Poets and Poems.
Metadata
- Author: Unknown
Highlights
Most central is the prophetic intensity; as much a result of displaced Protestantism as it is in Blake or in Wordsworth, but seeming more an Orphic than Hebraic phenomenon when it appears in Shelley. Religious poet as he primarily was, what Shelley prophesied was one restored Man who transcended men, gods, the natural world, and even the poetic faculty. Shelley chants the apotheosis, not of the poet, but of desire itself. — location: 2162
Shelley is an intense lyricist as Alexander Pope is an intense satirist; even as Pope assimilates every literary form he touches to satire, so Shelley converts forms as diverse as drama, prose essay, romance, satire, epyllion, into lyric. — location: 2173
More than all other poets, Shelley’s compulsion is to present life as a direct confrontation of equal realities. This compulsion seeks absolute intensity, and courts straining and breaking in consequence. When expressed as love, it must manifest itself as mutual destruction: — location: 2176
“Mont Blanc” is a poem of the age of Shelley’s father-in-law, William Godwin, while the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” belongs to the age of Wordsworth, Shelley’s lost leader in the realms of emotion. — location: 2205
The figure of the Solitary, in The Excursion, is the central instance of the most fundamental of Romantic archetypes, the man alienated from others and himself by excessive self-consciousness. Whatever its poetic lapses, The Excursion is our most extensive statement of the Romantic mythology of the Self, — location: 2226
For this nature is a mirror-world, like that in Blake’s “The Crystal Cabinet,” or in much of Keats’s Endymion. Its pyramids and domes are sepulchers for the imagination, and all its appearances are illusive, phantasmagoric, and serve only to thwart the poet’s vision, and drive him on more fearfully upon his doomed and self-destructive quest. Alastor prophesies The Triumph of Life, and in the mocking light of the later poem the earlier work appears also to have been a dance of death. — location: 2245
and the terza rima fragment, Prince Athanase, written late in 1817, a few months after The Revolt of Islam was finished, shows the poet back upon his true way, the study of the isolated imagination. — location: 2253
if we will grant him his mask’s validity we do find in him one of the archetypes of the imagination, the introspective, prematurely old poet, turning his vision outward to the world from his lonely tower of meditation: — location: 2258
The urbane conversationalist, the relentlessly direct and emotionally uninhibited lyricist, and the elevated prophet of a great age to come join together in the poet of Prometheus Unbound, a climactic work which is at once celebratory and ironic, profoundly idealistic and as profoundly skeptical, passionately knowing its truths and as passionately agnostic towards all truth. — location: 2273
and his — location: 2280
That abyss is Demogorgon’s, in Prometheus Unbound, and its secrets are not revealed by him, for “a voice is wanting, the deep truth is imageless,” and Demogorgon is a shapeless darkness. — location: 2285
Wallace Stevens’ conception of poetry as the Supreme Fiction, and Prometheus Unbound is the most capable imagining, outside of Blake and Wordsworth, that the Romantic quest for a Supreme Fiction has achieved. — location: 2295
Shelley’s skeptical and provisional idealism is not Plato’s, and Shelley’s major poems are mythopoeic, and not translatable into any terms but their own highly original ones. — location: 2300
Nothing is further from Shelley’s mind and art than the Platonic view of knowledge, and nothing is further from Shelley’s tentative myths than the dogmatic myths of Plato. — location: 2309
Shelley resembles Wordsworth or Ruskin in valuing so highly certain ecstatic moments of aesthetic contemplation precisely because the moments are fleeting, because they occupy, as Blake said, the pulsation of an artery. — location: 2314
Prometheus has a resemblance both to Blake’s Orc and to his Los; Jupiter is almost a double for Urizen, Asia approximates Blake’s Jerusalem, while Demogorgon has nothing in common with any of Blake’s “Giant Forms.” But, despite this last, the shape of Shelley’s myth is very like Blake’s. A unitary Man fell, and split into torturing and tortured components, and into separated male and female forms as well. The torturer is not in himself a representative of comprehensive evil, because he is quite limited; indeed, he has been invented by his victim, and falls soon after his victim ceases to hate his own invention. Shelley’s Jupiter, like Urizen in one of his aspects, is pretty clearly the Jehovah of institutional and historical Christianity. — location: 2355
