But for him love was a revolution-weapon: the active principle, as strong as electro-magnetism and, he surmised, the same force, by which the universe worked and by which men would be perfected. The germ of that force - like the tiny, compacted light of the sun and the stars - lay deep in the heart of man.
When men and women faced their oppressors armed with light and love, rather than revenge, they would be unconquerable. And, however crushed by outward chains, they would be free.
Shelley's importance for us, now, is not merely that he is a political poet. It is that he is a transcendent spiritual poet. If our age does not want such a voice, if it prefers to bring him down to a more secular, acceptable and ordinary level, that is a reflection on us, not him. Despite all the advances of his own industrial age, as he wrote in 1821, "we want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life."
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Spirit for our age
Shelley has been through many incarnations, from butterfly child, to political radical, to womaniser. For Ann Wroe his relevance is as a metaphysical poet, who put self-knowledge first
Saturday July 7, 2007
The Guardian
Biographers soon learn how their subject stands. Friends let you know.
"Shelley! God! Do you like him? Does anyone still read him?" Muttered protests from me. Or "Shelley? Mary?" Even more protests from me, first because it is outrageous that Mary, whatever her virtues, should now be more widely read than Percy Bysshe, and second because of the implication that I should be content to write about women, and leave the Great White Males to the men. But the most deflating thought came from a colleague who cried "Shelley! What a bastard! Especially to his women!"
What has become of Shelley, and how have we made him like this? Even poets have betrayed him. And I don't simply mean Francis Thompson, whose image of Shelley "gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars" fixed him as a butterfly-child in the minds of the Edwardian generation; or TS Eliot, who famously dismissed him as rhetorical, abstract, incoherent, and, most pompously, someone who just "did not know enough". The modern misrepresentation of Shelley is more subtle than that, because it so often masquerades as sympathy, enthusiasm and praise.
Shelley biography has always moved in cycles. After the late Victorian and Edwardian anointings, when he was all clouds and skylarks, the last decades of the 20th century brought a conscious push to make him more topical, more radical and more "relevant". When Paul Foot wrote Red Shelley in 1980, it was out of fury that the power of Shelley's political ideas was being lost in sentimental mist. He needed to do so - even though, with Richard Holmes's great biography of 1974, much of the mist was clearing. But now the political ideas are all we get. "Percy Bysshe Shelley, the radical poet", say the pocket biographies, which go on to stress his enthusiasm for William Godwin's half-baked egalitarian schemes. I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that Marx and Engels were inspired by Shelley. Yes, they were, but is this all he now stands for? It didn't seem so to me when I first encountered him. The lines that hooked me were from "Ode to the West Wind":
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest
bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power,
and share
The impulse of thy strength, only
less free
Than thou, O, uncontrollable!
Other poets had shown me the world I knew, but Shelley showed me a new, astonishing one, and swept me there by main force.
Poetry didn't mean for Shelley a pretty way with imagery and a slick way with rhymes, delivered in some Fotherington-Thomas daydream by the side of a brook. It meant the generation or transmission of a power so astonishing that it can reach and move readers across time and space. From 1812, when at 20 he wrote the extraordinary and utopian "Queen Mab", to 1822, when he was drowned off Leghorn, Shelley made himself the instrument of this power. It was, in the deepest sense, his life.
It also changed his priorities completely. The greatest struggle in Shelley's life was not between himself and his solid, landed, wishy-washy-Whig father; nor between his different excursions in earthly love with Harriet Westbrook, Mary, Claire Clairmont, Jane Williams and the rest, and his inevitably botched attempts to keep all parties happy. It was between the man, who persisted in arguing and unpicking the evidence of the senses, and the poet, who glimpsed what he instinctively recognised as the real and the true. When his friend Edward Trelawny asked him whether he believed in the immortality of the spirit, Shelley snapped: "Certainly not; how can I? We know nothing; we have no evidence; we cannot express our inmost thoughts. They are incomprehensible even to ourselves." But as a poet, he wrote:
The Light whose smile kindles the
Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work
and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing
Curse
Of birth can quench not, that
sustaining Love
Which through the web of being
blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air
and sea
Burns bright or dim, as each are
mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now
beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold
mortality.
This side of Shelley - I would argue not a "side" at all, but the essence of him - has become unfashionable. Shelley's Victorian hagiographers covered up his atheism, which was never retracted, but nowadays his defiant Godlessness is emphasised and celebrated. And because atheism and spirituality don't seem to fit together, Shelley's interest in the mystical and spiritual has been airbrushed out of the picture: in a non-religious age it seems nebulous and irrelevant. Modern readers want Shelley at the barricades, or at least at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, the central hive of dissent. They don't want him talking of "light" or "breath" or "benediction", but crying, as he did to the Spanish revolutionists:
Arise! Arise! Arise!
There is blood on the earth that
denies ye bread!
Be your wounds like eyes
To weep for the dead, the dead, the
dead!
Undoubtedly politics was important to him. He watched with "intense and wild exultation" as the Spaniards, the Mexicans, the Genoans and the Greeks rose up against their oppressors, and stirred up Welsh workers and Irishmen himself. Yet his ideas fitted no existing template, and he loathed the practice of politics. Though he could easily have got into Parliament by the graces of the Duke of Norfolk and a bit of borough-mongering, he refused to try.
In 1817 he fled to exile in Italy rather than stay in England, where a determined radical could have made himself useful. But his radicalism was of a different kind, based on discovering man's deepest nature and nurturing it with visions.
