Eleanor Marx Battles the Shelley Society!

Eleanor Marx Battles the Shelley Society!

Eleanor Marx

In 1886, at the height of the Victorian era, a group of admirers of Percy Bysshe Shelley came together to form the Shelley Society. Among the founders were some of the intellectual giants of the age. For example, the list of distinguished names includes Edward Dowden, Buxton Forman, William Michael Rossetti, Arthur Napier (the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford), Dr. Richard Garnett, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Salt, William Bell Scott (whose gorgeous painting of Shelley’s grave hangs in the Ashmolean Museum), Algernon Charles Swinburne, Francis Thompson, the Rev. Stopford Brooke, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx - to name only a few. At inception there were just over 100 but this number soon swelled to over 400 members. In addition, members of the general public were allowed to attend the meetings. As a result, while the inaugural lecture had an audience of over 500 - only a small proportion of whom were actual paid members. As it grew, the Society came to have chapters around the world. One thing that to me stands out from the list of eminent names, is what amounts to an ideological left/right fault-line which is at the heart of our story. And it actually speaks to Shelley’s protean character that he would find passionate adherents on both ends of the political spectrum.

A useful history of the literary societies of the 1880s (Shelley’s was not the only one) can be found in Angela Dunstan’s article, ‘The Newest Culte’: Victorian Poetry and the Literary Societies of the 1880s (In Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s, edited by Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor and published in 2019 by Cambridge). Dunstan points out that

“Though many in the Society were eminent literary scholars or critics the Notebooks make a concerted effort to legitimate opinions and close readings of rank and file members, demonstrating the capacity of vernacular poetry to be seriously studied by professional scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike.”

Also apparent to anyone reading through the Society proceedings is the presence of female voices. Dunstan writes,

Women were active in the Shelley society; notices of their involvement were regularly printed in “Ladies’ Columns:” in the press and reprinted in the Notebooks, and female members certainly attended the Society’s activities that contributed to debates. The Notebooks evidence debates over close readings of Alastor, for example, where ordinary female speakers confidently take on George Bernard Shaw or William Michael Rossetti over interpretation, and it is this democratic nature of literary societies’ debates which many outside of the societies and particularly in the universities found threatening.

“A stuffy Victorian, bourgeois morality suffuses the written record of the Society’s meetings.”

— Graham Henderson

The Society published notes of its meeting, undertook research, hosted speeches, spawned local affiliates, republished important articles and poems (some for the first time!) and even produced Shelley’s The Cenci for the stage — all before it fell apart four years later. The goal was to make the scholarly study of Shelley more accessible to the general public - to in effect popularize Shelley and “democratise” literary criticism - and the meetings gained a reputation for an interest in critical rather than mere biographical exercises. Though largely forgotten by history, the proceedings of the Shelley Society constituted a momentous episode in the history of Shelley’s reception by the reading public; though one that is not without controversy.

Some, notably the socialist Paul Foot, were of the view that the Society had a deleterious effect on his reputation as a political radical. That said, Professor Alan Weinberg has noted that

We are reminded that prominent members of the Shelley Society present at the inaugural lecture were not averse to the poet's politics. If anything they tended to advance them. Succeeding lectures were devoted to Queen Mab (Forman), Prometheus Unbound(Rossetti), The Triumph of Life (Todhunter), The Mask of Anarchy (Forman), The Hermit of Marlow and Reform (Forman), Shelley and Disraeli's politics (Garnett) -all of which point positively or constructively to Shelley's radical sentiments.

The Rev. Stopford Brooke, 1885

The first speech at the inaugural meeting of the Society was delivered by the Reverend Stopford Augustus Brooke. Brooke was a prominent member of the Church of England who had risen to the post of “chaplain in ordinary” to Queen Victoria in 1875. He was a patron of the arts and was the leading figure in raising the money to acquire Dove Cottage (now administered by the Wordsworth Trust). In 1880, Brooke took the unusual step of seceding from the church because he no longer subscribed to its principal dogmas. In that same year Brooke also published a collection of Shelley’s poetry, Poems from Shelley, selected and arranged by Stopford A. Brooke (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880). In the speech, Brooke principally responds to the attacks on Shelley’s character that had been famously leveled by Mathew Arnold - opinions which have poisoned Shelley’s reception to the present day. The Society, said Brooke, desired to

“connect together all that would throw light on the poet’s personality and his work, to ascertain the truth about him, to issue reprints and above all to do something to further the objects of Shelley’s life and works, and to better understand and love a genius which was ignored and abused in his own time, but which had risen from the grave into which the critics had trampled it to live in the hearts of men.”

Matthew Arnold

Brooke also devoted considerable attention to rebutting the opinions of perhaps Shelley’s most effective critic, Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s judgement on Shelley was, Brooke thought, “victimized by his personal antipathy to Shelley’s idealism”, and Brooke found his views “petulant” and “prejudiced”. While others had attacked Shelley, none of them had the gravitas and influence of Mathew Arnold; Arnold who had characterized Shelley as a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”. Arnold’s critique of Shelley appeared in a pair of essays written on Byron and Shelley and which were published together in his Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888). You can find a beautifully written, approachable essay on the subject written by Professor Alan Weinberg here. Arnold’s encapsulation of Shelley’s character went on to have enormous influence. Weinberg:

On close examination (as will be shown), his [Arnold’s] argument is grossly superficial and unreliable. What has tended to carry weight is the authority of Arnold's position as eminent critic of his age (while this had currency) and the persuasiveness of his dictum which has connected with an ongoing antipathy or ambivalence towards Shelley. In the course of time, the dictum has become disentangled from the original argument and has acquired a life of its own.

Despite Professor Weinberg’s opinion expressed above, it is my view that Shelley’s radical politics were at best tolerated by Society members. It seems to me that from inception, there was a not so hidden agenda which came to dominate the Society’s proceedings. In seeking the “truth about Shelley”, Brooke for example proposed a distinctly religious and spiritual approach saying that Shelley’s “method was the method of Jesus Christ, reliance on spiritual force only…” Brooke saw Shelley’s life as “full of natural piety” and “noble ideals” while at the same times characterising his “aspirations” as “often unreal and visionary.” He saw Shelley as a man “not content with the world the way as it is” (fair enough) but as a “prophetic singer of the advancing kingdom of faith and hope and love.” (more problematic). A stuffy Victorian bourgeois morality suffuses the written record of the Society’s meetings. That morality even appears to have influenced membership applications. Henry Salt records that when Edward Aveling (a socialist living out of wedlock with the daughter of Karl Marx) attempted to join the Society, his application was turned down by a majority of members - “his marriage relations being similar to Shelley’s”. It was only through the “determined efforts” of William Michael Rossetti that the decision was over-turned (Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, p 450).

Frederick James Furnivall. William Rothenstein (attributed), Trinity Hall

Frederick James Furnivall, a prominent “Christian Socialist” who founded the London Working Men’s College and was a tireless promoter of English literature, lauded Brooke’s impassioned remarks by declaring that the Shelley Society would devote itself to responding to what he characterized as “Philistine” attacks on Shelley’s character and poetry. The chief “Philistine” referenced here was Cordy Jeaffreson who had recently authored a highly critical biography of Shelley: (The Real Shelley: New Views of the Poet's Life, 2 vols. 1885). What we see playing out here was a curious contest between rival camps to stake out exactly who the “real” Shelley was and just importantly, what he believed.

The Society’s goal, then, was not only to rebut attacks of Shelley, but also to find the “real Percy Bysshe Shelley”. Now, this is a mission which frankly resonates with me! However, at the hands of the Society, a very unusual, apolitical, quasi-religious Shelley would emerge as “real” Shelley. For his part, this would probably have come as an enormous surprise to Shelley himself - the self-declared atheist, humanist and republican who once wrote, "I tell of great matters, and I shall go on to free men's minds from the crippling bonds of superstition.” This battle for the soul of the “real” Percy Bysshe Shelley has never really gone away and it had real world consequences for me - something I wrote about in My Father’s Shelley - a Tale of Two Shelleys.

“I tell of great matters, and I shall go on to free men’s minds from the crippling bonds of superstition.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

However, the Society didn’t just want a new, more religiously-minded Shelley, whose “rotten ethics” (see below) had been explained away as youthful folly. Notwithstanding the fact that Society members had a somewhat permissive or indulgent attitude toward Shelley’s radicalism (Weinberg, above), there was nonetheless a distinct tendency to in effect depoliticise Shelley. For example, in a lecture to the Society on 14 April 1886, Buxton Forman complained that,

“Shelley is far more widely known as the author of Queen Mab than as the author of Prometheus Unbound. As the latter really strengthens the spirit while the former does not, we, who reverence Shelley for his spiritual enthusiasm, desire to see all that changed. And the change is advancing.“

The battle lines were clearly drawn. This fight was going to be about more than poetry; it was going to be about politics and it was going to be about class. A major stumbling block for the bourgeois members of the Society was clearly Shelley’s professed atheism. But there were ways to deal with this. Francis Thompson, for example, devoted a significant portion of his famous 1889 essay, Shelley, opining that Shelley could not really have been an atheist - because he was “struggling - blindly, weakly, stumblingly, but still struggling - toward higher things.” He had just died before he got there. While we might question the robustness of this evidence, his final argument was air-tight: “We do not believe that a truly corrupted spirit can write consistently ethereal poetry…The devil can do many things. But the devil cannot write poetry.”

Sara Coleridge daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and an arch, bourgeois Victorian, reflected a widespread view when she wrote to a friend,

Sara Coleridge

"You are more displeased with Shelley's wrong religion than with Keats' no religion. Surely Shelley was as superior to Keats as a moral being, as he was above him in birth and breeding. Compare the letters of the two . . . see how much more spiritual is Shelley's expression, how much more of goodness, of Christian kindness, does his intercourse with his friends evince.”

One might well think that with friends like this, who needs enemies? I am not sure what is worse: the cringe-worthy dismissal of Keats, or the complete misappropriation of Shelley. And indeed, on another occasion one of the attendees said almost exactly that. Having listened to a speech about Shelley by Edward Silsbee that struck her as more of a “homily” than literary criticism, a Mrs. Simpson remarked that had Shelley heard the speech, he might well have said, “Save me from my friends.” Silsbee was reminded by another listener that between Dante and Shelley there was in fact another poet by the name of Shakespeare. Hagiography was very much the order of the day it would appear.

By the time the bourgeois members of the Shelley Society had finished with Shelley, poems like Queen Mab had been successfully relegated to the back pages of collected editions under the heading “Juvenilia“ - a designation suggested by Forman himself. Thus a cordon sanitaire had been established - Shelley’s radicalism was “ring-fenced”. He had in effect been reclaimed by proper society.

“The battle lines were clearly drawn. This fight was going to be about more than poetry; it was going to be about politics and it was going to be about class. ”

— Graham Henderson

Why was this happening? Well, Shelley an important poet. But he had two very distinct and mutually antagonistic audiences - both loved him and for very different reasons. On the one hand was the working class and its socialist champions. On the other? The upper class who valued above all Shelley’s “spiritualism”, his love poetry and his lyricism. The two could have probably co-existed but for the annoying fact that Shelley himself was ill-fitted to the bourgeois camp. That and the fact Shelley was actually a revolutionary who had set himself implacably against them - most of his output was intensely political and revolutionary.

Karl Marx and his daughters with Engels.

Bourgeois Victorian literary society in the main objected Shelley’s radical heritage. They wanted to shift focus from this unwelcome aspect of his poetry and in this regard, his prose was for the most part ignored. Though perhaps presciently, it was Arnold who observed that Shelley’s letters and essays might better resist the “wear and tear of time” and “finally come to stand higher that his poetry”. Instead the focus was to shift to Shelley’s “mysticism”, his “spiritual enthusiasm” and above all his “lyricism”. Shelley’s political poetry was considered to be almost an aberration and a defect of character and grist for the “street socialists.”

