A question re: Percy Bysshe Shelley

[truepenny]

Can anyone explain to me why we study Percy Bysshe Shelley as anything more than a minor Romantic poet and the husband of the author of Frankenstein?

There is no irony in my question. I dislike the Romantics (for values of "dislike" ranging from "am bored by" to "loathe"), so I'm well aware that I am not best positioned to see PBS's merits. And I am feeling particularly uncharitable toward him at the moment because I'm reading Anne K. Mellor's book on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and have gotten to the part where PBS's self-centered, selfish, callous thoughtlessness is partly responsible for the death of their daughter Clara Everina and where PBS proves himself TOTALLY INCAPABLE of understanding why MWS has gone off him a bit in consequence.

So, yeah, my fondness for P. B. Shelley, never great to begin with, is currently at its all time low.

Byron was just as bad in his private life (possibly worse, although there we have to get into comparative ethics and well, let's not go there), but I do understand why he's part of the Western canon--I get it. I even--sort of--get Wordsworth, much though he bores me until my eyeballs roll back in their sockets.

But what is there about Shelley that makes him worth discussing?

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I think Shelley's glorious. The words sing. (An asshole, but glorious. Though re: the asshole part, it does help to remember they were all so young. Maybe they'd have grown up better.) By contrast, any appreciation I have for Wordsworth is grudging and grumpy.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

My two least favorite Romantic poets are Wordsworth and Shelley, who usually bore me, so I can't help you there. I do find reading about Shelley's life to be fascinating in a creepy and appalling sort of way, the way some people are caught by the sight of train wrecks. And his life story completely explains why someone forced to live with him would end up writing Frankenstein.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Wordsworth, I would like to see scraped off the planet. Byron's short lyric poetry I love, some Shelley certainly can hear the swing of...

Keats, I could read ALL DAY.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I am not entirely sure, but gods above there is something wrong with the Wikipedia entries on those two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
The meat of the entry on her:
"Mary Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

She was married to the notable Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley."

here is his intro:
Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets who wrote in the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished "The Triumph of Life." Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him a notorious and much denigrated figure in his own life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Butler Yeats and Subramanya Bharathy(tamil poet)). He was also famous for his association with the contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron. An untimely death at a young age was common to all three. He was married to the famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

He gets more introduction than she gets article!
(hell his index is longer than her entry minus the "Mary Shelly in film" section

[larryhammer]

The past few years I've come to the somewhat reluctant conclusion that Shelley is interesting and important for his influence, if nothing else. His manner and interests reverberate though the next couple generations of Romantic poets, almost as much as Byron's (though without as long a shadow). (So much for coherent metaphors today.) He also has some truly lovely lyrics as good as anyone else writing at the time, though his best work seems to be his occasional verse (like the verse letters) when he isn't trying to be self-consciously poetical.

Also, without Shelley, we wouldn't have gotten one of Keats's three best letters.

---L.

[roguepuppet.livejournal.com]

maybe this is what starts to annoy me about them all so much.. that they are being self-consiously poetical. I love that summary. Instead of just letting the feeling and words flow... it always seems like they are trying so hard... a bit of poetical melodrama..

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Influence yes, and not just on poets. He goes on being influential in radical/free-thought circles throughout C19th.

[roguepuppet.livejournal.com]

honestly, I think that we have somehow over ramanticized the romantic poets. Yes, there is something heady about love and life. Yes, I have felt it.. feel it on pretty much a daily basis. Yes, I have even written poetry about it... but to idealize it as much as we do is off-kilter. There are a lot of artists who are/were actually jerks in real life ( this is not particular to artists- there are a lot of engineers who are jerks as well). Just as I do not judge the quality of a bridge by the life of the engineer, I try hard not to judge the art by the actions of the artist... but it is sometimes difficult to separate.
I always found that the romantic poets, far from beng lyric ( as they are often dscribed) are just windy... they go on and on and on so....

