19. Shelley’s Position in English Poetry. Shelley does not belong to the same rank as Shakespeare or Milton. He has neither Shakespeare’s sweeping vision and intimate knowledge of human nature and his genial and sunshiny humour, nor Milton’s puissant and splendid imagination, workmanship and grand style. Like Shakespeare he has never explored the recesses of the human heart or the motive-springs of human will or sounded the whole gamut of human passion. Certainly Shakespeare’s range and variety and depth of knowledge and experience was beyond the reach of Shelley who died prematurely only at the age of 29. Shelley’s superiority lies not in drama or epic but in the domain of lyrical poetry in English literature. Here he reigns supreme. He has enriched English poetry with superb imagery and enchanting melodies. His spontaneity is marvellous. Shelley is regarded as the greatest lyric poet in English. In lyric he is among the greatest of the world. Saintsbury regards that “few competent critics deny that, taking volume and quality together, Shelley is the greatest lyric poet in English.” “As a lyrical poet Shelley is,’ says Prof Cazamian, “the greatest that England or perhaps modern Europe has produced.”
Says Bradley: “What he says is highly characteristics of his own practice in composition. He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its way, without pausing to complete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not come; and the next day (if ever) he filled up the gaps and smoothed the ragged edges. And the result answers to his theory. Keats was right in telling him that he might be more of an artist. His language, indeed, unlike Wordsworth’s or Byron’s, is, in his mature work, always that of a poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently defuses and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the mould so veheniently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its way into all the litth’ crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. It has the rapture of the mystic, and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly said of the hymn Life of Life: ‘He seems to go up into the air and burst. It is true: and, if we are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not compare Life of Life with a great set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that illumines the whole sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling sight than the heavenward rush of rocket, and, it bursts at height no other fire can reach.
“He is haunted by the fancy that if he could only get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete aloofness from the many, from life with all its change, decay, struggle, sorrow, and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry, as if the whole finite world were a mere mistake of illusion, the sheer opposite of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation. Life, he says:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity;
but the other side, the fact that many colours are the white light broken, he tends to forget, by no means always, but in one and that not the least inspired, of his moods. This is the source of that thinness and shallowness of which his view of the world is justly accused, a view in which all imperfect being is apt to figure as absolutely gratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure white or pitch black. Hence also his ideals of good, whether as a character or as mode of life, resting as they do on abstraction from the mass of real existence, tend to lack body and individuality, and indeed, if the existence of many is a mere calamity, clearly the next best thing to their disappearance is that they should all be exactly alike and have as little character as possible. But we must remember that Shelley’s strength and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of aspiration towards it in which his poetry is unequalled.”
In the end we will give the views of some critics of the present century who have summed up the chief characteristics of Shelley’s poetry.
Yeats observes: From these scattered fragments and observations and from many passages read in their light, one some comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the liberty of Political Justice that it was one with intellectual beauty, and that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the regeneration many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come in its perfection till the hours bore ‘Time to his grave in eternity.’
T.S. Eliot says: Shelley both had views about poetry and made use of poetry for expressing views. With Shelley we are struck from the beginning by the number of things poetry is expected to do; from poet who tells us in a note on vegetarianism, that ‘the orange-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and the number of his teeth’, we shall not know what to expect. The notes to Queen Mab express, it is true, only the views of an intelligent and enthusiastic schoolboy, but a schoolboy who knows how to write; and throughout his work, which is of no small bulk for a short life, he does not, I think, let us forget that he took his ideas seriously. The ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of adolescence—as there is every reason why they should be. And an enthusiasm for Shelley seems to me also to be an affair of adolescence: for most of us, Shelley has marked an intense period before maturity, but for how many does. Shelley remain the companion of age? I confess that I never open the volume of his poems simply because I want to read poetry, but only with some special reason for reference. I find his ideas repellent; and the difficulty of separating Shelley from his ideas and beliefs is still greater than with Wordsworth. And the biographical interest which Shelley has always excited makes it difficult to read the poetry without remembering the man : and the man was humourless, pedantic, self-centred, and sometimes almost a blackguard.
Shelley seems to have had to a high degree the unusual faculty of passionate apprehension of abstract ideas. Whether he was not sometimes confused about his own feelings, as we may be tempted to believe when confounded by the philosophy of Epipsychidion, is another matter. I do not mean that Shelley had a metaphysical or philosophical mind; his mind was in some ways a very confused one:
he was able to be at once and with the same enthusiasm an eighteenth century rationalist and a cloudy Platonist. But abstractions could excite in him strong emotion. His views remained pretty fixed, though his poetic gift matured. It is open to us to guess whether his mind would have matured too; certainly, in his last, and to my mind his greatest though unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, there is evidence not only of better writing than in any previous poem, but of greater wisdom.
Herbert Read feels that the whole tendency of Shelley is towards a clarification and abstraction of thought—away from the personal and particular towards the general and universal….
But the highest beauties of Shelley’s poetry are evanescent and imponderable_thought so tenuous and intuitive, that it has no visual equivalent; no positive impact….such poetry has no precision, and the process of its unfolding is not logical. It does not answer to the general definition of any kind. It is vain to apply to it that method of criticism which assumes that the ardour of a verse can be analyzed into separate vocals, and that poetry is a function of sound. Poetry is mainly a function of language— the exploitation of a medium, a vocal and mental material, in the interests of a personal mood or emotion, or of the thoughts evoked by such moods or emotions. I do not think we can say much more about it; according to our sensitivity we recognize its success. The rest of our reasoning about it is either mere prejudice, ethical anxiety, or academic pride.
