Tag Archives: Shelley

Retrospective: Pforzheimer Visit

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Members of the RRG viewed the “Shelley’s Ghost” exhibit, followed by a visit to the Pforzheimer Collection, where the curator, Elizabeth Denlinger, showed us several items from the collection that were not included in the exhibit.

Among the highlights of the exhibit was a notebook of Shelley’s containing a revision of Queen Mab. The exhibit itself is wonderfully curated to tell the story not only of Percy Shelley’s life and the afterlife of his poetic reputation, but of the Godwin’ Wollstonecraft-Shelley family more generally. There were a number of letters on display from various members of the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley family, including Harriet Shelley’s suicide letter, which I found rather poignant. Along with printed books and manuscripts, the exhibit includes several other artifacts, from hair jewelry and portraits to Shelley’s guitar and fragments of his skull. The ornate rattle with golden bells from Shelley’s childhood helped me grasp just how wealthy his family was.

On our visit to the Pforzheimer we examined several interesting texts, including early editions of Lyrical Ballads, Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, and the manuscript of the sixteenth canto of Byron’s Don Juan. But along with these more canonical texts, Liz Denlinger displayed lesser-known texts and items of Romantic-era ephemera.

Most interesting to me, given my work on education in the period, were the children’s books and educational toys. The collection includes an item described as a “Lilliputian Library,” a wooden box about 6” tall containing two rows of tiny books of children’s stories. A didactic children’s board game entitled “A Game of Genius,” in which children learned about inventions such as the telegraph and gunpowder, featured beautiful color lithography. Most intriguing was a toy Denlinger described as a “peep show” (and no, not that kind). It looked like a small book with an opening cut into the front cover, but it consisted of paper folded accordion-style, the “pages” inside cut and colored so that when you looked through the hole, you saw a detailed diorama with beautiful perspective.

I plan on returning soon to read some educational texts for my dissertation, but suspect I may need to find an appropriate conference to attend just to justify examining more of these fascinating toys and games!

If you are interested in conducting research at the Pforzheimer Collection, please contact Elizabeth Denlinger.

http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman/pforzheimer-collection-shelley-and-his-circle

Veronica Goosey

Percy B. Shelley and Jonathan Bate: Poetry and the Problems of Mediation

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In his chapter, “What are poets for?” from The Song of the Earth (Harvard University Press, 2002), Jonathan Bate argues that poetry is a special “speech” that reanimates “primary experience” within the “environment of the imagination” (281). It can open an abstract “disembodied zone of possibility” that, in Bate’s reference to Heidegger, “brings forth” or “reveals” an unmediated experience of nature. The medium of the special speech creates an existential immediacy as a Song of the Earth recalling the Heideggerian pure presence and being, an opportunity to experience das Ding an sich and in der Welt sein. Techne and poiesis, Bate believes, bridge the gap

between speaking and writing, a dichotomy instigating a hermeneutical circle that has long boggled postmodern theorists. Because poetry enables this ontological immediacy for auditors and readers alike, he describes it as a phenomenological “medium” that resists questions about the specific forms and media that work to reanimate consciousness (260).

Bate’s theory about the meaningful interconnectedness of the environment, poetics, and being in the world is undeniably provocative, but it also raises some questions. If poetry is “not merely language” but a super language evoking “conditions such as dwelling and alienation in their very essence,” does poetry transcend the linguistic forms encountered through print, manuscript, or speech? Is the occasion for experiencing the semantic and non-semantic properties of poetry, in his estimation, a silent or audible affair? Or is it both? As a “special speech,” does poetry preexist its oral or written instantiation as Wordsworth and Coleridge have reflected upon?