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

Eh, Engineering is an art, one where they force you to learn the basics of the craft side of it before letting you call yourself an artist. (So many artists would have been improved by learning all of the technical bits of art before throwing them out as unneeded.)

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Opinions of both Shelleys and their circle vary widely from biography to biography. Mary is often shown as cold and distant from Percy in later years largely as a result of Jane Williams vindictive remarks.
Similarly byron biographies show Claire Clairmont as a silly girl stalking him, and neglect her considerable wit and intelligence as shown by her later acheivements.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Shelley is worth discussing because:

1) He had a funny middle name
2) He was married to somebody important
3) He happened to die around the same time and place as Keats, and his agent got him a package deal
4) Gladhanding and melodrama are excellent publicity tools (see #3 in re: death)

I tend to think of the Romantic poets as basically fanfic writers, very much under the impression that they'd invented the internet poetry and very much wrought in their passionate pursuit thereof. And like plenty of fanfic writers (and published ones too I am sure), the Big Name and the big talent sometimes coincided, but sometimes didn't.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Well, OK, he was a pretty important poet in his time, and he was a big reason why we have much from John Keats.

He was colorful in ways that catch the notice of people and stick with them for a long time; he was the ur-emo boy. He was a rebel, and that always has appeal.

But as for why he gets more press than Mary--

1. He was a man, and therefore MUST have been more important, at least until feminist critics could make some noise for Mary's sake. Because, you know, mean are more important; it's just the way things are, and no more need be said, because I'll descend into incoherent snark if I try.

2. Poetry was often, in that period, given a greater weight over fiction; the latter was often seen as writing for gain, while poetry was a purer and higher expression of creativity, divorced from pecuniary motives. PBS was a poet; Mary was a novelist. She was also publishing in order to support her family. He was, needless to say, writing and publishing as a result of inspiration and devotion to a Higher Cause.

If either of these thoughts make you want to blow raspberries in either the direction of PBS or a few generations of critics, feel free. But I think that this is what lies behind a lot of it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I was hoping that somebody could offer me reasons OTHER than those. You know, having to do with his actual writing.

Because as far as I can tell, those ARE the reasons that the canon is all over him. (1) Male. (2) Poet. (3) A particular gift for self-presentation.

And possibly (4) because the Romantic ideal of the poet--which is itself mostly Shelley's fault--is largely responsible for the way we fetishize the Artist today. So he's in the canon because he's partly to blame for the idea of the canon.

I was hoping somebody could convince me he was, you know, a POET.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I was hoping somebody could convince me he was, you know, a POET.

I suspect he is one of those John-the-Baptistlike figures who turns up to prepare the way for the next great coming, in this case, Keats, and is therefore important because of that rather than because of much that he personally wrote, though I may be doing him a deeply buried disservice. I don't know that much about him other than his Defence of Poetry (put down the Philip Sidney, back away from it) and something I heard recently about the Mask of Anarchy, which did, I admit, intrigue me. I cannot help feeling that had he lived he would have written less poetry as time went by and would have become more overtly political.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Well, some days he was pretty good. Then again, some days he was off, too. I think this is one of those things that falls into Taste, No Accounting for. Also, a lot of the early critics were pretty dazzled by his personality and looks, as well as, IMHO, a certain amount of wishful thinking "There, if I had but the nerve and guts to burn all my bridges, could go I." I suspect that, removed from his own time and his fanboys, there's not as much there as they thought, which is what you are scenting.

There are a few pieces that shine, still. {As mentioned here by someone else, "Ozmandias".) But when we add him up, we're adding him up without the effect of the man himself, and thus our sum is not the same as the on his contemporaries and those close in time to him came up with. I don't see how it can be, either.

Also, we've done rebels. We can be Less than Impressed by rebels. Rebels are no longer Not New, they've become something we can mock, when we think they merit mockery. Shelley was a Rebel when it was a new idea, and I think he stuck in people's awareness because of that.

And once in the canon, you can't pry 'em out with a crowbar.