For a glimpse into what they were reacting against, here is the view from the left (seemingly directly in response to the activities of the Shelley Society), courtesy of Friedrich Engels:

"Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of [his] readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today.”

According to Eleanor Marx, her father,

“who understood the poets as well as he understood the philosophers and economists, was wont to say: “The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice that Byron died at thirty-six, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist, and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.”

Our story begins in earnest during the spring of 1887 when in a speech to the Society on 13 April one of the members, Alexander G. Ross delivered a bitter, class-based attack not upon Shelley himself, but upon Shelley’s socialist proponents. According to Paul Foot, Ross had been “enraged to discover that workers and even socialists were quoting a well-known English poet to their advantage”. Worse, of course, was the fact that Ross believed that Shelley’s “ethics were rotten.” As did many of his bourgeois colleagues.

“...they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist, and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism.””

— Karl Marx

Ross approached the issue by arguing that while,

“…no one can contest the right of anyone even though he may be a mere sans culotte who runs about with red rag, to quote Shelley when or where he pleases; but when the blatant and cruel socialism of the street endeavours to use the lofty and sublime socialism of the study for its own base purpose it is time that with no uncertain sound all real lovers of the latter should disembowel any sympathy with the former….It will be clearly understood that I strongly protest against any Imaginative writer being cited as an authority in favour of any political or social action…”

Edward Aveling

The distinction between “parlour socialism” and socialism actually put into action (“street socialism”) is quite something. Poetry was to be for poetry’s sake - and to hell with the politics. Now, in fairness, it is to be pointed out that both Rossetti and Furnivall both objected to elements of Ross’s address. Rossetti noted that a “great poet should put morals into his writings”, while carefully reinterpreting the Revolt of Islam’s message as “do good to your enemies; an annunciation of a universal reign of love.” The Revolt of Islam he concluded was “certainly not a didactic poem”. Furnivall complained that Ross seemed to treat poetry as a “toy”, and averred that “poets were men who felt certain truths more deeply than other men, and it was their work to put forth those thoughts.” Three of the avowed socialists in the room, Henry Salt, Aveling and George Bernard Shaw objected more specifically to the attacks on socialism.

Aveling, for his part, maintained that “the socialism of the study and the street was one and the same thing – and that constituted the beauty of modern socialism.” Shaw was highly critical as well, arguing that “a poem ought to be didactic, and ought to be in the nature of a political treatise - for poetry was the most artistic way of teaching those things a poet ought to teach.” One of the oddities of the debate turns on the argument about whether Shelley’s poetry was “didactic” or not. It will help modern readers if we unpack the coded language here. Opponents of Shelley’s didacticism were really reacting to his politics; or to be more accurate, the fact that socialists were championing him and as Paul Foot suggested, doing so to their advantage - in other words advancing the cause of socialism.

Annie Besant

Ross’s contentious address prompted Aveling and Marx to request an opportunity to present the case for an alternative version of the “Real Shelley”; a case for the “Socialist Shelley”. To them, what was happening in the 1880s was, plainly, a battle for the legacy of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Viewed from the left, the stakes would have been remarkably high. Marx and Aveling saw Shelley as someone who saw more clearly than anyone else “that the epic of the nineteenth century was to be the contest between the possessing and the producing classes.” This insight removed him “from the category of Utopian socialists and [made] him as far as was possible in his time, a socialist of modern days.” To see Shelley “castrated” (in the words of Friedrich Engels) and co-opted by the bourgeoisie was a call to arms. Aveling delivered the paper in April of 1888 though was careful to point out that “although I am the reader, it must be understood that I am reading the work of my wife as well as, no, more than, myself.”

Eleanor Marx was an extraordinary person who deserves far more attention from our modern society. According to Harrison Fluss and Sam Miller writing in Jacobin, Marx was

born on January 16, 1855, Eleanor Marx was Karl and Jenny Marx’s youngest daughter. She would become the forerunner of socialist feminism and one of the most prominent political leaders and union organizers in Britain. Eleanor pursued her activism fearlessly, captivated crowds with her speeches, stayed loyal to comrades and family, and grew into a brilliant political theorist. Not only that, she was a fierce advocate for children, a famous translator of European literature, a lifelong student of Shakespeare and a passionate actress.

To which we can add that she was also devotee of and influenced by Percy Shelley. Both Eleanor and Aveling were immersed in culture - much like Karl Marx himself. This was not Aveling’s first foray into the subject matter. In 1879 he had given a speech about Shelley to the Secular Society - described by Annie Besant as a “simple, loving, and personal account of the life and poetry of the hero of the free thinkers..” (Kapp, p. 451) This assessment, by the way, is yet another indication of the high regard accorded to Shelley by the socialist community. According to her Wikipedia entry, Besant was was a

“British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer, orator, educationist, and philanthropist. Regarded as a champion of human freedom, she was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She was a prolific author with over three hundred books and pamphlets to her credit.”

That she considered Shelley to be the “hero of freethinkers” is telling and a further reminder of the influence Shelley had on 19th century socialists. Kapp perceptively points out that:

“There can be no doubt that this lecture, though delivered by Aveling, was it to collaboration between two people who had long and devotedly studied the poet with equal enthusiasm, Aveling primarily as an atheist, Eleanor as a revolutionary…”

Eleanor Marx at 18

Marx and Aveling were at pains to point out that “the question to be considered…is not whether socialism is right or wrong, but whether Shelley was or was not a socialist.” Thus they first described a set of six distinguishing hallmarks of socialism and pointed out, “…If he enunciated views such as these, or even approximating to these, it is clear that we must admit that Shelley was a teacher as well as a poet.” The authors then set out their course of study:

(1) A note or two on Shelley himself and his own personality, as bearing on his relations to Socialism;

(2) On those, who, in this connection had most influence upon his thinking;

(3) His attacks on tyranny, and his singing for liberty, in the abstract;

(4) His attacks on tyranny in the concrete;

(5) His clear perception of the class struggle; and

(6) His insight into the real meaning of such words as “freedom,'’ “justice,” “crime,” “labour,” and “property”.

Of Shelley’s personality, Marx and Aveling seem principally interested in adducing (with copious citations from The Cenci, Prince Athanese, Queen Mab, Laon and Cythna and Triumph of Life) Shelley’s connection to the politics of his era, noting his advanced thinking on issues such as Napoleon and evolution:

“Of the two great principles affecting the development of the individual end of the race, those of heredity and adaptation, he had clear perception, although day as yet we are neither accurately defined nor even named. He understood that men and peoples were the result of their ancestry and their environment.”

As for Shelley’s influences, the authors begin by contrasting Shelley with Byron.

In Byron they suggest,

“…we have the vague, generous and genuine aspirations in the abstract, which found their final expression in the bourgeois-democratic movement of 1848. In Shelley, there was more than the vague striving after freedom in the abstract, and therefore his ideas are finding expression in the social-democratic movement of our own day….He saw more clearly than Byron, who seems scarcely to have seen it at all, that the epic of the nineteenth century was to be the contest between the possessing and the producing classes. And it is just this that removes him from the category of Utopian socialists, and makes him so far as it was possible in his time, a socialist of modern days.

They then enumerate those whom they consider his prime influences: François-Noël Baboeuf, Rousseau, the French philosophes, the Encyclopaedists, Baron d’Holbach, and Denis Diderot. The addition of Diderot to this list is interesting. We now know that as early as 1812, Shelley had ordered copies of Diderot’s works - but this was not widely known in the 19th Century. I certainly feel that the spirit of Diderot suffuses Shelley’s philosophy and writings. Interestingly, Aveling and Marx thought very highly of Diderot as well, averring that Diderot “was the intellectual ghost of everybody of his time” - an assessment described to me as a “penetrating insight” by Andrew Curran the author of the excellent Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.

“We simply can not underestimate the influence Shelley had on the socialists of this period.”

— Graham Henderson

Godwin was also singled out, hardly surprisingly - though as Marx and Aveling ruefully note, “Dowden’s Life has made us all so thoroughly acquainted with the ill-side of Godwin that just now there may be a not unnatural tendency to forget the best of him.” But of real interest is the time spent adducing the under-appreciated influence of “the two Marys” (Wollstonecraft and Godwin), and the perspective is instructive. “In a word,” Marx and Aveling suggest,

the world in general has treated the relative influences of Godwin on the one hand and of the two women on the other, pretty much has might have been expected with men for historians. Probably the fact that he saw so much through the eyes of these two women quickened Shelley's perception of woman's real position in society and the real cause of that position….this understanding…is in a large measure due to the two Marys.

Shelley’s espousal of what we would now call feminist causes was extremely unusual for his time. Clearly it resonated with Marx and Aveling who comment that “it was one of Shelley's "delusions that are not delusions" that man and women should be equal and united. And Paul Foot seizes on and develops this theme in his speech to the 1981 Marxism Conference in London.

“It’s not just that he saw that women were oppressed in the society, that the women were oppressed in the home; it’s not just that he saw the monstrosity of that. It’s not even just that he saw that there was no prospect whatever of any kind for revolutionary upsurge if men left women behind. Like, for example, in the 1848 rebellions in Paris where he men deliberately locked the women up and told them they couldn’t come out to the demonstrations that took place there because in some way or other that would demean the nature of the revolution. It wasn’t just that he saw the absurdity of situations like that. It was that he saw what happened when women did activate themselves, and did start to take control of their lives, and did start to hit back against repression. Shelley saw that what happened then was that again and again, women seized the leadership of the forces that were in revolution! All through Shelley’s poetry, all his great revolutionary poems, the main agitators, the people that do most of the revolutionary work and who he gives most of the revolutionary speeches, are women. Queen Mab herself, Asia in Prometheus Unbound, Iona in Swellfoot the Tyrant, and most important of all, Cythna in The Revolt of Islam. All these women, throughout his poetry, were the leaders of the revolution and the main agitators.”

I have written myself at length on the fact that much of Shelley’s radicalism concentrates on what he would have considered twinned targets: the monarchy and religion (religion being for Shelley the “hand-maiden of tyranny”). So it is not surprising that when Marx and Aveling came to the third part of their presentation, they pointed out that at the root of Shelley’s antagonism to the tyranny of church and state was the belief that the ultimate problem was

“the superstitious in the capitalistic system in the empire of class…. And always, every word that he has written against religious superstition and the despotism of individual rulers may be read as against economic superstition and the despotism of class.”

They also pointed out the extent to which Shelley’s concern with tyranny was more than just abstract, he is lauded not just for his attention to Mexico, Spain, Ireland and England, but also for his attacks on individuals: Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Eldon and Napoleon. “He is forever,” they wrote, “denouncing priest and king and statesman.”

Of most interest to me is the fourth section in which Marx and Aveling turn to Shelley’s understanding of “class struggle.” What makes Shelley a socialist more than anything else,

“is his singular understanding of the facts that today tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing, and that to this tyranny in the ultimate analysis is traceable almost all evil and misery. He saw that the soul-called middle class is the real tyrant, the real danger at the present day.”

Shelley by George Clint after Amelia Curran

To support this position, a veritable arsenal of quotations is deployed. From what they call the Philosophic View of Reform, from Godwin, from letters to Hookham and Hitchens, and from Swellfoot the Tyrant, Peter Bell the Third and Charles the I. The effect is spectacular. For example, this from Swellfoot: “Those who consume these fruits through thee [the goddess of famine] grow fat. / Those who produce these fruits through the grow lean". The cumulative effect is to place Shelley in a tradition that leads directly to Marx, Engels and modern socialism. And, indeed, the resonance and reverberation of the language is uncanny.