Percy B. Shelley addresses some of these concerns—including the tensions between the ineffable power of poetry and issues of mediation—in his Defence of Poetry. In one instance, he explains that Homer’s verse unveils the “truth and beauty of friendship and patriotism” when “read[ing] . . . his verses.” The modern reader (note Shelley’s mention of Homeric text as literal rather than oral) becomes ensconced in art as truth and beauty are “unveiled to the depths.” At another instance, “poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Uncovering beauty, it destabilizes meaning through defamiliarization of its object (this idea recalls his take on the origins of language as “vitally metaphorical” and resembles Russian Formalist concerns of the 20th century). At a later moment, however, Shelley describes how poetry “veils” the vanishing apparitions that “haunt,” making immortal what is best and most beautiful. No longer exposing beauty, poetry participates in covering or obscuring disagreeable elements.

On the one hand, he describes poetry as uncovering and reanimating the “truth” and “beauty” of things (similar to Bate’s formulation). On the other hand, poetry acts as a concealing agent that lifts and covers ambiguous “veils” between the artistic object and its beholder, reader, or auditor—as if some dialectic between revealing beauty and concealing the disagreeable emerges. In both cases, Shelley fails to disambiguate the “unveiling” agent; is it the poet or poetry itself implicated in the performative act? Overall, Shelley explains that poetry “spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil.” Through a performance of “spreading” or “withdrawing,” poetry guides us toward aesthetic objects of pleasure and pleasantry—in sync with the harmonious and agreeable. Shelley does not clarify, though, when and how poetry “elucidates” or “covers.” Nor does he hint that the poetic experience occurs as immediate as Bate believes.

Shelley complicates the tensions between poetry and mediation even further, I believe. When he describes Dante’s writings as “awakening” an “entranced” Europe, the poet depicts Dante’s words as “pregnant with lightning which has yet found no conductor . . . veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning [of Dante’s poetry] may never be exposed.” Two important issues arise here. First, “high poetry” requires a “conductor” through which it assumes form and becomes uttered in its full “truth” and revealed in its full beauty. In this way, poetry loses the power of “the lamp” itself, as it were in an Abrams sense, that he had described earlier; it no longer exposes beauty. Second, layers of “veils” exist between the high poetic product and its recipient. In the poetic act of enunciation and reception, the “veils” obstruct the organic link to beauty. Not only, then, do we lose the meaning of how exposition of beauty occurs but we encounter the glaring inconsistencies across Shelley’s various “veils,” as well. Does this alternating “veiling” effect return us to the hermeneutic circle from which Bate tries to remove us? Though “the creation of poetry is often wholly unalloyed,” Shelley suggests its final iterations aren’t always pure. Only the “feeble shadow” of the poet’s original inspiration remains in its production (similar to Wordsworth’s celebration of the “spontaneous overflow” of poetic inspiration whose tranquil recollection turns into a precarious act of recovery).

These reflections from Shelley and Bate bring us back to the age-old question of “what is poetry?” along with considerations of creation, production, consumption, media, and mediation. If, according to Bate, poetry arrives as a moment of creative existentialism, then how are we to reconcile the material and immaterial considerations of its substance (or lack thereof)? Shelley doesn’t seem to offer a clear answer to this, either. Does the poet/poem offer the occasion for participating in unmediated and mediated experiences simultaneously? Does poetry have the ability to exempt us from the Nietzschean “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms”? I think it’s worth considering further the occasion of poetry as an act of production and consumption as well as its attendant mediations, the power of eco-poetics, and other consequential theories and properties not yet brought into this inquiry.

-Omar F. Miranda

Works Cited:

Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Shelley, Percy B. “The Defence of Poetry.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. Print.

Gentlemanly Furnishings and Textual Liberation

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In our previous post, Veronica Goosey asked what place cleverness or scholarly play had in academic writing. As my title indicates, I have decided that play should have a more prominent role in my scholarly endeavors.

This post picks up issues of scholarly practice and continues the blog’s larger discussion of media by examining Percy Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo.