Prometheus in Shelley is both the archetypal imagination (Blake’s Los) and the primordial energies of man (Blake’s Orc). Jupiter, like Urizen again, is a limiter of imagination and of energy. He may masquerade as reason, but he is nothing of the kind, being a mere circumscriber and binder, like the God of Paradise Lost, Book III (as opposed to the very different, creative God of Milton’s Book VII). — location: 2366
She is less than the absolute vainly sought by the poet-hero of Alastor, though she is more presumably than the mortal Emilia of Epipsychidion can hope to represent. Her function is to hold the suffering natural world open to the transcendent love or Intellectual Beauty that hovers beyond it, — location: 2372
Like the emanations in Blake, she may be taken as the total spiritual form or achieved aesthetic form quested after by her lover, Prometheus. She is less than the absolute vainly sought by the poet-hero of Alastor, though she is more presumably than the mortal Emilia of Epipsychidion can hope to represent. Her function is to hold the suffering natural world open to the transcendent love or Intellectual Beauty that hovers beyond it, — location: 2371
Shelley’s Demogorgon, like the unknown Power of Mont Blanc, is morally unallied; he is the god of skepticism, and thus the preceptor of our appalling freedom to imagine well or badly. — location: 2384
Martin Price, writing of Blake’s religion, observes that “Blake can hardly be identified as theist or humanist; the distinction becomes meaningless for him. God can only exist within man, but man must be raised to a perception of the infinite. Blake rejects both transcendental deity and natural man.” The statement is equally true for the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound, if one modifies rejection of transcendental deity to a skeptical opening toward the possibility of such a Power. — location: 2392
Shelley hears a cry of leaves that do transcend themselves, and he deliberately seeks a further transcendence that will metamorphosize “the thing itself” into human form, so that at last the cry will concern all men. — location: 2425
The triple invocation to the elements of earth, air, and water occupies the first three stanzas of the poem, and the poet himself does not enter those stanzas; in them he is only a voice imploring the elements to hear. In the fourth stanza, the poet’s ego enters the poem, but in the guise only of a battered job, seeking to lose his own humanity. From this nadir, the extraordinary and poignantly “broken” music of the last stanza rises up, into the poet’s own element of fire, to affirm again the human dignity of the prophet’s vocation, and to suggest a mode of imaginative renovation that goes beyond the cyclic limitations of nature. Rarely in the history of poetry have seventy lines done so much so well. — location: 2432
Its true companions, and descendants, are Browning’s giant progression of dramatic monologues, The Ring and the Book, and certain works of Hardy that share its oddly effective quality of what might be termed dramatic solipsism, to have recourse to a desperate oxymoron. — location: 2475
Shelley’s Beatrice and Blake’s Oothoon are either too human or not human enough; the reader is uncomfortable in not knowing whether he encounters a Titaness or one of his own kind. — location: 2481
Tragedy becomes the fall of the imagination, or rather the falling away from imaginative conduct on the part of a heroically imaginative individual. — location: 2493
The natural man in the reader exults at Beatrice’s metamorphosis into a relentless avenger, and approves even her untruthful denial of responsibility for her father’s murder. The imaginative man in the reader is appalled at the degeneration of an all-but-angelic intelligence into a skilled intriguer and murderess. This fundamental dichotomy in the reader is the theater where the true anguish of The Cenci is enacted. The overt theme becomes the universal triumph of life over integrity, which is to say of death-in-life over life. — location: 2503
As a parable of imaginative failure, the poem is another of the many Romantic versions of the Miltonic Eden’s transformation into a wasteland, but the limitations it explores are not the Miltonic ones of human irresolution and disobedience. Like all of Shelley’s major poems, The Sensitive Plant is a skeptical work, the skepticism here manifesting itself as a precariously poised suspension of judgment on the human capacity to perceive whether or not natural or imaginative values survive the cyclic necessities of change and decay. — location: 2518
What is lost is innocence, natural harmony, the mutual interpenetrations of a merely given condition that is nevertheless whole and beyond the need of justification. The new state, experiential life as seen in Part III of the poem, is the world without imagination, a tract of weeds. — location: 2528