Marx and Aveling conclude the section by quoting Mary to great effect (from her notes to her collected edition): “He believed the clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the peoples side.” They clearly see Shelley as a direct precursor to Marx and Engels and it is hard to disagree with them. In an unusual turn of phrase considering their undoubted atheism, they had earlier referred to Shelley as a philosopher and a prophet - a term you will have seen Engels use as well in the quotation cited above. Elsewhere, Marx and Aveling refer to him as the “poet-leader”. In a truly remarkable passage they seem to treat Shelley’s writing, his value system, almost as a “sacred text”:

This extraordinary power of seeing things clearly and of seeing them in their right relations one to another, shown not alone in the artistic side of his nature, but in the scientific, the historical, the social, is a comfort and strength to us that hold in the main the beliefs, made more sacred to us in that they were his, and must give every lover of Shelley pause when he finds himself departing from the master on any fundamental question of economics, a faith, of human life.”

It was not uncommon for atheists, including Shelley, to use the words of religion when attempting to convey passionately held beliefs. And passages and expressions such as these mean that we simply can not underestimate the influence Shelley had on the socialists of this period.

“[What makes Shelley a socialist] is his singular understanding of the facts that today tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing class.”

— Eleanor Marx

In their final section, Marx and Aveling consider Shelley’s use of language, focusing on the words, “anarchy, freedom, custom, crime and property” as well as the concept of the “governing class”. Perceptively and shrewdly, they note that for Shelley the accepted meaning of certain phrases does not align with reality. Thus they touch on what came to be understood as Shelley’s famous capacity for ironic inversion. For example his deployment of the term “anarchy” to describe the then current social system and “rule of law”. For Shelley, they say, anarchy, was “God and King and Law…and let us add…Capitalism.”

On the question of “property”, Marx and Aveling reach their denouement. They begin by quoting a passage from A Philosophical View of Reform that directly anticipates Marx:

Labor, industry, economy, skill, genius, or any similar powers honourably or innocently exerted, are the foundations of one description of property. All true political institutions ought to defend every man in the exercise of his discretion with respect to property so acquired… But there is another species of property which has its foundation in usurpation, or imposture, or violence, without which, by the nature of things, immense aggregations of property could never have been accumulated.

They then paraphrase this in the language of what they call scientific socialism:

“A man has a right to anything his own labour has produced, and that he does not intend to employ for the purpose of injuring his fellows. But no man can himself acquire a considerable aggregation of property except at the expense of his fellows. He must either cheat a certain number out of the value of it, or take it by force.”

With citations from Song to the Men of England, Fragment: To the People of England, Queen Mab and a letter to Hitchener, Marx and Aveling make the case that Shelley understood,

the real economic value of private property in the means of production and distribution, whether it was in machinery, land, funds, what not. He saw that this value lay in the command, absolute, merciless, unjust, over human labour. The socialist believes that these means of production and distribution should be the property of the community. For the man or company that owns them has practically irresponsible control over the class that does not possess them.

And this, they conclude, are the “teachings of Shelley.” And as they are also the teachings of socialism, the two are one and the same thing. Thus Marx and Aveling end with the ringing words, “We claim him as a socialist.”

““We claim him as a socialist.””

— Eleanor Marx

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According to Marx’s biographer Yvonne Kapp, Shelley’s Socialism was first published by To-day: The Journal of Scientific Socialism in 1888 (Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, p. 450). It also appeared as a pamphlet in an edition of only twenty-five copies published (presumably by the Shelley Society) for private circulation under the title Shelley and Socialism. In 1947, Leslie Preger (a young Manchester socialist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War) arranged to have it published, with an introduction by the Labour politician Frank Allaun through CWS Printing Work. The Preger edition can be found online through used book services such as AbeBooks. The version published by Preger and that which appeared in To-Day are somewhat different. The version which appears in To-Day appears to have been lightly edited and omits several selections from Shelley’s poetry that appear in the Preger edition. My assumption is that Preger reproduced the pamphlet version released by the Shelley Society. The version I have made available (see link below) is based on Preger and thus is the only complete and “authoritative” version of the speech (as delivered) available on line. You may read it online in it entirety for the first time.

In their speech, Marx and Aveling refer to a second part which they intended to deliver upon some future occasion. Either the second installment has been either lost or perhaps it was never delivered. However, Kapp tantalizingly points out that Engels in fact translated the second part into German for publication in Germany by Die Neue Zeit (Kapp p. 450). No trace of it appears to exist - a loss for us all given the intended subject matter discussed in the speech.

Frank Allaun, author of the preface to the Preger edition, offered this encapsulation of the speech: “A Marxist evaluation of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” He concludes his preface with this sage assessment:

“Shelley, who died when his sailing boat sinking a storm in 1822, lived when the Industrial Revolution was only beginning. The owning class had not yet "dug their own graves" by driving the handloom weavers and other domestic workers from their kitchens and plots of land into the "dark satanic mills" alongside thousands of other operatives. Conditions were not ripe for the modern trade union and socialist movement. Had they been so Shelley would have been their man.”

Of the authors, George Bernard Shaw said "he (Aveling) was quite a pleasant fellow who would've gone to the stake for socialism or atheism, but with absolutely no conscience in his private life. He said seduced every woman he met and borrowed from every man. Eleanor committed suicide. Eleanor's tragedy made him infamous in Germany". Shaw added, "While Shelley needs no preface that agreeable rascal Aveling does not deserve one.”

You can read a wonderful encapsulation of Eleanor Marx and her legacy in the Jacobion, here. And you can buy Kapp’s biography of Marx here, though I strongly suggest you instead order it through your local bookseller.

Click the button to go to the speech.

The footnotes in all of the sources are antiquated and refer to out of date editions of Shelley’s poetry and prose - I will in due course provide references to more modern, available texts. Interestingly, there is no mention of the speech in any of the major Shelley biographies. Not even Kenneth Neill Cameron, a Marxist, alludes to it.  Nor does Paul Foot reference it in Red Shelley. Thus, it would appear that Aveling’s and Marx’s effort to “claim Shelley as a socialist” had little effect either of the Society or upon public opinion in general. Perhaps this was predictable given the tenor of the times. As Foot observed:

Paul Foot

“In the 1840s as Engels noted, Shelley had been almost exclusively the property of the working class the Chartists had read him for what he was, a tough agitator and revolutionary. The effect of the Shelley-worship of the 1880s and 1890s was too weaken that image; to present for mass consumption a new, wet, angelic Shelley and to promote this new Shelley with all the influence and wealth of respectable academics and publishers.”

Paul Foot offers a disquieting account of the struggle during these years in chapter 7 of Red Shelley. It was a struggle which was largely won by the right and lost by the left. And it would be decades before Kenneth Neil Cameron emerged in the early 1950s to begin the lengthy and arduous process of salvaging Shelley’s left wing credentials. For generations, the Shelley that was embraced by Chartists, by Marx and Engels, would be subsumed by a tidal wave of mawkish Shelleyan “sentimentality’. Gone would be his revolutionary political ardour and in its place appeared a carefully curated selection of poetry designed to showcase only Shelley’s lyrical capabilities - his love poems.

Interestingly, to call Shelley a “love poet” can be intensely misleading. Many modern readers encountering the term “love poet” will think immediately of romantic or sexual love - and there is no doubt that Shelley wrote many poem that were almost purely romantic. However, when Shelley speaks of love, you have to look carefully at what he is saying, and what he is almost always talking about is empathy, that is the ability to imagine and understand the thoughts, perspective, and emotions of another person; to put yourself in their shoes, as it were. Shelley should therefore be thought of as the “poet of empathy” and of revolutionary love.

“Shelley should be thought of as the poet of empathy and, if anything, of revolutionary love.”

— Graham Henderson

Isabel Quigley’s selection of Shelley’s Poetry: “No poet better repays cutting.”

For example, in the first part of the 20th century, Gresham Press offered a highly popular selection of poems by English poets. In the introduction to the Shelley volume, the poet and editor Alice Meynell (also a vice president of the Women Writers' Suffrage League) cheerfully announced that “ This volume leaves out all Shelley’s contentious poems.”

As recently as 1973, Kathleen Raine, in Penguin’s Poet to Poet series, omitted important poems such as Laon and Cythna - as well as most of the rest of his overtly political output. And she did so with considerable gusto, stating explicitly that she did so “without regret”. In a widely available edition of his poetry, the editor, Isabel Quigly, cheerfully notes, “No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety".

Fortunately Shelleyan scholarship has now long since passed through this dark period in his reception. The annus mirabilis in this regard was 1980, the year in which PMS Dawson published his book, Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics, Paul Foot published Red Shelley, and Michael Scrivener published Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. All three owe an enormous debt to perhaps the greatest of Shelley’s politically minded biographers, the Marxist Kenneth Neill Cameron whose magisterial volume The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical appeared in 1958. This is a book of which one can truly be in awe.

Can Poetry Change the World?

First published in June of 2017, Graham’s article (see below) reflected on the UK Labour Party’s use of a quote from Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy: “For The Many. Not For The Few”. The line was in fact the Party’s campaign slogan. Today, this article has sudden new relevance due to developments in Europe.

With the recent election of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom and the looming risk that the governing Conservatives under his tutelage may be toppled by the Labour Party opposition at any moment, Jeremy Corbyn has been catapulted into the spotlight. If politics is fundamentally a contest of different visions of the future, then the visions of each of the respective party leaders could not be more antithetical. At heart of the Brexit debate that has tattered the nation’s fabric is not simply an issue of securing economic prosperity, but rather an issue of who belongs and who may prosper in the national fold. Consistent with the political trend abroad, the leaders’ have appealed to nationalist sentiments in order to shore up support, but the meaning behind the oft bantered catch-phrase “the people” could not be more different.

While the Brexit debate is voiced as an economic issue that if successful would ultimately recuperate the nation’s prosperity, lingering behind the economic claims is an implicit attempt to reshape the nation’s social pattern by redefining its foreign ties. The irony, of course, is that the United Kingdom’s wealth is precisely the result of its long imperial history abroad. Just as the onset of industrialism and the imperial phase in which it was a part led to the mass dispossession of the lower classes as the feudal economy was reformed, dispossession continues in a more insidious form today as wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of the few. Even if Brexit is an attempt to restore the prosperity of the masses as the Conservatives claim it will do, that claim is revealed as specious considering the centrality of transnational capital to its economic policies. Although both parties appeal to class-based claims about how to rejuvenate the prosperity of the commonweal, the Conservatives’ attempt to redefine Britain’s relationship with continental Europe specifically gestures toward the real essence of its aim: to define who belongs in the commonweal, for which the policies of the European Union are categorically problematic. The attempt to break ties with the EU speaks more to Brexit supporters’ longing to undermine the nation’s pluralism than the goal of recuperating the nation’s wealth.