The central philosophic debate and its interruption by the figure of the maniac in Shelley’s poem have been the topics of much scholarly commentary. Raymond D. Havens argues that the argument is indeed forgotten and “although the poem continues for a hundred lines after the madman has ceased to speak,” there is “no word concerning the subject of discussion” (649). Charles Robinson claims that the poem displays the poets’ contrasting views regarding the human condition but does not pick a winner. I want to suggest that a close examination of the physical spaces of the poem alters how we are to adjudicate the central debate. The fatalistic Count Maddalo believes that the madhouse functions as a symbol of humanity’s fate. In order to assist the maniac, Maddalo offers gifts that attempt to recreate his own gentlemanly estate. Maddalo provides the maniac with the trappings of a gentleman in the hopes that he will be able to participate in gentlemanly discourse. Julian, on the other hand, offers the maniac something quite different. The narrative account of the maniac captures the madman’s words, allows them to circulate to a wider audience, and provides a type of textual liberation. I hope to show that the maniac’s interruption in Julian and Maddalo should be read as cautionary tale for poets like Maddalo/Byron.

Maddalo’s description of the madhouse plays a crucial role in understanding the central debate regarding free will and freedom in general. Looking out on the madhouse and its tolling belfry, Maddalo says, “And such . . . is our mortality / And this must be the emblem and the sign / Of what should be eternal and divine” (l. 120-122). As Robinson accurately points out, these lines echo Byron’s famous 1816 poem Prometheus. In Byron’s work, Prometheus the demigod functions as an “emblem.” Byron’s speaker calls Prometheus “a symbol and a sign / To Mortals of their fate and force; / Like thee, Man is in part divine, / A troubled stream from a pure source” (l. 45-48). Here, the concept of a divine and predetermined “fate” is at odds with the “force” that mortals possess. In Byron’s poem, Jupiter punishes Prometheus for taking knowledge to Earth and for refusing to tell him the secret of his downfall. The demigod emerges as a powerful representative of fallen mankind because he clings to his mortal “force,” his will. Byron’s speaker closes by claiming that the will can endure torture and never can be killed. Ultimately, the will becomes “Its own concenter’d recompense, / Triumphant where it dares defy, / And making Death a Victory” (l. 57-59). Despite being chained to a rock and tortured, Prometheus’s unwillingness to concede to the demands of Jupiter makes even “Death a Victory.” In Shelley’s poem, Maddalo projects the description of Prometheus onto the madhouse. It is important to recognize that his description comes before the reader has been introduced to the figure of the maniac. Therefore, there is not yet a representative for the madhouse. Instead, the characteristics of Prometheus are part of a particular space. Like the chains that bind Prometheus to the rock, the madhouse and its walls, for Maddalo, represent the “fate” of those who exert their mortal “force.”

The projection of Promethean features onto the madhouse alters the manner in which we should read Maddalo’s gifts to the maniac. Maddalo believes that a change in environment has the potential to improve the maniac. According to Kelvin Everest, “Maddalo attempts to alleviate the maniac’s suffering by creating the illusion of a gentlemanly normality” (682). By providing the maniac with the accoutrements of a gentleman, Maddalo hopes to foster the maniac’s inner gentility: “I fitted up for him / Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim, / And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers” (252-254). The “busts,” “books,” and “urns for flowers,” can help the maniac enter into the type of gentlemanly discourse that Maddalo and Julian represent. In actuality, however, the gifts seem to allow the maniac to play the part of a Byronic hero. Julian and Maddalo first encounter the maniac “sitting mournfully / Near a piano” in his room that overlooks the sea (l. 273-274). Further more, when the maniac starts to speak to himself, Julian claims that “his words came each / Unmodulated, cold, expressionless; / But that from one jarred accent you might guess / It was despair that made them so uniform” (l. 291-294). As the wind howls and a “gusty storm / Hissed through the window,” the maniac’s words acquire a type of uniformity thanks to his “despair” (l. 295-296). Despite the kindness of Maddalo’s gifts, nothing that he offers removes the maniac from the “emblem and the sign” of man’s degraded condition. Rather, Maddalo’s gifts help the maniac better play the part of the brooding and isolated Byronic hero.