Then again, there's John Crowe Ransom's jab:

Sing a song for Percy Shelley,
Drowned in pale lemon jelly

from this (http://vmlinux.org/ilse/lit/ransom.htm).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I <3 John Crowe Ransom.*

Really, that's all I have to say.

---
*One of the best English assignments I ever had in high school was a compare and contrast paper of his poem "Dead Cousin" with somebody else's poem "Dead Boy." Poetry is all about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug, and that assignment taught me to understand that. Also the incomparable value of specificity.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I <3 him too. I first read "Survey of Literature" about 30 years ago. I was very young and painfully serious about poetry, and it had not occurred to me that poets could get away with being so unkind about other poets.

It was oddly liberating.

[namastenancy.livejournal.com]

Well, he died young in a tragic (ie stupid) accident and had long flowing locks. Doesn't that make him poetic?

I'm with you on the blah bit on the romantic poets. Byron had a more interesting life but they all were assholes supreme to the women in their lives. I realize that I shouldn't judge the period by my standards but I'm afraid that it's impossible not to.
Besides, all that flowery etherial stuff while letting your wife handle all the difficult business of life - ug!

I think you are right.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

That, and such notable doggerel as this:

When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead -
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.

Okay, I've read worse. And it's better than Wordsworth. And "Ozymandias" is a pretty good poem.

But it's not a patch on Keats or the shorter and more imagistic Byron.

Re: I think you are right.

[the_rck]

Somewhere around here, on an old cassette tape (copy of a copy, at least), I have a recording of a filksing that included someone (I have no idea who) singing "Ozymandias." It works quite well as a song.

Re: I think you are right.

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

Most filkers who sing "Ozymandias" sing Dave Weingart's arrangement (or variations thereof - his is pretty rock-ballad-y, which is tough to pull off with solo vocalist and acoustic guitar). Dave is filkerdave; not sure where his lyric page and MP3s have wandered off to.

Luscious phrasing

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Like

My ear is open like a greedy shark,
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.

Sorry, anyone can slip, but that one sticks with me.

Re: Luscious phrasing

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Yes. My twitch is more of a Homer-himself-occasionally-nods thing. Sometimes, when you have a really great gift for imagery, you need to think twice before taking it out of the drawer and turning it on. That sucker can turn in your hand and--ooops.

[carbonel]

I can't actually answer your question in the real world, but I do recommend Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard, which proposes a Grand Unified Field Theory of the Romantic poets. I don't like most of Tim Powers' books all that much, but that one leaves me open-mouthed in admiration.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Shelley is all about the long form, and I'm a short-form reader myself. I am therefore deaf to what's supposed to be his best work.

Keats, however... mmmmm.

[larryhammer]

Well, mid-length forms -- by which I mean between 100-1000 lines. His truly long forms are rarely readable except in extract.

---L.

[larryhammer]

I find Prometheus unreadable except in extracts, and can no longer separate Adonais from my anger at its role in mythologizing Keats.

The Cenci is the one long work I'd argue for excempting from my blanket statement.

---L.

[menin-aeide.livejournal.com]

For this (http://www.savagenet.com/oz/Oz/) and this (http://www.bartleby.com/101/610.html).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Which makes him a minor poet with a Shakespeare complex. (I'm not arguing that "Ozymandias" is not a great poem, btw.) I'm trying to figure out why he's treated as a major poet.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Fanboys.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I didn't want that to be the answer.

Really and truly, I didn't.

I wanted to be like Saul on the road to Damascus and have the scales fall from my eyes.

I mean, he still would have been a narcissistic little shit, but I would have been able to feel that he'd been canonized for reasons OTHER than being a narcissistic little shit.

It seems, however, that I am doomed to my cynicism. Alas and also alack.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

There are certainly people out there for whom it is not the answer.
But I can't make him into PoetryGod myself; and if you can't either, then you just can't.

