Give a brief account of Shelley’s style and diction.
Introduction: Among the Romantic poets, Shelley is marvelled for his inimitable abstract ideas, but he is less of an artist. He was aiming not at the poetry of art, but at the poetry of rapture. Keats advised him to be “more of an artist” and to” load every rift with ore”, but Shelley was aiming at a different effect from that of Keats’s richly decorated and highly finished poetry.
Imagination. It is imagination which makes Shelley’s poetry the best. His mind was abstract and imaginative, that he sometimes wondered if he were fitter for metaphysics or poetry. His natural mode of thinking was too abstract to isolate some element in Nature or man, and then being a poet, to body it forth in imagery. He gives life to every object in Nature through his imagination in current words, in new and striking manner and forms new compounds, always a fresh shoot in every living language.
Ordinary things are lifted to the higher plane by his imagination The Cloud is a wonderful example of Shelley’s imagination. He imagines the cloud as the fairy child that runs about everywhere and laughs at all things. He speaks of its immortality in these lines:
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the
tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
He imagines the wind in Ode to The West Wind as the destroyer destroying useless and evil creeds:
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing
Also, the wind blowing through the forest and producing noise is a common thing, but Shelley imagines the forest as a lyre on which the West Wind plays different tunes:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.
Imagery. Shelley fuses intellectual idea with the images, and the result is that idea has new appeal. Shelley thought that the abstract ideas which meant so much to him could be presented only in symbols and images. In his Preface, he says,
“The imagery which I have employed will be found in many instances to have been drawn from the operations of human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed.”
Even in a philosophical poem he pours out all imagination and daring speculations. In Prometheus Unbound, in Act IV where lone and Panthea see bewildering forms in a forest, Shelley describes it as having white face, white feathers, a white body and white hair:
Yet its two eyes are heavens
Of liquid darkness, which the Deity
within seems pouring.
Shelley’s style abounds in personification and metaphor and other of those natural figures which we all use, as best we may, to describe vividly what we see and feel, or to express what passionately moves us. The metaphors he uses for the Skylark, “Like an embodied joy whose race is just begun” combine both the abstract and the concrete qualities, which is a characteristic of Shelley’s manner.
His act of comparing flowers to stars sounds ethereal
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen
Though Keats is prominent for the use of synaeasthetic imagery, Shelley has used it in different combinations. In Triumph of Life, he portrays sound as—
A silver music on the mossy lawn.
Symbolism. R.H. Fogle says: “Shelley’s imagery is symbolic to an unusual degree”. Most of his characters are symbolical.
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