At first sight, this seems neither practical nor useful. What the poor and oppressed of the world need first, in the words of "The Mask of Anarchy", are "clothes, and fire, and food", together with education and the vote. Shelley knew that; his political essays were written to drive on the work in practical ways. But even in these, he could not resist advising his readers that self-knowledge should come first. The French revolutionists had ignored this lesson, and they had failed. Shelley's revolution, which was intended to go so much farther than theirs, had to be founded on the force of human spirit. That way, he hoped, it might work and last.
Here his experiences as a poet, transitory and elusive as they were, allowed him to set the example. He tried to discover, as far as he was able, the truth about himself. In both poems and prose he ceaselessly analysed the mechanisms of his thought and the deep recesses of his dreams. He longed to know what life and death were, whether sleep formed a bridge between them, and where his spirit travelled when he was unconscious (a state into which he could fall alarmingly quickly, sometimes sliding onto the floor or almost into the fire). He yearned to find out where he fitted into the scheme of things, and what he was.
Such probings are now the realm of science, psychoanalysis or the para-normal. But Shelley delved there constantly. He was fascinated by the difference between his physical self, dragged down with "languour" and kidney spasms and "slight attacks of typhus" and that other, extraordinary part of him, that
. . . aspires to Heaven,
Pants for its sempiternal heritage,
And, ever-changing, ever-rising still,
Wantons in endless being . . .
Shelley's "mystifying metaphysics" was Byron's taunting name for this. It infused both the poems and the prose, and the letters too, whenever Shelley sensed he had a captive correspondent. It filled his conversations. Even at shooting practice, Byron complained, Shelley would be "thinking of metaphysics rather than of firing" - and still shooting straighter than anyone else, on most occasions.
Mary wanted more "human interest" in his poems. He disdained it. Human history was a "record of crimes and miseries" to him. Earth was a prison and an illusion, earthly life a "stain" and a "curse". His physical life was a mess; but at one level, he didn't care. All this was merely part of the flux of existence, endlessly coalescing, dissolving and changing, as both Lucretius and Plato had taught him. Shelley tried to stay focused on the aspects that did not change, including most particularly those thoughts and feelings that seemed to hint at immortality and divinity in himself.
In pursuit of this understanding, he voyaged inwards. He longed to get to his own "source" as he longed to reach the hidden spring of rivers, clambering up Swiss waterfalls or battling, in his little green-and-white skiff, against the torrent of the Arno in Pisa. It could be dangerous work. In Mary's words, "Intense meditations on his own nature . . . thrilled him with pain", to the point where he would break off abruptly from writing, drop his pen and rush, pale, to the parlour to be comforted for a while with human warmth. But in a little while he would be back, plumbing his own depths, with no safety-rope or anchor to haul him again to the shore. Shelley's challenge to us is expressed in the words he speaks to the worldly, mocking Byron in "Julian and Maddalo":
It is our will
That thus enchains us to permitted
ill -
We might be otherwise - we might
be all
We dream of, happy, high, majestical.
Where is the love, beauty, and truth
we seek
But in our mind?
This sounds like the classic humanist position: no absolutes and no ideals beyond man himself. But Shelley meant something different. His searchings had shown him that minds are limitless. And, being limitless, they were open to transcendent forces: absolute liberty, absolute love. These words raise a wry smile in Shelley's case, as if all they meant to him was a licence to sleep with any young woman he chose. But for him love was a revolution-weapon: the active principle, as strong as electro-magnetism and, he surmised, the same force, by which the universe worked and by which men would be perfected. The germ of that force - like the tiny, compacted light of the sun and the stars - lay deep in the heart of man.
When men and women faced their oppressors armed with light and love, rather than revenge, they would be unconquerable. And, however crushed by outward chains, they would be free.
Shelley's importance for us, now, is not merely that he is a political poet. It is that he is a transcendent spiritual poet. If our age does not want such a voice, if it prefers to bring him down to a more secular, acceptable and ordinary level, that is a reflection on us, not him. Despite all the advances of his own industrial age, as he wrote in 1821, "we want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life."
Shelley insists, more strongly than any other poet, on the god-like power of the imagination to re-order and thus to recreate everything. He insists on divinity not as some far-off force but as humanity's true nature and inheritance. To those who wonder "Is this all there is?" or "Is this the best we can do?", Shelley cries "No!" He reminds us, in the same insistent way he reminded all his lovers and friends, of how much we can surely accomplish once our demons have been conquered - and how extraordinary we can be.
But another reason for Shelley's importance concerns the man as much as the poet. He asks the questions that, for all the cleverness of science, have not been answered yet. What is life? What is death? What is consciousness? What is our true history, and what is our destination? And he makes these insistent inquiries not as a member of a church or a school of thought but as Shelley unprotected, Shelley alone.
The inescapable Shelley-image, which he created for himself in both poems and sketches, is of the lone sailor out on the sea. He is venturing, challenging, searching and though the Breath blows him "darkly, fearfully afar", he is still at the helm. Between "the Power unknown" and his own "aweless soul", equally divine, he finds no difference. He is infinitesimally small, yet he can contain and control all the elements of his universe, all the oceans and constellations, as he discovered when, in 1816, he proudly flung his final question at the brooding power behind Mont Blanc:
And what were thou, and earth, and
stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
Being Shelley by Ann Wroe is published by Jonathan Cape on July 12.
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