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Shelley’s early draft of “Ode to the West Wind,” 1819, Bodleian Library

Writing at the height of Britain’s colonial reign, Shelley, unlike some of his contemporaries such as John Clare or William Wordsworth, actually saw globalization in a positive light. While The Mask of Anarchy is often invoked as a key poem evincing Shelley’s social philosophy, his later poem “Ode to the West Wind,” written one year after Mask of Anarchy in 1820, makes interesting—and certainly timely—linkages between racial politics, globalization, and poetic creation. At first glace the autumn leaves—“Yellow, black, and pale, and hectic red”—appear to be stock botanical metaphors, but closer inspection uncovers that they represent various races who collectively comprise the “pestilence-stricken multitudes.” Pestilence-stricken not just because the west wind has desiccated them, but because the West is where so much of the colonial activity is occurring at this time, namely the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the Americas. Of course, the United Kingdom is also geographically West, perhaps intimating how the colonial enterprise has affected nations in the East. While Shelley identifies how globalization can have negative social ramifications, he nevertheless one of its ardent proponents. Just as the seeds that lay dormant require the spring rains that are incited by the cyclical ebb and flow of winds around the earth, the poet summons those same winds as a source of poetic inspiration. Poetic inspiration is thereby syncretic, fostered by global myths that capture—and envision—a universal humanity. In a moment when that universal humanity is under siege by cordoning off borders and shoring up nationalist sentiment, we need to look at its social and poetical implications alike.’

With that said, here is what Graham had to say on 2017.

James Regan, University of Toronto.

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Fiona Sampson has written an absolutely brilliant article which I urge you to spend some time with and share widely.  She opens by referencing Shelley's Defense of Poetry and his famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."  She also cites The Mask of Anarchy. You can find it here: Jeremy Corbyn is Right: Poetry Can Change the World.

In an other excellent article (From Glastonbury to the Arab Spring, Poetry can Mobilize Resistance) in the same online news source, Atef Alshaer, Lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster, looks at other instances of poetry's power in the political context. "Poetry," he notes, "has remained a potent force for mobilization and solidarity." He traces the influence of Shelley to the words of the Tunisian poet, Abu al-Qassim al-Shabbi (1909-1934). He also observes that Shelley's words were "echoed across the Middle East within the context of what has been called the 'Arab Spring'."

It is important, however, to understand what Shelley meant when he said poets were the "unacknowledged legislators of the world."  I believe it was PMS Dawson who pointed out that Shelley used the term "legislator" in a special sense. Not as someone who "makes laws" but as someone who is a "representative" of the people. In this sense poets, or creators more generally, must be thought of as the voice of the people; as a critical foundation of our society and of our democracy. They offer insights into our world and provide potential solutions - they underpin our future. An attack on creators is therefore an attack on the very essence of humanity.

Exposure to cultural works also engenders and inculcates empathy.  Shelley thought poetry was the greatest expression of the imagination. This was important because as a skeptic he believed that the human imagination was the principle organ we use to understand the world. A defective imagination can lead to dangerous errors.  You might, as did Coleridge, look at the sublimity of Mont Blanc and be misled into thinking it was the work of an external deity.  And for Shelley, that is the beginning of a great error that would lead to the abdication of personal responsibility and accountability. He would prefer to look upon the sublimity of Mont Blanc and see a "vacancy".  This doesn't mean he saw nothing. This simply means that there is nothing there except as we perceive it.  In other words we make our own world.  If we abdicate responsibility for what happens in the world, we get what we deserve. 

I was recently at a ceremony hosted by the Government of Ontario that was intended to honour its most outstanding citizens.  One of them was a "reverend" who was foolishly permitted to offer the "invocation."  In the course of this she asked us to thank god for the fact that to the extent we had special gifts - we owed it to god.  In other words, what "gifts" we have, we have because of god - they were given to us - not earned or developed.  This pernicious idea is exactly the sort of nonsense Shelley was rebelling against. I almost turned my back on the podium.

It is therefore a most welcome development that as a result of the recent British election, poetry in general and Shelley in particular have been brought to center stage. Thank you Mr. Corbyn. And let us not underestimate the importance of Shelley to what happened.  A general election in one the world's largest democracies was just fought out on ground staked out by Shelley 200 years ago. Labour's motto, "For The Many. Not For The Few", was directly taken from Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy. Read more about the history of this great poem here.

The motto brilliantly captured (or did it create?) an evolving zeitgeist. People are fed up with the current status quo: wealth is concentrating in fewer hands that at almost any point in human history. Shelley knew that. And he found an ingenious manner of expressing that thought. Someone in the Labour Party winged on to this and the rest is history. I firmly believe that motto was responsible for capturing the imagination of youth and bringing them to the polls. Was Shelley worth 30 seats? He may well have been.

But back to "unacknowledged legislators."  I think we are better off to think of Shelley's statement as pertaining to all of the creative arts and not just poetry. Shelley was answering a particular charge at a particular juncture in history - his friend Peacock's suggestion that poetry was pointless. Today the liberal arts and the humanities are under a similar attack by the parasitic, cultural vandals of Silicon Valley. Right across the United States, Republican governors are rolling back support for state universities that offer liberal arts education. The mantra of our day is "Science. Technology. Engineering. Mathematics." Or STEM for short.  This is not just a US phenomenon.  I see it happening in Canada as well.  There is a burgeoning sense that a liberal arts education is worthless.

Culture is worth fighting for - for the very reasons Shelley set out. What Shelley called a "cultivated imagination" can see the world differently - through a lens of love and empathy. Our "gifts" are not given to us by god - we earn them.  They belong to us.  We should be proud of them. The idea that we owe all of this to an external deity is vastly dis-empowering. And it suits the ruling order.

A corollary of this, also encapsulated in Shelley's philosophy, is the importance of skepticism.  A skeptical, critical mind always attacks the truth claims of authority.  And authority tends to rely upon truth claims that are disconnected from reality: America is great because god made it great. Thus Shelley was fond of saying, "religion is the hand maiden of tyranny."

It should therefore not surprise anyone that many authoritarian governments seek to reinforce the power of society's religious superstructure. This is exactly what Trump is doing by blurring the line between church and state. Religious beliefs dis-empower the people - they are taught to trust authority.

A recent development has been the re-emergence of stoicism - it is the pet ancient philosophy of the "tech bros", the overlords of Silicon Valley. And it is a very convenient one indeed - because it is in effect a slave's philosophy that teaches us to accept those things over which we have no control.  And if the companion philosophy is that technological developments are inevitable, then stoicism suits the governing techno-utopian order perfectly. You can read what Cambridge philosopher Sandy Grant has to say about this here.

If there is an ancient philosophy that we need right now, it is skepticism - a philosophy which teaches to to question all authority. Coupled with an empathetic "cultivated imagination", developed through exposure to culture, you have a lethal one-two punch that threatens the foundation of all authoritarians.

We can thank Shelley for piecing this all together. Poets and creators may have been the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" in Shelley's time.  But perhaps no longer.  Now, let's haul ass to the barricades.

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Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, oil on canvas, 1830

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James Regan is an English Literature scholar at the University of Toronto and also works with me as a research and editorial assistant.

Happy Zodiacal Valentine's Day From Percy Bysshe Shelley!!

Happy Valentine’s Day From Percy Bysshe Shelley!!

Here at The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley I spend a lot of time focusing on Shelley’s political and philosophical writings. Around here I can sometimes forget that PB was one of the greatest of all love poets. And so this being Valentine’s Day it seems only right and proper that I should unleash the majesty of his (small “r”) romantic poems. To add some fun to the proceedings I decided to introduce an astrological element. A famous skeptic and a man who was disdainful of superstition, Shelley would probably be appalled by what I am up to here. But then again, contrary to the common misconception, Shelley had a great sense of humour - so maybe he would love this. Let’s hope so. But in any event, it is Valentine’s Day and the spirits of Eros and Cupid are in charge, so I am going to jump in with both feet.

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And here it is! Hilda Pagan’s horoscope for me.

I wanted to try to match some of his most beautiful poems with the twelve astrological signs. Do you want to know which love poem rules your sign? Which poem speaks to the heart of your loved one? Well look no further. I order to make this all happen, I needed to speak to astrological experts. Knowing none, I was left in a quandary. It then occurred to me that my great Aunts Hilda and Isabel Pagan (yes, that is their name) were both astrologers of the first order. In fact they cast a horoscope for me (see image) at the hour of my birth - a horoscope so uncannily accurate that my mother kept it hidden from me until I was in my twenties!. One problem - they are both dead.

Where there is a will there is a way. Thanks to the magic of the ouija board, I was able to communicate with them. It took a little time (letter by letter!) but i am now pleased to present a selection of Shelley’s love poetry matched to each of the 12 astrological signs. No one in the history of the world has ever performed this astounding feat of astro-poetical genius. Let’s dig in.

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Aries: March 21 – April 19

Aries. You are from the first House, the House of Self. This can make it challenging to choose a partner but where love is concerned, under the fire sign and the ruling celestial body of Mars, choosing yourself might be the right idea!

The Question

I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,

Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring,

And gentle odours led my steps astray,

Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring

Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay

Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling

Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,

But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,

The constellated flower that never sets;

Faint oxlips; tender bluebells, at whose birth

The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets —

Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth —

Its mother's face with Heaven's collected tears,

When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears.

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,

Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may,

And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine

Was the bright dew, yet drained not by the day;

And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,

With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray;

And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold,

Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.

And nearer to the river's trembling edge

There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white,

And starry river buds among the sedge,

And floating water-lilies, broad and bright,

Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge

With moonlight beams of their own watery light;

And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green

As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.

Methought that of these visionary flowers

I made a nosegay, bound in such a way

That the same hues, which in their natural bowers

Were mingled or opposed, the like array

Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours

Within my hand,— and then, elate and gay,

I hastened to the spot whence I had come,

That I might there present it! — Oh! to whom?

— Written in 1820, this poem was published by Leigh Hunt in The Literary Pocket-Book in 1822.

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Taurus: April 20 – May 20

Ruled by Venus but under a terrestrial sign, your earthly concern on Valentine’s Day is sharing a night with your honey. Shelley has you covered. Curl up with this beauty...and indulge in breakfast in bed in the morning no matter who cooks!

Goodnight

Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill

Which severs those it should unite;

Let us remain together still,

Then it will be good night.

How can I call the lone night good,

Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?

Be it not said, thought, understood —

Then it will be — good night.

To hearts which near each other move

From evening close to morning light,

The night is good; because, my love,

They never say good-night.

— Written in 1820, this poem was published by Leigh Hunt in The Literary Pocket-Book in 1822.

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 Gemini: May 21 – June 20

You are a thinker, Gemini. Your twin soul weighs past and future equally.  Shelley’s thoughtful poem The Recollection captures your understanding of the balance of past and future. Is there someone you should reach out to and send a little note that you’re thinking of them?

To Jane: The Recollection

Now the last day of many days,

All beautiful and bright as thou,

The loveliest and the last, is dead,

Rise, Memory, and write its praise!

Up, — to thy wonted work! come, trace

The epitaph of glory fled, —

For now the Earth has changed its face,

A frown is on the Heaven’s brow.

We wandered to the Pine Forest

That skirts the Ocean’s foam,

The lightest wind was in its nest,

The tempest in its home.

The whispering waves were half asleep,

The clouds were gone to play,

And on the bosom of the deep

The smile of Heaven lay;

It seemed as if the hour were one

Sent from beyond the skies,

Which scattered from above the sun

A light of Paradise.

We paused amid the pines that stood

The giants of the waste,

Tortured by storms to shapes as rude

As serpents interlaced;

And soothed by every azure breath,

That under Heaven is blown,

To harmonies and hues beneath,

As tender as its own;

Now all the tree-tops lay asleep,

Like green waves on the sea,

As still as in the silent deep

The ocean woods may be.

How calm it was! — the silence there

By such a chain was bound

That even the busy woodpecker

Made stiller by her sound

The inviolable quietness;

The breath of peace we drew

With its soft motion made not less

The calm that round us grew.

There seemed from the remotest seat

Of the white mountain waste,

To the soft flower beneath our feet,

A magic circle traced, —

A spirit interfused around,

A thrilling, silent life,

To momentary peace it bound

Our mortal nature’s strife;

And still I felt the centre of

The magic circle there

Was one fair form that filled with love

The lifeless atmosphere.