If Maddalo gives the maniac the furnishings of a gentleman, what then does Julian offer the slighted lover? Julian’s gift to the maniac is a bit more difficult to locate. I want to suggest that Julian offers the poem itself, thus enabling the maniac’s words to circulate and reach new audiences. In other words, while Maddalo offers material objects to alter a problematic space, Julian’s narrative offers a type of figurative liberation. According to Everest, “The maniac has two audiences in the poem; the absent ex-lover that his speech is addressed to, and the unseen Julian and Maddalo who overhear him” (681). Julian and Maddalo the poem, on the other hand, has the potential to reach a much wider audience. Publication of the poem also undoes some of the maniac’s melancholic proclamations. The maniac can no longer speak his soliloquies or “hide” beneath “words like embers” (l. 503-504). Instead, his story circulates beyond the confines of the emblematic madhouse and functions as a type of cautionary tale. But who, then, is the target audience for Shelley’s words of warning? Interestingly, the largest clue comes from Maddalo. It is Maddalo who provides the concluding summation of the encounter with the maniac. After returning home, Maddalo says, “Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong, / They learn in suffering what they teach in song” (l. 544-546). Maddalo seems to be describing a poet who, at least in part, resembles Byron. A poet who would compose a work that, like Prometheus, treats fate and the human will as competing forces and imagines confinement as fallen mankind’s inevitable lot. The maniac exhibits traits and inhabits a space that better reflect Maddalo’s situation than that of Julian.

Julian’s pledge to discover himself by studying Maddalo seems to collapse the two figures together and challenge the suggestion that the maniac’s story is a warning to poets like Maddalo/Byron. Everest argues that Julian chooses to “aspire” to “the life of Maddalo” rather than the life of the maniac (683). However, Julian’s final decision is not a simple binary with the maniac and Maddalo providing two different ways of proceeding. Before he makes his pledge to find himself in his friend, Julian imagines himself staying in Venice because “books are there, / Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair” (l. 554-555). It is important to recognize that this list of items is similar to the gentlemanly gifts that Maddalo gives to the maniac. Julian goes on to picture himself sitting alongside Maddalo in his “great palace” (l. 559). Julian does not simply want to emulate Maddalo but rather learn his ways in order to “reclaim him from his dark estate” (my emphasis, l. 574). In other words, Julian wants to remove Maddalo from the type of environment that he currently occupies. He believes that his presence and conversation have the potential bring about some change and “reclaim” Maddalo from his “dark estate.”

Maddalo offers gentlemanly gifts that simply recapitulate his own situation. While the markers of gentlemanly status help spruce up the maniac’s environment, they do not remove him from the confines of the madhouse. Julian, in contrast, creates a poem that allows the maniac’s words to escape the walls of the asylum. The poem transforms the maniac’s soliloquies into poetry and allows his words to circulate to a much wider audience. The absent ex-lover and the hidden Julian and Maddalo are not the only ones who are able to hear his woeful words. Julian sees the maniac’s story not as a warning against his own theories, but an exaggerated endpoint of Maddalo’s fatalism. Ultimately, Julian seeks to liberate both the maniac and Maddalo from the confines of their respective situations.

Works Cited

Everest, Kelvin. “Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002. p. 675-683.

Havens, Raymond D. “Julian and Maddalo.” Studies in Philology 27.4 (Oct. 1930), 648-653.

Lord Byron. Lord Byron: The Major Works. Ed. Jerome McGann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Robinson, Charles. Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1976.

Shelley, Percy. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002.

R. A. Sessler

Review: Charm, or de casibus Literary Scholarship?

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Hadley J. Mozer “‘Ozymandias,’ or de Casibus Lord Byron: Literary Celebrity on the Rocks.” European Romantic Review 21.6 (2010):727-749.

