Vagueness and unreality. Shelley’s poetry has been much criticized and much condemned by Matthew Arnold and others, because of its vagueness, what Arnold called its “fatal lack of substantiality.” He described Shelley as a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” Beautiful he certainly is, but is he ineffectual? Because he is vague and unpractical because he regards history as a dirty record of crime and brutality, practical politics as a waste of time, and dogmatic religion as an unnecessary evil, and yet provides us with no moral political and religious code in their place, is that to say he is ineffectual ? It has been said. that his scheme was to reform the world, but that he demonstrates the impossibility of his ideas in his poetry where his ideals are pictured and his theories realized in another and an ideal world; and thus he leads us to the conclusion that love cannot, as he hoped, bring the millennium. But, even if it were granted that this too were true, it would not prove him ineffectual.
“The very vagueness of Shelley’s poetry is an essential part of its charm. He speaks the language of pure emotion, where definite perceptions are melted into the mood they generate. Possessed by the desire of escape, he gazes calmly and steadily on nothing of earthly build. Every visible object is merely another starting point for the cobwebs of dreams.” Like his own poet in Prometheus Unbound.
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aereal kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought’s wilderness:
He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor hear nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
‘His thoughts travel incessantly from what he sees to what he desires, and his goal is no more distinctly conceived than his starting-place. His devotion is to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow; the voices that he hears bear him vague massages and hints
Of some world far from ours
Where music and moonlight are one.
And this perfect lyrical vagueness produces some of the most ghostly and bodiless descriptions to be found in all poetry. His scenery is dream-scenery. The scene of his poem is laid among
Dim twilight lawns and stream-illumined caves, And wild-enchanted shapes of wandering mist.
And the inhabitants are even less definite in outline as Sir Walter Raleigh observes; the spaces of his imagination are:
Peopled with unimaginable shapes
Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep.
