is heralded as the best Romantic poet of his age.

Draw the image of the West Wind as a destroyer and preserver as you find in
the poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’.

The faculty of the visionary and revolutionary zeal was inherent in the mind of
Shelley, because he entered in the world of poetry during the storm and stress of
the French Revolution. From his earliest years, Shelley found himself in opposition
to the convention of the class to which he belonged. So he denounced the existing
order of things and assailed the barrier which checked the free development of
human spirit. The pain which inflicted his heart was the cruelty of society which
instead of hailing him as an intellectual apostle and liberator regarded him as a
moral outcast. Ode to the West Wind written under the influence of the French
Revolution expresses Shelley’s idea of Revolution.

Shelley believes that both nature and the society of men are suffering from deadly
diseases like tyranny, oppression, corruption and injustice. These deadly diseases
are like pestilence which can be cured by a miraculous change. This change can be
brought about by power and the West Wind has this power because it is a
destructive as wet as a creative agent of nature. Shelley has created the image of
the West Wind by some technical means such as similes, metaphors,
personification, a special verse pattern, music of words etc. The figures of speech
lie scattered here and there in the poem. Of them the remarkable ones are in the
comparison of the West Wind to a magician (simile), the West Wind is the dirge of
the dying year (metaphor), the Mediterranean dreaming of his palaces and towers
(personification).

In the first three stanzas of the ode, The West Wind is depicted as a force of nature
with its influence on land in the air, and on and away the under water. The West
Wind drives away the dead and decayed leaves just as a magician drives away a
ghost by his magic spell. West Wind also scatters the seeds far and wide and
covers with dust to bury them underground where they lie till the advent of the
spring when they sprout into plants bearing flowers of sweet smell and attractive
colors. In the air the West Wind carries loose clouds which seem to have fallen
from the sky just as withered leaves fall from the branches of trees in autumn. The
clouds scattered by the West Wind are the bringers of rain and lightning. The locks
of the approaching storm are spread on the aery surface of the sky. The West Wind
is “the dirge of the dying year”. A huge tomb will be built over the dead body of
the year. The darkness of the night which is spreading over the earth will serve as
the dome of that tomb. The collective strength of the clouds will be the vault or
arched roof of that tomb. From the solid seeming vapors of clouds in the sky will
fall rain, lightning and hailstones.

As for the influence of the West Wind on and under water, the poet has drawn the
picture of the calm Mediterranean being disturbed by the wind and the Atlantic,
thrown into a state of agitation by the same power. The West Wind seems to
awaken from sleep the blue Mediterranean, dreaming of old palaces and towers
which once stood on its shores. When the West Wind blows on the Atlantic its
water becomes restless and mountain like waves role on its surface. Turbulent
waves are raised on the surface of the ocean and between these waves great
hollows are produced. Before the west wind blew, the surface of the Atlantic was
level but now it would seem as if the Atlantic has cut a path on its surface for the
West Wind to pass over it. While the West Wind begins to blow on the Atlantic,
the plants growing at the bottom of the ocean tremble with fear and shed their
leaves.

Thus Shelley has drawn the image of the west wind in its three phases—
appearance, action and message. Its appearance and action on land, in the air, and
under water are connected with its dual capacity for destruction and creation. Its
function on land is noticeable in the change of seasons, autumn, winter and spring.
The terrible functions of the West Wind in the air have been made vivid through
three images ; (a) vapor rising from ocean to form clouds, the source of rains,
lightning and hailstones, (b) the stormy wind in the image of the dancing Maenad
in intoxication out of clouds. The image of the Mediterranean and that of the
Atlantic under the influence of the West Wind are also terrible forces of nature.

Shelley’s approach to the phenomena of nature was distinct from others. The life
of nature to Shelley was as real as the life of man. But his attitude to nature was
scientific. Shelley retained or even magnified the true character of a natural
phenomenon when he personified it. His West Wind, while he personified it
remained a wind, or rather a terrible wind, an agent of destruction and preservation
for creating again in nature.
Short Q

How does Shelley’s treatment of nature differ from that of the earlier Romantic
poets? What connections does he make between nature and art, and how does he
illustrate those connections?

