SHELLEY’S DEVELOPMENT AS A POET

INTRODUCTION:

J.C. Smith writing on Shelley, says: “No poet suffered severer re-probation in his life and none perhaps has evoked more ardent sympathy and admiration in later years than this Strange offshoot from an otherwise undistinguished aristocratic family.’ In such a poor state and circumstances, Shelley began writing both verse and prose at a very early stage. But his boyhood writings are of little importance for they are more of imitation than of originality.

EARLY-STAGE:

As Desmond king puts it “His skill in poetry was a gradual growth”. Shelley’s first poem Queen Mab (1812-13 has a considerable biographical and psychological interest as the starting- point of his later development. It is a strange poem, a confused yet eloquent record of a confused state of feeling through which a young poet who never quite understood either himself or other men, was passing. This poem is an exposition of Godwin’s doctrines and his trench atheistic and revolutionist teachings and in imitation of Robert Southey’s works. This piece of work foreshadows the two great themes of Shelley-belief in the existence of Heaven and the development of man towards perfection. Thus from the beginning we Shelley as a poet with the belief in the existence of goodness, and I leaven, and the possibility that the world can be transformed into the likeness of Heaven.

Queen Mob (1813) had foreshadowed faintly the subject matter of his mature poetry, but it has hardly any of its wonderful music. That music is heard for the first time in the first of his great works, Alastor (1815). Alastor is a poem of an idealized version of Shelley himself. It is about a tragic idealist who vainly pursues the perfect beauty until his death which is described at the conclusion of the poem in lines of solemn beauty. The value of Alastor lies not in its story but in its mood of ardent aspiration, its magnificent description of nature, and the noble music of its blank verse which owes much to Wordsworth. This is the beginning of Shelley’s apprenticeship to his art.

Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty belong to the memorable period of Shelley’s friendship with Byron in 1816 and express the Shelleyan idealism.

Next comes The Revolt of Islam (1818) a still more ambitious, revolutionary, allegorical poem modeled on Spenser’s work. This piece is a combination of Shelley’s two invariable motives-a passionate philanthropy and an equally passionate eroticism. He feels the liberation of mankind is to be achieved by eloquent persuasion. It contains individual passages of very great beauty with the use of language in an entirely new and distinctive manner. The chief and sole beauty of the poem lies in the music of the blank verse and poetic imagery, where his characteristic style appears fully developed for the first time.

Prince Athanase is a fragment where the eternal warfare of the idealist seems to have been the theme and it pictures a philosophic converse between a young disciple and a ‘divine old man’. The Revolt of Islam and this beautiful unfinished fragment of Prince Athanase Shelley’s apprenticeship may be said to end.

A MATURED POET:

The first works of his maturity are the great lyrics tines Written in Euganean Hills and Julian and Maddalo, composed after his arrival in Italy. In Julian and Maddalo, he celebrates his friendship with Byron, a masterpiece of a kind rarely achieved. It is a perfect example of a verse that is at once familiar and even colloquial and yet highly poetical. What is remarkable iii this mastery is that Shelley carries it over into his major achievement, the great lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound.

Prometheus Unbound (1818-1819) is the most ambitious and central attempt of the poet to render his reading of life, the mystery of good and evil and to give adequate embodiment to his own ambition as poet and reformer:

‘I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms “a passion for reforming the world”.’

To Shelley, Prometheus is the embodiment of the wisdom and heroism of humanity, while Jupiter of tyranny and superstition where he is the representative of the whole machinery of legalism and respectability which Shelley considered to be the burden under which the world was groaning, we portray eternity overpowering tyranny and tyranny is removed by the spirit of love and beauty and thus the regeneration of the world. But in the Fourth Act he portrays a magnificent lyrical vision of a new heaven and a new earth, where time itself has been replaced by Eternity and man has become

One harmonious soul of many a soul
Whose nature is its own divine control
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.

The central theme of Prometheus Unbound is again that of Godwinism-an enslaved world of evils regenerated by their sudden overthrow. But here, the abstractions of Godwinism are not that of a political philosopher, but of a creator of mythology. Macaulay rightly comments on this:

“He turned atheism itself into mythology, rich with visions as glorious as the gods that live in the marble of Phidias or the virgin saints that smile on us from the canvas of Murillo. The spirit of Beauty, the principle of good, the principle of evil when he treated of them, ceased to be abstractions. They took shape and color. They were no longer mere words, but ‘intelligible forms, ‘fair humanities, of’ love, of adoration, or of fear,”

Most of the critics are tempted to consider the characters of Prometheus Unbound as inhuman. They are inhuman because they represent mythical and elemental beings and no men and women otherwise it can’t be judged as a drama. Shelley wrote to Peacock:

“It is a drama, with character and mechanism of a kind yet unattempted”

This poem is noted for its vast orchestrated lyricism representing a series of visions of an ideal world.

