18. Shelley’s Style and Diction. Shelley’s poetry varies considerably in style. He was a more accomplished ‘man of letters’ than the other romantic poets; he could vary his manner successfully to suit the tone of his work, as in The Cenci, his stage play, or in familiar or humorous poems such as Julian and Maddalo and Peter Bell the Third. His style is unique and inimitable. His descriptions of natural scenes, for instance, are full of delightful suggestiveness for the imaginative reader,
Spontaneity and fluidity are the proof of his wealth of imagination. There is no effect of laborious artistry about Shelley’s style at any time. “The language is poetical through and through,” says Bradley, “not, as sometimes with Wordsworth, only half- poetical, and yet it seems to drop from Shelley’s lips. It is not wrought and kneaded; it flows. The spontaneity and fluidity Shelley’s writing are present almost equally in the narrative Spenserians of the revolt of Islam and the dramatic blank verse of The Cenci; and fully, though not constantly, in his highest flights; and they help to make the best of his quieter lyrics comparable with the best Elizabethan songs”
“Shelley, of all the great Romantic poets of the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the most spontaneous Byron was equally fluent; but Byron’s highest achievements do not reach Shelley’s level, and his fluency was attended by a self-consciousness from which Shelley was entirely free.” His poetry is rich in lyrics in which the emotion of the heart takes form in words without effort. Nor has any other poet sung to one clear harp in so many diverse tones. His verse, responsive to the influence of every mood, trembles and sighs with alternating despondency and hope. In the Ode to the West Wind it moves to stately music, wrapped in a garment of splendid imagery. In the lines To a Skylark it takes wing with its subject ‘in profuse Strains of unpremeditated art’. Alone among modern poets, Swinburne, his most ardent disciple, has surpassed him in variety of meter and music.
“The variety of Shelley’s poetic style,” says Professor Elton, “is great. In a poem like the Hymn of pan or To Question it can be called romantic, in the more special sense; it is rich, and joyous, and full of colours and odours and liquid bird notes, approaching in character to the style of Keats”. He could vary his style successfully to suit the tone of his work In his short lyrics his art of overture, development and close, and his choice of meter correspond with his mood and emotion. But his skill in poetic construction is fitful. In The revolt of Islam it is slight or null, but it is at its highest in The Cenci, and in his lyrics.
Shelley’s diction is marked by directness, clarity, purity, magnificence, and strength. In vocabulary and phrase his diction is almost unsurpassingly pure; it seldom aims at strangeness, and it shows none of that anxious testing and adoption of Elizabethan forms which Leigh Hunt taught to Keats. His gift of musical diction and movement is unique.
Shelley has also certain limitations as a poet. He is sometimes accused of unsubstantiality and vagueness. Though there may be some truth in Arnold’s criticism of Shelley as “ a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain, but it is certainly too hard. When we study his poetry for its own sake, we forget the man in our admiration of the poet for it is poetry such as the world has rarely seen, not philosophical like that of Wordsworth or Browning, or popular like that of Burns or Tennyson, but suffused with a creative beauty of a purely poetical quality which has appeared in no other English poet with the exception of Spenser, and, to a lesser degree, Keats. Its dazzling images, its rapid rhythms, its grad and delicacy of touch, its exquisite melodies and harmonies, win us to forget the vagaries of the reformer in the perfection of the artist.”