Whereas older Romantic poets looked at nature as a realm of communion with

pure existence and with a truth preceding human experience, the later Romantics
looked at nature primarily as a realm of overwhelming beauty and aesthetic
pleasure. While Wordsworth and Coleridge often write about nature in itself,
Shelley tends to invoke nature as a sort of supreme metaphor for beauty, creativity,
and expression. This means that most of Shelley’s poems about art rely on
metaphors of nature as their means of expression: the West Wind in “Ode to the
West Wind” becomes a symbol of the poetic faculty spreading Shelley’s words
like leaves among mankind, and the skylark in “To a Skylark” becomes a symbol
of the purest, most joyful, and most inspired creative impulse. The skylark is not a
bird, it is a “poet hidden.”

2.

How and why does Shelley believe poetry to be an instrument of moral good? What
impact does this belief have on his poems, if any?

As Shelley explains in his essay A Defence of Poetry, he believes that poetry

expands and nurtures the imagination, and that the imagination enables sympathy,
and that sympathy, or an understanding of another human being’s situation, is the
basis of moral behavior. His belief that poetry can contribute to the moral and
social improvement of mankind impacts his poems in several ways. Shelley writes
his poems in fulfillment of the responsibility to exercise the imagination and
provide it with beauty and pleasure; thus his poems become whimsically
imaginative in content and manner. The sense of this “responsibility” also adds
urgency to Shelley’s poetic product, and makes the widespread reading of the
poems a central and explicit goal: thus Shelley’s speaker makes declarations such
as those in “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark”, expressing his desire that
his words will spread amongst humanity.
3.

Many of Shelley’s poems include a climactic moment, an instant when the poet’s
feelings overwhelm him and overwhelm his poem. What are some of these
moments? How do they relate to the poems as wholes? How are they typical of the
poetic personality Shelley brings to his writing?

The most obvious example of such a climactic moment is the speaker’s collapse at
the beginning of the third stanza of “The Indian Serenade”; one might also include
the poet’s cry “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” in “Ode to the West Wind,”
and “To a Skylark” as accounts of such moments sustained for an entire poem and
distilled from all feelings of lesser intensity. These moments show both the power
of the outside world to affect Shelley’s inner feelings, and the power of these
feelings in and of themselves—Shelley responded very intensely to the world, and
in his poems the world is a place to which one can respond only intensely.

4. Think about Shelley’s use of the sonnet form in “England in 1819” and
“Ozymandias.” How does he shape the form to his own purposes? How does his
use of the sonnet form break from the established traditions of the early 1800s?
5. Shelley was a political radical who never shied away from expressing his
opinions about oppression and injustice—he was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for
applying his radicalism to religion and arguing for the necessity of atheism. What
do we learn about Shelley’s ideal vision of the human condition, as based on his
political poems? With particular attention to “Ode to the West Wind,” how might a
sense of his social hopes emerge from even a non-political poem?
6. In some ways Shelley is a creature of contradictions: he was an atheist who
wrote hymns, a scandalous and controversial figure who argued for ethical
behavior, an educated aristocrat who argued for the liberation of humankind, and a
sensuous Romantic poet whose fondest hope was that his poems would exert a
moral influence over the human imagination. How can one resolve these
contradictions? (Are they even resolvable?) How do they manifest themselves in
his poetry?
7. Shelley lived a fascinating and turbulent life among fascinating and turbulent
people, from Lord Byron, the most famous, controversial, and popular poet of the
era, to his wife Mary, the author of Frankenstein. How does a knowledge of
Shelley’s biography (and early death) affect your appreciation of his poetry? Or
does it affect it at all? Is it necessary to know about Shelley’s life and times in
order to fully understand the poetry?