We paused beside the pools that lie

Under the forest bough,—

Each seemed as ’twere a little sky

Gulfed in a world below;

A firmament of purple light

Which in the dark earth lay,

More boundless than the depth of night,

And purer than the day —

In which the lovely forests grew,

As in the upper air,

More perfect both in shape and hue

Than any spreading there.

There lay the glade and neighbouring lawn,

And through the dark green wood

The white sun twinkling like the dawn

Out of a speckled cloud.

Sweet views which in our world above

Can never well be seen,

Were imaged by the water’s love

Of that fair forest green.

And all was interfused beneath

With an Elysian glow,

An atmosphere without a breath,

A softer day below.

Like one beloved the scene had lent

To the dark water’s breast,

Its every leaf and lineament

With more than truth expressed;

Until an envious wind crept by,

Like an unwelcome thought,

Which from the mind’s too faithful eye

Blots one dear image out.

Though thou art ever fair and kind,

The forests ever green,

Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind,

Than calm in waters, seen.

— Written in 1821 and published in this form by Mary Shelley in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1839, 2nd edition.

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 Cancer: June 21 – July 22

Guided by the moon and water you respond to the romance of the night and your environment. Delight in the mood and the atmosphere on Valentine’s Day with this literary treat. Good lighting, relaxing music and a great glass of wine can do wonders.

To Jane: “The Keen Stars Were Twinkling”

The keen stars were twinkling,

And the fair moon was rising among them,

Dear Jane!

The guitar was tinkling,

But the notes were not sweet till you sung them

Again.

As the moon's soft splendour

O'er the faint cold starlight of Heaven

Is thrown,

So your voice most tender

To the strings without soul had then given

Its own.

The stars will awaken,

Though the moon sleep a full hour later,

To-night;

No leaf will be shaken

Whilst the dews of your melody scatter

Delight.

Though the sound overpowers,

Sing again, with your dear voice revealing

A tone

Of some world far from ours,

Where music and moonlight and feeling

Are one.

Written in 1822, the poem was published in part under the title An Ariette for Music. To a Lady Singing to her Accompaniment on the Guitar by Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin in 1832. Mary later published in full under the title To — in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley , 2nd Edition. We now know the poem was written to Jane Williams.

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 Leo: July 23 – August 22

Sun driven Leo! Headstrong lion from the House of Pleasure, whisk your Valentine away for an unforgettable trip….even if you are your own Valentine. Life’s joys are many. Pamper yourself and try to set a record for favourite things done today. This is Shelley’s sign - he was born 4 August 1792!!

To Jane: The Invitation

Best and brightest, come away!

Fairer far than this fair Day, 

Which, like thee to those in sorrow,

Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow

To the rough Year just awake

In its cradle on the brake. 

The brightest hour of unborn Spring,

Through the winter wandering,

Found, it seems, the halcyon Morn

To hoar February born.

Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth,

It kiss'd the forehead of the Earth,

And smiled upon the silent sea,

And bade the frozen streams be free,

And waked to music all their fountains,

And breathed upon the frozen mountains,

And like a prophetess of May

Strewed flowers upon the barren way,

Making the wintry world appear

Like one on whom thou smilest, dear.

Away away from men and towns,

To the wild woods and the downs —

To the silent wilderness

Where the soul need not repress

Its music lest it should not find

An echo in another's mind ,

While the touch of Nature's art

Harmonizes heart to heart.

I leave this notice on my door

For each accustomed visitor: —

“I am gone into the field

To take what this sweet hour yields; —

Reflection, you may come tom-morrow,

Sit by the fireside with Sorrow, —

You with the unpaid bill, Despair, —

You tireseome verse-reciter, Care, —

I will pay you in the grave, —

Death will listen to your stave.

Expectation too, be off!

To-day is for itself enough;

Hope, in pity mock not Woe

With smiles, nor follow where I go;

Long having lived on thy food,

At length I find one moment’s good

After long pain — with all your love,

This you never told me of.”

Radiant Sister of the Day

Awake! arise! and come away!

To the wild woods and the plains,

To the pools where winter rains

Image all their roof of leaves,

Where the pine its garland weaves

Of sapless green and ivy dun

Round stems that never kiss the sun;

Where the lawns and pastures be

And the sandhills of the sea; —

Where the melting hoar-frost wets

The daisy-star that never sets,

And wind-flowers and violets,

Which yet join not scent to hue,

Crown the pale year weak and new;

When the night is left behind

In the deep east dim and blind,

And the blue noon is over us ,

And the multitudinous

Billows murmur at our feet,

Where the earth and ocean meet 

And all things seem only one

In the universal Sun.

— Written in 1821 and published in this form by Mary Shelley in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1839, 2nd edition.

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 Virgo: August 23 – September 22

Virgos analyze. Analyze this gem inspired by Shakespeare. Are you in a relationship? Could there be someone nearby who also loves you? You are valued and cherished, thoughtful Virgo! Word to the wise - if someone gives you a guitar, they probably have a crush on you! This is Mary’s sign - she was born 30 August 1797!!

With a Guitar, To Jane - an Excerpt

Ariel to Miranda: — Take

This slave of Music, for the sake

Of him who is the slave of thee,

And teach it all the harmony

In which thou canst, and only thou,

Make the delighted spirit glow, 

Till joy denies itself again,

And, too intense, is turn'd to pain;

For by permission and command

Of thine own Prince Ferdinand,

Poor Ariel sends this silent token

Of more than ever can be spoken;

Your guardian spirit Ariel, who,

From life to life, must still pursue

Your happiness; — for thus alone

Can Ariel ever find his own. 

From Prospero's enchanted cell,

As the mighty verses tell, 

To the throne of Naples, he

Lit you o'er the trackless sea,

Flitting on, your prow before,

Like a living meteor. 

When you die, the silent Moon

In her interlunar swoon,

Is not sadder in her cell

Than deserted Ariel.

When you live again on earth, 

Like an unseen star of birth,

Ariel guides you o'er the sea

Of life from your nativity.

Many changes have been run

Since Ferdinand and you begun

Your course of love, and Ariel still

Has track'd your steps, and served your will;

Now, in humbler, happier lot,

This is all remembered not;

And now alas! the poor sprite is

Imprisoned for some fault of his,

In a body like a grave; —

From you he only dares to crave,

For his service and his sorrow

A smile to-day, a song to-morrow. 

The artist who this idol wrought,

To echo all harmonious thought,

Felled a tree while on the steep

The woods were in their winter sleep, 

Rocked in that repose divine

On the wind-swept Apennine;

And dreaming some of Autumn past, 

And some of Spring approaching fast,

And some of April buds and showers,

And some of songs in July bowers, 

And all of love; and so this tree, —

Oh that such our death may be! —

Died in sleep and felt no pain ,

To live in happier form again;

From which beneath Heaven's fairest star,

The artist wrought this loved Guitar;

And taught it justly to reply,

To all who question skilfully,

In language gentle as thine own;

Whispering in enamour'd tone

Sweet oracles of woods and dells,

And summer winds in sylvan cells;

For it had learnt all harmonies

Of the plains and of the skies ,

Of the forests and the mountains 

And the many-voicèd fountains;

The clearest echoes of the hills,

The softest notes of falling rills,

The melodies of birds and bees,

The murmuring of summer seas,

And pattering rain, and breathing dew, 

And airs of evening; and it knew

That seldom-heard mysterious sound,

Which driven on its diurnal round ,

As it floats through boundless day, 

Our world enkindles on its way, —

All this it knows but will not tell

To those who cannot question well

The spirit that inhabits it;

It talks according to the wit

Of its companions; and no more

Is heard than has been felt before,

By those who tempt it to betray

These secrets of an elder day:

But sweetly as its answers will

Flatter hands of perfect skill,

It keeps its highest, holiest tone

For one belovèd Jane alone.

— Written in 1822, this poem was published by Medwin in The Athenæum on 30 October 1832.

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Libra: September 23 – October 22

Symmetry and balance are in the air for you, Libra. One of Shelley’s greatest poems gives you all of that and more. You juggle thinking and feeling all day long. Perhaps succumb to feeling every now and then. Especially for a romantic special occasion such as this.

Love’s Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river

And the rivers with the Ocean,

The winds of Heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

All things by a law divine

In one spirit meet and mingle.

Why not I with thine? —

See the mountains kiss high Heaven 

And the waves clasp one another;

No sister-flower would be forgiven

If it disdained its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth 

And the moonbeams kiss the sea:

What is all this sweet work worth

If thou kiss not me?

— Written in 1819, the poem was first published by Leigh Hunt inThe Indicator on 22 December 1819.

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Scorpio: October 23 – November 21

Sensuous and dreamlike, yet physical and organic, your keyword is desire, Scorpio. Desire with a capital D. Drama also starts with a D... You know your power but your love might not understand the full scope of it. Focus your energy on treating your Valentine and try not to slip into the second D word.

The Indian Serenade

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night.

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright:

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a spirit in my feet

Has led me — who knows how?

To thy chamber-window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream —

The Champak odours fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale's complaint,

It dies upon her heart; —

As I must die on thine,

Oh, belovèd as thou art!

O, lift me from the grass!

I die, I faint, I fall!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold, and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast; —

Oh! press it close to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.

— Written in 1819 this poem was published with the title Song written for an Indian Air, in The Liberal, volume 2, 1822.

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 Sagittarius: November 22 – December 21

You are a traveler, Sagittarius. You understand the need for new surroundings and what fleeting experiences do to impact your ideas of time and memory. Love is like that as well and sometimes sharp inclines of joy and declines of sorrow only reinforce the immediacy of life and the beauty of each moment. Cherish this moment.

Mutability

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,

Streaking the darkness radiantly! — yet soon

Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings

Give various response to each varying blast,

To whose frail frame no second motion brings

One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. — A dream has power to poison sleep;

We rise. — One wandering thought pollutes the day;

We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;

Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! — For, be it joy or sorrow,

The path of its departure still is free:

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;

Nought may endure but Mutabililty.

— Written in 1816, the poem was published with Alastor in the same year.

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Capricorn: December 22 – January 19

You have sense, Capricorn. You have roots in wisdom and earth. You certainly have the wherewithal and savvy to convince a crush to give you a chance or the judgement to choose a suitable suitor/suitress. Maybe this could be an opportunity to use your wisdom and savvy for mutual gratification!

Epipsychidion — an excerpt

Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare          

Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wrecked.          

I never was attached to that great sect,       

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select

Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,       

And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend     

To cold oblivion, though it is in the code      

Of modern morals, and the beaten road      

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,

Who travel to their home among the dead  

By the broad highway of the world, and so  

With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,      

The dreariest and the longest journey go.    

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

That to divide is not to take away.    

Love is like understanding, that grows bright,          

Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light,      

Imagination! which from earth and sky,       

And from the depths of human phantasy,

As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills

The Universe with glorious beams, and kills 

Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow           

Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow           

The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,

The life that wears, the spirit that creates    

One object, and one form, and builds thereby         

A sepulchre for its eternity.

— This excerpt (lines 147 - 173) is from Epipsychidion which was was written in 1821 and published (without Shelley’s name) in the summer of 1822.

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Aquarius: January 20 – February 18

Cup bearer! Aquarius, you understand water, air and friendship. You are willing to ride along on the tide of another’s passion because you feel you just know. This is a beautiful trait. If you are with someone right now, give them the tiller on your love boat. If you are not, perhaps now is the time to try something you are unsure of because it could be something magical. Who knows?  

My Soul is an Enchanted Boat - an excerpt from Prometheus Unbound

My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;

And thine doth like an angel sit

Beside a helm conducting it,

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.

