SHELLEY’S OPTIMISM

 George M. Ridenour observer: “Shelley’s optimism is based on chances for extracting benefit from an order of things not obviously concerned with man. As he himself observers at the beginning of his ‘proposals for an Association of Philantropists’ Man cannot make occasions, but he may seize those that offer.” This is classical, as Shelley knew. He expended a cynical epigram of the palatine Anthology: Under the heaving High Cope/Fortune is God, all you endure and do /Depends on circumstances as much as you”. But it is possible to reverse the emphasis and point put that it depends on you as much as circumstance, and this is Shelley’s usual way. He assumes that while man’s mind and what it experiences concur only imperfectly the extent of disproportion can at least be reduced. Art, science and social organization can reshape the experienced world nearer to the heart’s desire. But as we have noticed, Shelley’s emphasis falls on what, for want of better terms, we must call the spiritual or psychological. He hopes it is possible to exercise the mind in such a way that, without deception the elements favourable to man may be strengthened the hostile reduced and man finds the good he seeks . The strategy is a delicate one involving a complex,interplay of active and passive, inner and outer, mind and experience, as in the intricate gearing of Alastor, intellectual Beauty or Mant Blanc. The movement upward of the mind often involves an imaginative projection of what ought to be, which is itself to some extent received- e.g., the vision in Alastor. The passive aspect involves an inner disposition that Shelley usually calls love, roughly the effective correlative to the more consciously shaping power. Together they make up man’s capacity for integrated experience, i. e., imagination. Shelley points out that even limited success is evidence that the non-human world is at least amenable to human purposes and he hopes that it may suggest an ultimate identity in Nature.

Conclusion: Many critics who consider Shelley’s poetry as wanting in substance refuse to take seriously the Philosophy it professes to preach, and do not regard him as a philosophic poet at all. But a systematic study of his poetry reveals the fact that Shelley was a truly philosophic poet and we cannot arrive at a proper appreciation of his poetry if we dismiss his philosophy as frivolous. Baker remarks: “Yes Shelley has not been taken seriously as a philosophical poet, and one often gathers from remarks of his critics, whether inimical or worshipful that his Philosophy does not matter. Yes it does matter and vitally so because it is always either the central matter of his poetry, or the frame of reference in terms of which his poetry has been written.”