I suspect part of it is the effect of the personality. Think about evaluating people like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer without their aura of personal myth. When I was 20 or so, people were just beginning to be able to do this to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as critical writing about them began to be done by people who hadn't been their contemporaries, or known them, or known those who were close to them, so that they were less affected by that factor.

Also, a work can be so much of its times that it develops a reputation far above its merits, when viewed apart from those times. (*cough* Dune *cough*)

Both may be factors here with Shelley.

[menin-aeide.livejournal.com]

Personally, I have a difficulty getting the distinction between major and minor poets. I suspect it boils down to the sociology of EngLit through the ages, or something like that. You don't get this sort of thing quite as much in other literatures which lack such a formidable LitCrit establishment (I'm thinking of Spanish literature here).

Then again, I've always found Shelley more likeable than that pompous übergit Byron - not the brightest light, and certainly incredibly naïve in his politics, but essentially well-meaning. It's Keats's death that breaks my heart, though.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Keats is in a different league.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Me, senior year of high school, AP English, having just learned we'd be studying poetry: Will we be doing any Swinburne?

English teacher, crushingly: No, we won't be doing any of the minor poets.

Me: Oh. *goes on to nearly fail class because of Joyce and Conrad*

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Shelley’s greatest work of art was, in fact, not a poem but his own reputation. He did not create the stock figure of the poète maudit, but he and Byron were the first to perfect and actually live the part. This theatrical antinomianism has become the stock pose of the artistic, Romantic, and revolutionary poseur the world over, and Shelley is accordingly revered as its inventor. (Byron has Don Juan and some other genuinely great poems to fall back upon. His ghost has its own intellectual capital to live on, and so leaves Shelley to draw all the profits from the poète maudit business.)

By the way, ‘Ozymandias’ is a good enough sonnet, but it would never have earned its present reputation if it had not become a sort of anti-national anthem for the Little Englanders in Victorian times, and subsequently for generations of anti-imperialists. Ozymandias, King of Kings, was in fact meant to stand for the British Empire, which Shelley hated bitterly for destroying that other Romantic rebel, Napoleon. This becomes perfectly clear if you read the sonnet, ‘On a Stupendous Leg of Granite’, written by Shelley’s friend Horace Smith. ‘Stupendous Leg’ and ‘Ozymandias’ were written as a contest to see which poet could compose the best sonnet upon a given subject — which Shelley easily won, for Smith’s sonnet is at least half as bad as its title. But Smith’s sonnet has a kind of forensic virtue which Shelley’s lacks: it was blatantly and inartistically obvious about what its subject-matter meant.

I have touched on this, and a good many other related topics (including my LJ name), in this essay (http://www.bondwine.com/tomsimon/essays/superversive.html). You might find it of interest; and den again you moutn’t.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Can anyone explain to me why we study Percy Bysshe Shelley as anything more than a minor Romantic poet and the husband of the author of Frankenstein?

Why, no. No, I cannot.

[carandol.livejournal.com]

Dunno. I tend to think of him as the husband of the author of Frankenstein, myself. Though Ozymandias was good. And Ode to the West Wind is quite fun to declaim loudly in a gale. But even in my most anarchist phase, I found The Masque of Anarchy dull...

[complicittheory.livejournal.com]

I've always yawned over the romantic poets which was a major pain, in that two of my degrees were primarily on poets. I thought they were... I'd better not start. I was always more partial to the pre-romantics (collins, grey, smart, young), and of course Blake. I've always jokingly accused the romantics to be the spindoctors of the industrial revolution; providing some maudlin diversions. Needless to say I was enouraged to not become an English prof. Would that people read the poets that really rocked rather than justifying a useless cannon... though I admit I'm still really partial to Shakey, Sidney and Spenser, but that's due to a great mentor.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Belatedly, I'm reading Julie Philips' biography of Tiptree, and have just come across a comment from Le Guin to Tiptree about Shelley:

'He is like oysters; you do, or you don't; if you don't, he makes you sick to look at; and if you do, he is simply in a class by himself.'