It seems to float ever, for ever,

Upon that many-winding river,

Between mountains, woods, abysses,

A paradise of wildernesses!

Till, like one in slumber bound,

Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,

Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound:

Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions

In music's most serene dominions;

Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.

And we sail on, away, afar,

Without a course, without a star,

But, by the instinct of sweet music driven;

Till through Elysian garden islets

By thee, most beautiful of pilots,

Where never mortal pinnace glided,

The boat of my desire is guided:

Realms where the air we breathe is love,

Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,

Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above.

We have past Age's icy caves,

And Manhood's dark and tossing waves,

And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray:

Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee

Of shadow-peopled Infancy,

Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day;

A paradise of vaulted bowers,

Lit by downward-gazing flowers,

And watery paths that wind between

Wildernesses calm and green,

Peopled by shapes too bright to see,

And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee;

Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously!

— Prometheus Unbound was written in Italy over a period of about year beginning in September 1819. Shelley published it in the summer of 1820.

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 Pisces: February 19 – March 20

You are a ship at sea. The water sign guides your sensibilities but inspired by the ichthyocentaurs you are flexible and will venture boldly into the lands of air, fire, earth as well as water. You have an exceptional talent for versatility. Show your Valentine your many strengths this February 14th (and really, any day).

Epipsychidion — an excerpt

This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed       

Thee to be lady of the solitude. —     

And I have fitted up some chambers there

Looking toward the golden Eastern air,        

And level with the living winds, which flow  

Like waves above the living waves below. —

I have sent books and music there, and all   

Those instruments with which high Spirits call

The future from its cradle, and the past       

Out of its grave, and make the present last  

In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,  

Folded within their own eternity.     

Our simple life wants little, and true taste

Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste  

The scene it would adorn, and therefore still,          

Nature, with all her children, haunts the hill.

The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet   

Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit

Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance        

Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;       

The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight          

Before our gate, and the slow, silent night   

Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep.

Be this our home in life, and when years heap         

Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,      

Let us become the overhanging day,

The living soul of this Elysian isle,      

Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile

We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,

Under the roof of blue Ionian weather,

And wander in the meadows, or ascend

The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend

With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;

Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,

Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea,

Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy, —

Possessing and possessed by all that is

Within that calm circumference of bliss,

And by each other, till to love and live

Be one: — or, at the noontide hour, arrive

Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep

The moonlight of the expired night asleep,

Through which the awaken'd day can never peep;

A veil for our seclusion, close as night's,

Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;

Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain

Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.

And we will talk, until thought's melody

Become too sweet for utterance, and it die

In words, to live again in looks, which dart

With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,

Harmonizing silence without a sound.

Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,

And our veins beat together; and our lips

With other eloquence than words, eclipse

The soul that burns between them, and the wells

Which boil under our being's inmost cells,

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be

Confused in Passion's golden purity,

As mountain-springs under the morning sun.

We shall become the same, we shall be one

Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?

One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,

Till like two meteors of expanding flame,

Those spheres instinct with it become the same,

Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still

Burning, yet ever inconsumable:

In one another's substance finding food,

Like flames too pure and light and unimbued

To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,

Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:

One hope within two wills, one will beneath

Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,

One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,

And one annihilation….

— This excerpt (lines 513 - 587) is from Epipsychidion which was was written in 1821 and published (without Shelley’s name) in the summer of 1822.

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All poems are taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited by Thomas Hutchinson and published in 1948. If you see an mistake, please let me know!

Let Fury Have the Hour - Shelley and The Clash

Let Fury Have the Hour - Shelley and The Clash

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On 8 May 1970 the Beatles issued their final album and broke up - the music that I had grown up with was, I thought, finished and the world was unraveling. Ah youth. I was not yet 16. Then, when I was barely 18, the chess and hockey started - and things really went nuts.

In the summer of 1972 the American Bobby Fischer faced Boris Spassky, a Russian, in a chess (chess!!!!) match that came to be known as the “Match of the Century”. It dominated newspaper headlines for months. Without question this will be looked back on as the most famous chess match ever played - though not necessarily because of the chess - though it was brilliant. Garry Kasparov, a subsequent world champion, explains why:

“I think the reason you look at these matches was not so much due to the chess factor but rather the political element. This was inevitable because in the Soviet Union chess was treated by the Soviet authorities as a very important and a useful ideological tool to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Soviet communist regime over the West. That is why Spassky’s defeat was treated by people on both sides of the Atlantic as a crushing moment in the midst of the cold war”.

“Then the chess and hockey started - and things really went nuts.”

Spassky (left) and Fischer in 1972

Spassky had barely resigned the match on 31 August 1972 when a mere 2 days later a very different and far more physical cold war contest began. On 2 September 1972 Canada and the Soviet Union squared off in what came to be known as the Summit Series. For decades the Soviets had dominated international hockey largely because the Canadian had never “iced” their professional players. For the first time, our best would face their best. 26 grueling days later the series ended with a dramatic last minute goal - Canada had defeated the Soviet Union. I know exactly where I was.

In that same summer, the Black September terrorists kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Then came an oil embargo that roiled the world. Next came Nixon’s epic disgrace and resignation. Over the next few years we would learn about the deaths of millions of Cambodians at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. During this same period wars erupted across Africa as former colonial states fought for independence in places like Rhodesia and South Africa.

In 1978 we were shocked by the mass suicides in what was called Jonestown. We were also introduced to the concept of serial killers thanks to the predations of David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam”) and Ted Bundy. The threat of nuclear disasters also dominated our world culminating in Three Mile Island accident in 1979. The soundtrack for much of this period was a bizarre mishmash of “prog rock” and disco. Below the surface, however, we took shelter with Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith and holdovers from the late 60s.

Paul Henderson scores the winning goal with seconds left.

I am not going to suggest that the 1970s were uniformly terrible. Every era has its good and its bad. The chess was terrific and Canada’s national hockey team accomplished what was thought to be impossible. Mother Theresa won the Nobel peace Prize. Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon. Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. Louise Brown became the world’s first test tube baby. Secretariat blew away the field to win the Triple Crown. Billie Jean King beat that fool Bobby Riggs. Some amazing movies got made: Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver, and Alien. And musically, the decade went out in a blaze of rock and roll we called punk.

Somehow, during all of this confusion, I managed to come of age and become a man. I graduated from high school in 1973 and eventually went to University. I fell in love, out of love and back in love. I cemented friendships which have endured to this day. But what sustained me for the latter part of this decade was a couple of things: my love of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and music - specifically, punk rock.

“ Let fury have the hour, anger can be power - The Clash”

I was young and fairly revolutionary in my thinking. I was studying English literature - Shelley and Blake were my heroes. I liked them because they opposed the status quo - they fought the system. Much like Shelley, I could not abide Wordsworth - not because of the poetry - but because he became a backsliding, reactionary, counter-revolutionary. He became as, Mary Shelley so succinctly put it, a “slave”. And there is nothing that youthful rebels despise more than seeing their heroes back-silde into conformity.

In the 1970s, Shelley was still an outcast in the academic community – his reputation had been almost irreparably damaged by the likes of Eliot and Leavis. It was only just then in the process of being resuscitated thanks to scholars such as Milton Wilson (with whom I had the luck to later complete my masters at the University of Toronto), the great Kenneth Neill Cameron and Eric Wasserman. To study Shelley was almost an act of rebellion in and of itself. He was a lot of very cool things: atheist, vegetarian, philosophical anarchist, feminist, anti-monarchist, republican and lots more. He was seriously rock and roll.

One of my favourite bands from the era was Buzzcocks, an English outfit fronted by a man named Pete Shelley. Pete had been born as Peter McNeish; but when he took to the stage he changed his name to honour his favourite romantic poet. I was enthralled by this idea and when I wrote my masters thesis, I included three musical epigraphs: two from the Sex Pistols and one from Buzzcocks. It was perhaps a stretch - however in my youthful rebellious mind I thought it was apt.

But was it really so far-fetched to tie together punk music and romantic poetry? To test this, I thought I would be fun to have a quick glance at one of the classics of the era to see if there are, in fact, any Shelleyan overtones. That classic? Clampdown by The Clash from the album London Calling. Let’s dig in.

To make this work, you really need to do me a favour.  You need to follow this link or this one or this one and give the song a few listens. When you are done that, come on back and let’s continue.

Clampdown is a song about the loss of youthful ideals. Written by Joe Strummer, one of the band's most fiercely anti-establishment members, the song charts the manner in which this can happen. And just as Shelley understood importance of language, so too did Strummer. He laments the manner in which society teaches its "twisted speech to the young believers"; the manner in which youthful revolutionary instincts are dulled by an inculcated appetite for money and the acquisition of luxuries.

We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers

“You grow up and you calm down - you’re working for the clampdown. - The Clash”

The tendency of revolutions to fail to bring about meaningful change and progress was always a concern for Shelley; it is one of the reasons I think he was almost obsessed with language. I am not sure that, apart from Shakespeare, there has ever been a writer who not only understood the power of language, but who mastered it so completely. Words can free us; words can enslave us. Professor Michael O’Neill in his keynote address to the Shelley Conference 2017 digs into how Shelley uses language to challenge custom and habit; or, as O’Neill puts it, to "invite [his readers] to reconsider the world in which we live." This, to me, strikes at the heart of Shelley’s entire output; this was a man who believed that poetry (or more generally cultural products) could literally change the world.  I have written about this here and here.

In the case of Clampdown, Strummer castigates the youth of all generations, alleging, "You grow up and you calm down / You're working for the clampdown. For his part, he imagines a revolutionary resistance to the state:

The judge said five to ten-but I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown

How familiar does this start to sound? I hear echoes of Prometheus facing down the Jupiter in Act 1 of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.  Both speakers see themselves as martyrs. In Clampdown, the protagonist is charged by the police for an act of rebellion against the state. At his trial, he defies his judge and asks for his sentence to be doubled. Then, spitting with anger: 

Kick over the wall cause governments to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D’you know that you can use it?

“Kick over the wall cause governments to fall. - The Clash”

The state, however, is seen as cunning and subversive. It gets inside your head, it coerces you subtly; wears you down, urges conformity. Why fight the system? You will never win. At this point I hear the furies from Act 2 of Prometheus Unbound taunting Prometheus. Strummer himself imagines a subversive internal dialogue that erodes the will to resist:

The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you

Even the members of one's own class are not to be trusted: 

The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

He then moves to the accusatory crescendo of the song:

You grow up and you calm down
You're working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You're working for the clampdown.

“Shelley was a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism - Marx”

Joe Strummer

And once this happens the conversion is complete. Youthful rebellion is replaced by aging complacency and conformity - the young rebellious Wordsworth becomes the old reactionary Wordsworth. The revolution, in other words, fails. It seems to me that there are some surprising echoes here of both Prometheus Unbound and Shelley's own life. The voices inside Joe Strummer’s head are the Clash's version of Mercury and the Furies. We all hear them. Unlike Shelley, however, Strummer had no real sense of the perfectibility of man. He saw only chaos and degradation – the endless cycles of revolution-tyranny-revolution. Shelley saw a way out. Not so Joe Strummer. 

Shelley, drawn by Edward Williams (If only PBS had a publicist!)

As a young man, despising Wordsworth as a sellout and extolling Shelley as a revolutionary, I clung to the message of Clampdown: which I took to be: "Don't grow up and turn into your old man; don't conform." Be Shelley, not Wordsworth. Now, of course, there was one flaw in my thinking. Shelley died before he had a chance to turn into a Wordsworth; before the voices in his head subverted his revolutionary impulses. And he has detractors who suggest that had he not died, this is exactly what would have happened - he would have grown up and become a proper Tory.