Hadley Mozer’s article arguing that Shelley’s sonnet should be read as a lecture to Byron on the vanity of his celebrity won Article of the Year at the 2010 NASSR conference. I attended the conference, and heard several highly complimentary things said of the piece. So when I returned to the article to study its merits more closely, I was somewhat surprised.
The first surprise—a pleasant one—was finding the cleverness of the title recurring throughout the essay. The writing is playful, witty, and a pleasure to read. But despite the charm of Mozer’s wordplay, I found myself not only unconvinced by Mozer’s argument, but convinced that it was a stretch. Mozer’s argument that Shelley experienced a sense of inferiority to Byron in the late 18-teens was well-researched, well-argued, and not, I would think, particularly controversial. Locating in ‘Ozymandias’ an early start to Shelley’s poetic engagements with Byron seemed an intriguing prospect, but the evidence Mozer presents in letters and other poems provide at best circumstantial support. Mozer’s shift to critical interest in identifying the Shelley’s source for the “shattered visage” provides a wealth of historical detail and successfully engages it to disprove earlier claims, and support the interpretation that Shelley’s statuary remains are not based on any actual Egyptian statuary.
Mozer’s archival work is impressive, but the leap from “not based on Egyptian statuary” to “based on Byronic portraits” is questionable. Byron’s poetry, portraits, and bust, along with their reproductions, provide ample evidence that one public version of Byron, the arrogant, brooding Byronic hero, has features which resemble Shelley’s poetic description of the statue of Ozymandias. But Mozer’s claim that this resemblance is the result of Shelley’s attempt to “Byronize” the pharoah in order to critique the poet is problematic. The pharoah’s obessions with monuments to himself could plausibly evoke the image-management in which Byron engaged, but only if we accept Mozer’s claim that Shelley “Byronizes” the statue of Ozymandias, which I found to be the article’s weakest claim, seductive though it was.
Similarly, the genre argument that this ekphrastic sonnet should be read as a de casibus poem held some appeal initially, but the connections between “Ozymandias” and a form of history writing and moral instruction long associated with tragedy are not as strong as one woule hope. Perhaps further research will strengthen what appears in this article as an intriguing possibility. But by Mozer’s own acknowledgement, Shelley departs from de casibus tradition in so many ways, it seems as though any influence the genre might have had on the poem was not enough to merit the claim that the sonnet is a de casibus poem. Mozer’s argument that Byron at least may have read it in this fashion, as supported by the end of canto 1 of Don Juan, is excitingbut under-investigated.
Mozer’s essay demonstrates exemplary writing and research, and the argument itself is provacative, if not entirely persuasive. If “Ózymandias” is indeed “a veiled de casibus meditation on the vanity of Byron’s literary celebrity,” I would argue that the veil is quite thick (743). Yet if, as article of the year, this essay represents the work Romanticists want to see in journal publications, then there are several implications for graduate students. Here are a few: 1) Make a bold claim; 2) Integrate archival research; and, 3) Be playful.
A bold claim should be plausible and provocative, but needn’t necessarily be proven—or even provable. Our job isn’t so much to solve a problem, but to lay out a problem’s parameters and poke around its implications. The more boldly you do that, the more interesting the essay is to read, as long as you have sufficient support.
In answer to that caveat is point two: archival research. We all love it. Finding unusual or neglecting archival materials is a favorite tactic among scholars in the humanties. Applying such texts to a problem and integrating them into an ongoing scholarly debate is highly attractive. Half the seduction of Mozer’s article, for me at least, comes from the manner in which archival research is integrated into the argument.
Charm is also seductive. The more fun it is to read an article, the more seductive the argument appears. An argument may be rich in data supporting a claim which could change the course of literary scholarship, but the accessibility of the argument makes it readable and widens its circulation. In this case, I would argue that the wit and charm of the writing makes it a more appealing read than the argument merits, but this only showcases my own claim—that allowing yourself to be witty and playful in your writing will make your argument more attractive to your readership.

Veronica Goosey

If you have a response to Mozer’s article or our review, please do chime in.