Implicit in Shelley’s poem is a passionate refutation of time, but the passion is a desperation unless the mind’s imaginings can cleanse perception of its obscurities. — location: 2535
If the Witch is to be translated at all into terms not her own, then she can only be the mythopoeic impulse or inventive faculty itself, one of whose manifestations is the Hermaphrodite, which we can translate as a poem, or any work of art. The Witch’s boat is the emblem of her creative desire, and like the Hermaphrodite it works against nature. — location: 2551
The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. — location: 2573
The mind in creation, here and in A Defense of Poetry, is as a fading coal, and much of Shelley’s art in the poem is devoted to the fading phenomenon, as image after image recedes and the poet-lover feels more fearfully the double burden of his love’s inexpressibility and its necessary refusal to accept even natural, let alone societal, limitations. — location: 2587
Adonais is a high song of poetic self-recognition in the presence of foreshadowing death, and also a description of poetic existence, even of a poem’s state of being. — location: 2609
From frost to fire as a mode of renewal for the self: that is an archetypal Romantic pattern, familiar to us from The Ancient Mariner and the Intimations Ode (see the contrast between the last line of stanza VIII and the first of stanza IX in that poem). — location: 2614
Rousseau and Hume make an odd formula of heart and head in Shelley, but they are the closest parallels to be found to him on the emotional and intellectual sides respectively. — location: 2672
Rousseau is betrayed to the light of life because he began by yielding his imagination’s light to the lesser but seductive light of nature, represented in the poem by the “Shape all light” who offers him the waters of natural experience to drink. He drinks, he begins to forget everything in the mind’s desire that had transcended nature, and so he falls victim to Life’s destruction, and fails to become one of “the sacred few.” — location: 2684
If irony is an awareness of the terrible gap between aspiration and fulfillment, then the skeptical Shelley is among the most ironical of poets. — location: 2700
Shelley, at his greatest, precisely chants an energetic becoming that cannot be described in the concrete because its entire purpose is to modify the concrete, to compel a greater reality to appear: — location: 2720
giving—the sense of the human making choice of a human self, aware of its deathly nature, and yet having the will to celebrate the imaginative richness of mortality. — location: 2854
Keats, like Stevens, fears the angelic imposition of any order upon reality, and hopes to discover a possible order in the human and the natural, even if that order be only the cyclic rhythm of tragedy. Stevens’s definitive discovery is in the final sections of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction; Keats’s similar fulfillment is in his perfect poem, To Autumn. — location: 2925
To weave is to wind is to wander is to turn is to blight and blast. Blight and blast what and how? The surprising answer is: voice, which of course is the prophet’s one gift. Blake wendhs as the harlot wendhs, and both to the same result: the loss of human voice. For what is an “infant”? “Infant,” “ban,” and “prophet” all come from the same root, the Indo-European Bha, which is a root meaning “to speak.” — location: 781
Fire is the prime perspectivizing trope in all of Romanticism, as we will see again and again. It stands, most often, for discontinuity or for the possibility of, or desire towards discontinuity. Its opposite, the emblem of repetition or continuity, tends to be the inland sound of moving waters. — location: 900
For Petrarch the perfection of literary form, which exists polished and unchanging on the page in a kind of eternity, is achieved only at the cost of the poet’s natural life. His vitality must be metamorphosed into words, and this process is profoundly ambiguous. — location: 133
Petrarch is always calling attention to the psychologically relative, even suspect, origin of individual poems and thus of writing itself. His hope is that ultimately the great theme of praise will redeem even the egotism of the celebrant. — location: 138
Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity. There is therefore scarcely any species of writing, of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are its constituents; every new genius produces some innovation which, when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of foregoing authors had established. — location: 330
The desultorily moving imagination