Possibly. But maybe not. Not everyone is destined to become a Wordsworth. Think for example of the great crusading journalist (and Shelleyan) Paul Foot. I wrote about him here. Or what about Ursula Leguin (another Shelleyan). Leguin and Foot never for a minute surrendered their ideals. I like to think Shelley would never have surrendered them either, would never have worked for the clampdown. And I am not alone, here is what Karl Marx said:

"The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism."

But those voice in our heads........they keep calling - don’t they. Shelley knew that. Contrary to what many think, Shelley was not a utopian and Prometheus Unbound is not his vision of utopia. Have a close look at Act 3. After the forces unleashed by Demogorgon oust Jupiter, Demogorgon does not vanish - Shelley envisages that he retires to a cave beneath the world from whence he may be called forth again in the event the revolution fails. This underscores Shelley’s lifelong skepticism: you can fight for change, you can win, but you can just as easily lose everything you have gained down the road. The only cure? Eternal vigilance and an ever-renewing revolutionary imagination.

The rebellious spirit of the romantic poets is really not so far removed from that of the punk rock musicians of the 1970s and 80s. This is why the study of poets like Shelley (in particular) can offer so much to us today. There is a commonality of spirit, a sort of intellectual esprit de coeur, that unites them - that unites are true revolutionaries. And they all tell us one thing: we grow old at our own peril.

“Let fury have the hour, anger can be power”.

Roland Duerksen: A Shelleyan Life

In the early summer of 2017, I received a letter from the daughter of the noted Shelley scholar Roland Duerksen. Susan had read my article “My Father’s Shelley” and it had struck a chord. She wanted to connect me with her father, now 91 years old and living in Oxford, Ohio. Roland is the author of two noteworthy and important books on Shelley: Shelleyan Ideas in Victorian Literature and Shelley's Poetry of Involvement. His analysis is penetrating and nuanced, and his style is conversational and accessible. But it is his overall approach that makes him different: Roland's work is imbued with a humanity that reflects well on both himself and his subject. This much I knew, but I knew less about the man himself. I was thrilled that Susan had reached out to me. She offered me a chance to meet one of the great Shelleyans, but I had no idea whatsoever of the magic that lay in wait for me.

         Below, I give you a little about the life and thought of Roland Duerksen, which I gathered from him in interviews that took place over a couple of days. In this essay, I want to share Roland's early life story, from his Mennonite rearing in Dust Bowl Kansas to his development into one of the truly great Shelley scholars. In a second essay, which will appear shortly on our website, I will dive into Duerksen's ideas about Shelley and his later life, including his important work as an activist. Stay tuned!

          Roland possesses an extraordinary memory and can quote Shelley at length. Though he has been retired for years, his grasp of the nuances of Shelley’s poetry was nothing short of astonishing. He was also an amusing and friendly interlocutor. He has the ability to put one at ease; you feel like you are out on a country porch, chatting with an old friend you have known for years.

          Roland Duerksen was born 23 October 1926, just 7 miles from Goessel, Kansas. Goessel is a small farming community that is located almost dead center on the US map. In Goessel you will find, among other things, the Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum, a hint of the community’s religious and farming roots. To get there, one takes Interstate 135 north from Wichita to Newton, before making a quick right on Highway 15. In seven miles you will find yourself in Goessel. The 240-acre family farm can be found two side roads north and four to the east, another seven miles from town.

Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church, Molotschna, Ukraine.

          Roland’s ancestors came to this place in 1874, part of a mass migration of Mennonites fleeing persecution in Russia. The history is fascinating. Originally Dutch, the community emigrated in the early 17th century to what was then South Prussia, and then later in the 1820s to Molotschna, Russia (in what is now Ukraine). The Mennonites had been on the move for centuries, persecuted for what were considered to be heretical beliefs. In Russia they were promised exemption from military service, the right to run their own schools, and the ability to self-govern their villages. In the late 19th century, however, Russia decided to revoke all special privileges that had been given to the community. The leaders of the community made a momentous decision: they would take their entire community to the United States of America. Church elders organized an exploratory mission in 1873 to ascertain the available options. After visiting Texas and Kansas, the leaders returned with the recommendation that the community emigrate to Kansas. At the time, the United States was desperate for skilled farming immigrants, and the Mennonites fit the bill. The community quickly set out, eventually settling in Buhler and Goessel, two towns in rural Kansas. In 1874, after a long, arduous trip, Roland's grandfather Johann (then aged 16) reached his new life in the Goessel community. (Read more about this extraordinary migration here.)

Roland Duerksen in 1934 or 35.

          During their first 50 or so years in America, the Goessel farmers prospered essentially as they had expected. Life was persecution-free and work was productive. Free to worship as they pleased, the Duerksens attended Alexanderwohl Church (pictured to the right). Originally built in 1886, it was refurbished substantially over the years, but is still there to this day.

          Then came the hard times. By the time Roland was 3, the stock market had crashed; before he was 8, the American West was in the grips of the great drought of the 1930s; and as he turned 16, America entered a World War. How does this compare with your youth?

          We all know the drought of the 1930s as the “Dust Bowl” because it resulted in immense dust storms, known as “black blizzards,” which wreaked havoc on America's farms. They came in waves, hitting America hard in 1934, 1936, 1939, and 1940.

          On 14 April 1935, a mammoth series of these storms struck the American West. They have since come to be known as “Black Sunday.” They were every bit as bad as their name suggests. Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger (famed for having given the Dust Bowl its name) was caught on a highway north of Boise City, Idaho as he raced at 60 miles an hour in a failed attempt to outrun it. He writes of what he saw as follows:

Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, 1935

“The Black Sunday event was one of the less frequent but more dramatic storms borne south on polar air originating in Canada. Rising some 8,000 feet into the air, these churning walls of dirt generated massive amounts of static electricity, complete with their own thunder and lightning ... Temperatures plunged 40 degrees along the storm front before the dust hit.”

“A farmer and his two sons during a storm in Cimaron County, Oklahoma April 1936." Arthur Rothstein.

          Goessel is located on the edge of where these storms hit hardest, and the bad weather severely impacted the Duerksens. The family, which consisted of Roland, his parents, and three siblings, was very poor; Roland's father often struggled to make his payments on the farm. Unlike so many, however, the family weathered the Great Depression and emerged from the years of hardship in one piece.

          The family were devoted Mennonites. Ironically, Roland's childhood faith may have partly inspired his attraction to England's most famous atheist poet (I will return to this idea). Mennonites believe that baptism should result from an informed decision of which only adults are capable; thus the religion tends to stress individual choice and the freedom of conscience in religious and ethical matters. For much of history, this spirit of non-conformity made them a target of persecution within European societies. 

        Mennonites place the teachings of Jesus, including pacifism, non-violence, and charity, at the heart of their religion. According to Bethel College, a Christian school Duerksen attended, Mennonites base their faith and lifestyle around the following traits: "service to others; concern for those less fortunate; involvement in issues of social justice; and emphasis on peaceful, nonviolent resolution of community, national and international conflicts.” It is this last feature of their belief system that has resulted in Mennonites’ opposition to war and their refusal to serve in the military. The corollary of this passivism is of critical importance, because Mennonites are dedicated to creating a “more just and peaceful society.” Of course, these same values can be found in Shelley's writing, even if Shelley and the Mennonites took very different paths towards them.

          In other ways, however, Roland's upbringing hardly seemed calculated to produce a great literary scholar. His mother, who drew on evangelicalism as well as the Mennonite faith, “was opposed to the reading of novels because they do not contain the truth,” Roland says. This meant that as he grew, books were a rarity and the church was central to his existence. Roland attended a one-room school house which had only a few short shelves of books. When I asked him about this, Roland replied,

"I must say my whole introduction to books came much later. I did read some books. I remember Robinson Crusoe and [books like that]. But, it was very sparse and I was figuring, I guess, that I [was destined to] be a farmer. So why should I read a lot?"

          The future, however, had something very different in store for Roland Duerksen: Shelley lay in wait…

Roland Duerksen, circa 1948.

          Roland attended high school in Goessel, graduated in 1944, and immediately registered as a conscientious objector. The war was reaching a climax; millions of young Americans were enlisted and fighting overseas. Nationwide there was little sympathy for those who refused to serve in the military. Roland was not unlike thousands of other young Americans (many of them Mennonites) whose religious beliefs required them to make such a momentous, deeply unpopular decision. The movie Hacksaw Ridge offers a surprisingly candid and sympathetic portrait of one such young man. Taking a stand as a pacifist in World War II brought social ostracism and disdain, and often much worse. But because of the 19th-century mass migration of Mennonites to Marion County where Goessel is located, the Mennonite population there was still so large that the atmosphere was not as hostile. When the county draft board saw that a registrant was a member of the Mennonite church, conscientious objector status was virtually automatic.

          During the Second World War, over 15 million men and women had been called up for service. This amounted to almost 20% of the work force and agriculture was hit particularly hard. Congress reacted by passing legislation allowing for draft deferments for those who were “necessary and regularly engaged in an agricultural occupation.” Roland received just such a deferment and for the next 7 years worked in tandem with his father on the family farm. Then, in 1951 at age 25, Roland went to college.

          When I asked Roland what motivated this life-changing decision, he told me,

"I believe that all those years I was always thinking, well, maybe [farming] isn't really what I want to do. And I had this notion that it would be a great thing to go to college and become a teacher, but I didn't know what I wanted to teach. But the idea of teaching was interesting to me. And so finally, after those seven years, I decided, well, if I'm ever gonna make the break, now is the time."

Bethel College today.

          Bethel College is located in North Newton, just across the railroad tracks from Newton itself. It is about 20 miles distant from the Duerksen farm. Bethel College, a four-year, private, liberal arts college, is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Its charter was filed in 1887 by the early central Kansas immigrants because of their commitment, shared with their non-Mennonite neighbours, to educating their children. According to its values statement, “the vision and mission of Bethel College are grounded in the values inherited from its historical relationship with the Christian faith tradition of the Mennonite Church…”

          In our lives, there are sometimes special teachers, people who change the course of our lives. For me, one of those teachers was Professor Kenneth Graham of the University of Guelph. Much like Roland, when I went to University I was unsure of my direction. Ken Graham kindled a passion for literature in me that has burned brightly all my life; it was Ken’s unbridled enthusiasm that sealed the deal.

Honora Becker, c. 1955

          For Roland, the person who filled this mentoring role was Professor Honora Becker. Teaching at a small college meant specialization was out of the question for teachers like Becker. But according to Roland,

“The reason I chose English, I think, was because there was one very enthusiastic teacher. She had to teach so many different courses that she couldn't be a scholar, but it was the fact of her enthusiasm about English literature that influenced me to take it as a major.”

          One thing I learned about Roland through our conversations is that once fired up, there is not much that can hold him back. A late starter at college, he wasted little time and completed a four-year honours degree in three years, graduating in 1954.

          Not long after Roland's graduation, the military came calling again. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the US government passed the Selective Service Act of 1948 which applied to all men between 21 and 29. A million and a half men were drafted to meet the demands of the Korean War, but even after its conclusion in 1953, the armed forces continued to call up young men. Roland was one of them. Still a conscientious objector, Roland was granted alternative service and performed it through the auspices of the renowned Mennonite Central Committee, headquartered in Akron, Pennsylvania. For two years he worked as a personnel recruiter and publicity writer for three small psychiatric hospitals operated by the Central Committee.

Mary and Roland, 2016

          Just before leaving for Pennsylvania, Roland met Mary Ellen Moyer, a Bethel graduate who was teaching school in Hutchinson, Kansas, and courted her through occasional visits. They married in 1955. They are still happily together more than 62 years later.