Romantic Drama and Romantic Theatre

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Some time ago, we posted some thoughts on the staging of unstaged Romantic-era plays and on the phenomenon described by critics as mental theater.  I’d like to return to the subject of Romantic-era drama. When was the last time your English department offered a course examining the dramatic material of the Romantic period as drama? While staging is acknowledged to play an important role in understanding a Shakespearean tragedy and what’s being staged is a political issue in the early eighteenth century, Romantic drama is not widely viewed as dramatic, and the drama being staged in the period is not often made an object of study.

Romantic drama, and particularly the dramatic works of the “big six” Romantic poets, is generally viewed as poetry rather than as drama. For one thing, the drama of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron is lyrical, often employing long soliloquys and other marks of interiority. For another, few of these plays were ever staged, and in some cases the authors claim that they are not intended for the stage. However, there is evidence that the writers sought to have their plays staged without theatrical success, or in several cases, without acceptance by the managers. Wordsworth could find no one
to take The Borderers. Coleridge’s early Osorio was revised into Remorse before it took to the stage. Although The Cenci was the only work of Shelley’s to go into a second edition in his lifetime, no public performance made it onto a London stage until well into the nineteenth century. The vexed relationship between Byron’s dramas and their staging I’ll leave to my esteemed colleague Randall Sessler to discuss at another time. Joanna Baillie, one of the most esteemed dramatists of the period both critically and popularly, published multiple editions of her Plays on the Passions, and had several of her plays staged, but none achieved commercial success on the stage. Baillie, like the Romantic poets, was more concerned with tracing a character’s psychology than with spectacular stage effect. Critics have suggested that this focus on interiority and lyric
expression may have made the plays difficult to stage.

Some of the poets themselves suggest that they lack stage success because the stage is degenerate. As Jane Moody indicates in Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840, Romantic poets dismissed the theaters as “places of noise, dirt, spectacle and unbridled sexual commerce, where Shakespeare was being mangled into opera, and ignorant audiences preferred performing dogs to the pleasures of Sheridan and John Gay” (2-3). Nor are these criticisms without basis. In addition to physical and moral contributions to “illegitimacy” to which Moody refers, the stage was subject to censorship and supervision unmatched by any other medium in the period, thanks to the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, which, although relaxed by the Theatrical Representations Act of 1788 and the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, was not repealed until the passage of the Theatres Act of 1968. Plays intended for performance had to be approved by the Licenser, a position in the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and could be censored by him. The Act particularly censored political commentary and satire. Although political statements would generally be excised from performance texts, the published versions of plays were not often censored. So although drama remained a legitimate form for political commentary, dramatic compositions approved by the Licenser could be viewed with suspicion.

Moreover, the plays being staged emphasized sentimentality and spectacle. The gothic dramas of Matthew Lewis and others, the Orientalism of, for instance, George Colman the younger’s Blue-Beard, the spectacle of trained animals as in The Quadrupeds of
Quedlinburgh, and the popularity of pantomime are only a few examples of what poets and other critics denounced as the degeneracy of the stage. Additionally, changing stage practices and public taste made adaptations of Shakespeare more popular than the original works—Nahum Tate’s happy-ending version of King Lear was rather popular throughout the nineteenth century. Yet despite condemnations of the theater from poets rejected by the managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, at various points Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Baillie all sought to have their plays staged as a way of legitimizing their dramatic efforts.

We can contextualize and historicize the retreat from the stage of the Romantics and other major poets working in dramatic genres during this period. But if, as argued in our earlier post Romantic Drama: Experiments, Mental Theater, and Media, the retreat from the stage of some of the period’s most talented dramatists led to the invention of a new dramatic form, and a new dramatic space, what does that do to our study of the Romantic-era stage and the drama performed there? How ought we to approach a dramatic performance? As scholars and critics of English literature, we are trained, at least primarily, to study texts. Text and performance are significantly different objects of study, and should be treated differently, but in what ways? How can we, as textual scholars, contribute to a reading of the staging of Byron’s Marino Faliero or Baillie’s
De Montfort, in addition to the texts?

~Veronica Goosey