From this piece, it is understood, he has risen to the highest line and it is seen that his original ideas of a perfect world and of regeneration are now deepened and transformed by the study of Plato, of Spinoza, and of Dante and the existing power is no longer Reason but Love.

The Cenci (1819) is a work in a different manner where Shelley shows his skill in handling any subject and mastering an uncongenial style. It is a tragedy of Italian life and displays his lack of knowledge of human nature, for a play on such a theme is seldom successful. Shelley’s treatment of the tragic horror as tragic dignity with a restraint and a delicacy gives the play a unique place among tragic dramas of modern times. “He does not reproduce with modifications the style of Shakespeare, but does what Shakespeare did idealize without describing the language of contemporary speech” , says A. C. Bradley.

SHELLEY, A SATIRIST:

To comment upon Shelley’s sarcasm, Peter Bell The Third is an apt example. It is a satire on Wordsworth, a “dull” poet, and recalls the earlier Wordsworth, a man of false ideals who composed poems on ‘moor and glen and rocky Lake/And on the heart of man’. Shelley criticizes the reactionary politician who once welcomed revolution and the dull poet, Wordsworth himself, who was very famous.

Though Shelley had not much natural aptitude for satire, yet he was successful in his attempts. In Mask of Anarchy (1819) and Swellfoot (1820), he shows his skill in handling the theme of politics also.

The Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820) displays his ability to write an easy, natural, yet poetical conversation. The Witch of Ailas (1820) composed in the ottava rima like that of Byron’s best poems, is a contrast to his other works for it is a long poem of the pure escape of fancy weaving a myth of deliverance from Shelley’s imagined troubles, personal and human, where he gives his imagination free play.

In The Sensitive Plant, he finds out a new symbol for his own ‘love of love’. In Adonais (1821) the great elegy on Keats, he reincarnates the Greek pastoral lament and reveals his faith in the spiritual reality.
Shelley’s famous and short poems The Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud, The Skylark are written in verse forms of his own innovation, about the divinity of Nature and the Supreme Power.

The Letter to Maria Gisborne celebrates his intellectual friendship without any imitation and it is a poetry of fun with human thought and common sense.

Epipsychidion (1821) is a poem inspired by his admiration for Emilia Viviani, an Italian girl who was imprisoned in a convent at Pisa. It is also an expression of that “high, sweet, mystic doctrine of love” taught by Plato in the Symposium and Dante in the Vita Nuovcz though marred, as Swinburne has justly pointed out, by “such mere personal allusions as can only perplex and irritate the patience and intelligence of a loyal student.” It’s a personal poem that demonstrates his weaknesses and strong points more than any other poem does.

Hellas (1821), the lyrical drama is described by Shelley as a sort of imitation of the Personae of Aeschylus. He wrote this to celebrate the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. Though much lighter than Prometheus Unbound, it is marked for Shelley’s most beautiful and finished lyrical verse. The lyrical movement of the “Chorus”, marks the highest form of Shelley’s rhythmical invention.

In 1821, a slight change came over the tone of the shorter lyrics, but the achievements of 1821 were scarcely inferior to those of 1819.

In 1821, Peacock wrote The Four Ages of Poetry, attacking the poetry of his own age, and to defend it, Shelley wrote his greatest prose A Defence of Poetry which ranges far beyond the scope of literature. It expresses a profound philosophy of art and is equally valuable as a critical work of universal application, and as a revelation of Shelley’s own theory and practice of poetry. It reveals the extraordinary power and beauty of the language.

LAST ACHIEVEMENT:

His last achievement is The Triumph of Life (1821) which is a fragment as he died before completing it. Here he states his philosophy of life that “Life is what triumphs over Nature, triumphs over imagination. Life is death-in-life, cold, common hell in which we wake to weep”. It’s in the form of Italian ‘terza rima’, strongly influenced by Dante and Petrarch. Some are of the opinion that had this work been finished, it might have been one of the greatest English poems.

CONCLUSION.

Some may claim that Shelley’s poetry stands less high in recent English estimation than it did even before the war. But to Saintsbury he is nevertheless the quintessential poet and to Herford as to A. C. Bradley and Gilbert Murray, he is still both poet and prophet.

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