          Once his alternative service was completed in the spring of 1956, Roland immediately enrolled in the English literature programme at Indiana University in Bloomington. He completed his Masters degree over the course of three successive summers, during which time he taught English at a junior high school in Topeka, Kansas. While at Indiana University, Roland studied under another inspirational teacher named Russel Noyes. Through Professor Noyes, Roland first meaningfully encountered the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

          Born in 1901, Russell Noyes was a fixture at the Indiana University for most of his career. A committee under his chairmanship had been responsible for the foundation of the Indiana University Press. Roland arrived shortly after Noyes had given up the position of Department Chair, a role he had occupied for 10 years. Though best known for his work on Wordsworth, Noyes had eclectic interests. The two devotions of his life, his love for landscape and his love for the poetry of William Wordsworth, were "fostered in my youth spent among the White Mountains of New Hampshire," Noyes once wrote. He lived a full and satisfying life, dying in 1980. His colleagues remembered him for his belief “in plain living and high thinking and in the value of good letters and their power to ennoble and sustain.” Frankly, he sounds a lot like Roland to me! Read the University's Memorial Resolution, which discusses the life and thought of Russell Noyes, here.

A screen capture of the cover of Noyes' 1956 masterwork.

          In the summer of 1956, the year Roland arrived, Noyes was basking in the afterglow of a considerable publishing achievement: Oxford’s then-definitive compendium, “English Romantic Poetry and Prose.” It is a volume that inspired generations of students and was not easily superseded. What set the volume apart was its carefully curated selection of minor poetry, which functioned as a background for the major works normally featured in such anthologies. It also contained a wide selection of Shelley's radical poetry, a body of writing that had long been excluded from anthologies on political grounds. I think this is important for our story.

          Both Noyes and his anthology would play a significant role in the development of Roland’s passion for Shelley. One of the first classes Roland took at Indiana was taught by Noyes, with the professor’s new compendium of English Romantics as the textbook. Then in the fall of 1958, Roland entered the PhD programme at Indiana with Noyes serving as his advisor. When I asked Duerksen how he first came into contact with Shelley he told me:

"My very first contact was at Bethel College ... and it was in a survey course that I read some of his poetry. I think I was of course aware even before that of a poem like "Ode to the West Wind" which I probably read in high school. But ... I didn't at that point know enough about him to get excited about him. I did think though that, yes, he was an interesting poet. However, in graduate school, the very first course that I took was a course from Russel Noyes and that's where I became excited about him - and I'll add that Noyes had selected very well for his anthology. It contained some prose and all the good, really great poems of Shelley's."

          In the late 1950’s, Shelley’s reputation had reached perhaps its lowest ebb. Sustained attacks by the New Critics (such as TS Eliot and FR Leavis) had followed decades of misinterpretation by Victorians such as Matthew Arnold and Francis Thompson. The Victorians had tried to suppress the political and intellectual sides of Shelley's writing. As Professor Tom Mole has pointed out in his book, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, anthologies from this period featured only snippets of his poetry, and editors generally avoided including Shelley's most political writings. Duerksen himself later wrote a pioneering book on Victorian attitudes to Shelley.

          Roland himself felt some censure from colleagues as his interest in Shelley grew. As he told me, “The old Matthew Arnold judgment on him had simply not gone away: 'A beautiful, ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.'” Indeed it had not. Seizing on the Shelley they encountered in the Victorian anthologies and either too lazy or indifferent to dig deeper, critics such as Eliot and Leavis savaged Shelley as a superficial lyric poet.

          Roland quickly became interested in Shelley, and his political writings in particular. When we regard the essence of Shelley’s political philosophy – for example, his astonishing avowal of the idea of non-violent protest – I think we can also see how Shelley's writings would have dovetailed with the teachings of Roland’s Mennonite ancestors. The core tenets of Mennonite faith are worth requoting: "Mennonites believe in service to others; concern for those less fortunate; involvement in issues of social justice; and emphasis on peaceful, nonviolent resolution of community, national and international conflicts." If we insert “Shelley” for "Mennonite" in the foregoing passage, I think we can see how Roland's upbringing in a community valuing non-conformity, freedom of conscience, and non-violence might have led Roland to feel at home with Shelley. 

          However, as we know, a striking feature of Shelley’s philosophy was his atheism. Now, there have been those who have disputed this. Certainly, the Victorians fell over backwards to see him as a kind of closet Christian. More modern critics (perhaps missing Shelley’s penchant ironic inversions) have pointed to what they see as overtly religious elements in poems such as Prometheus Unbound. I have written about this at length in my article "I am a lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist: What did Shelley Mean?". If we were to say Shelley was opposed to organized religion, however, I do not think we would get too much argument today.

          One might think this would pose a problem for Duerksen. However, remember that the central focus of the Mennonite Church is on the teaching of Jesus – and in particular the Sermon on the Mount. As for Shelley, the author of “The Necessity of Atheism” and whose famous declaration “I am a lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist” (written in a hotel register in Chamonix) made him infamous? Well, Shelley always had a place in his philosophy for the teachings of Jesus. He just did not see him as in any way divine. And he believed that the church had perverted his teachings. I think we can see potential resonances here.

          Still, I was intrigued by the unlikeliness of the connection. How does a deeply religious young man from a devoutly evangelical family, who grew up without books on a farm, who attended a religious college in a small town in Kansas, find common ground with one of the most radical, revolutionary, anti-religious thinkers of the 19th Century? How does a Mennonite find common ground with the man about whom Karl Marx himself remarked:

"The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at 36. Because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at 29 because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism."

          So, I asked him!! And here is what he said:

Roland Duerksen after graduation in 1961, at age 35.

“I began to ask questions about [my beliefs]. I must admit I was quite devout in my religion. I [said to myself], okay, if [I’m] gonna believe this, I ought to really be consistent in every way. The questions I asked were very consistent questions. I would credit the asking of questions as the big turning point in my life. During the 10 years of my education, I [ended up] pretty far removed from where I had started. Up until [the time I went to university], I had had asked some questions already on the farm, but nothing that would really challenge my basic beliefs.”

          Moving slowly toward secular humanism through his education, Roland had found an affinity with the views of Shelley that superseded earlier religious convictions. Roland graduated in 1961 with a PhD in English Literature. His thesis was focused on Victorian attitudes to Shelley and would eventually form the basis of his landmark book, Shelleyan Ideas in Victorian Literature. This study should be required reading for all students of Shelley.

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In Part Two of this feature on Duerksen's life and thought I will focus on his approach to Shelley, his teaching career, activism and retirement, Duerksen remains one of the most important voices in the Shelleyan critical tradition. Stay tuned.

Shelleyan Top Ten Moments - 2017

Welcome to my inaugural, year end "Shelleyan Top Ten" list. The eligibility criteria for an appearance on this list is pretty straight forward (and subjective!) First the event or occurrence must have contributed to raising the awareness of Percy Bysshe Shelley among the general public. Second, it also needs to have come to my attention - which is not omniscient (this means my list is not necessarily definitive!). Finally, I also have ranked on the basis of whether the moment was unusual or unexpectedly brilliant.

In any event, these sorts of lists are supposed to be fun and are designed to provoke debate and conversation.  So let the discussion begin.

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The 10 Best Shelley Moments of 2017

10.        Entering the list at number ten is the Penn-Shelley Seminar series that is overseen by Eric Alan Weinstein. The seminar brings scholarship from around the world together to examine the life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Over the past three years, more than a dozen Penn faculty members spanning five separate departments have contributed as have almost forty visiting scholars -including me!  You can watch my most recent presentation by clicking the link to "The Radical Shelley in His Time and Ours". Together Eric and his team have produced nearly 100 hours of unique digital scholarly content, all of which is being made freely available. An associated MOOC became of of the world's favourites in 2016. Say what you will about MOOCs, hundreds of people participated in Eric's course as did I. It is fair to say that my entire Shelley project was inspired by that course. Like Shelley, Eric wants to change the world; Shelley can help us to do this. I look forward to the relaunch of the Shelley MOOC in 2018!!! You can learn more about Eric's initiatives here.

9.         At number 9, we have Paul R Stephens (follow him on Twitter here) who launched a series of “On This Day" Tweets that focus on memorable excerpts from the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Featuring over 300 selections so far, the series also matched the prose with very carefully chosen works of art. Paul is a Shelley scholar working on his PhD at Oxford. With Paul’s permission, I began republishing his selections on The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley Facebook page in November with the addition of a couple of paragraphs of my own commentary.  These posts have proved to be a huge hit, drawing hundreds of reactions and scores of comments and shares. What makes Paul’s selections so clever is the manner in which they draw attention to different aspects of Shelley’s multifaceted character.  So, well done Paul, don’t stop now!!!!

8.         In the summer of 2017, the Keats-Shelley Association of America (full disclosure: I am a Board Member) announced an ambitious online communications strategy which involves revamping its website and launching Twitter and Facebook feeds. The organization has hired Shelley scholar Anna Mercer as the official coordinator. She currently oversees four communication fellows. I have been advocating for this since I joined the Board as I believe social media (despite all of its drawbacks) is an essential tool to build communities. I look forward to great things from this initiative in 2018.

 7.        In March of 2017, English fashion designer John Alexander Skelton deployed Shelley's Mask of Anarchy in his spring runway show. This is an example of members of the general public engaging with Shelley and the radical past and unusual ways. You can read my article, "Shelley Storms the Fashion World" by clicking the button below. Skelton has to be one of the first clothing designers in history whose clothing line was inspired by a bloody massacre.  This might strike many as unusual, but I think it is actually quite an important example of art interfacing with politics and political protest – in a manner Shelley would have whole-heartedly approved.

6.         Frankenreads is another initiative of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. It enters my list at number 6.  An ambitious project it is designed to get people around the world thinking about and reading Frankenstein, the concept is built around a massive, world-wide reading project slated for Halloween of 2018.  While this project is virtually entirely focused on Mary, it can nonetheless function as a gateway through which we can interest Mary Shelley enthusiasts in Percy - after all, he was an active and not insubstantial collaborator on the novel. You can learn more about this brilliant KSAA project here.

5.         Flying in under the radar at number five is Tess Martin's brilliant animation short based on Shelley’s fragmentary poem, The Dirge. You can read the poem here. There is speculation that the poem was based on a true story about Ginevra degli Almieri, who was thought dead of a plague that swept the city of Florence in the year 1400, and was put in a vault to be buried the next day. But she then awakens and is mistaken for a ghost by both her husband and her parents. Martins gorgeous, ghostly interpretation of the poem is exquisite. It is one of the years great Shelley events. Thanks to Tess Martin and Max Rothman the good folks at Monticello Park Productions. I have an upcoming article on this magnificent project.

4.         Shelley took an unexpected star turn in the summer blockbuster, Alien Covenant. This is deserving of fourth place on the list!!  After the movie was released, I was very excited to hear that Shelley's poem Ozymandias features prominently.  The poem's theme is woven carefully into the plot of the movie, with David (played again by Michael Fassbender) quoting the famous line, "Look on my works ye mighty and despair." David, as followers of the movies will know, is a "synthetic humanoid" - one in a long line of such creatures, one of the most famous being Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. That David quotes the poem without a trace of irony is central to the question of whether or not these creatures are fully human or not. For David, not to see that Shelley is employing one of his trademark ironic inversions, suggests that something is not quite right with him. That he mistakenly attributes the poem to Byron is another twist altogether. Enjoy Zac Farini's terrific review, "David or the Modern Frankenstein" by clicking the button below.

3.         During the summer of 2017, I published in three installments, for the first time, the text of a speech given by Shelley devotee and crusading journalist Paul Foot. It was an epic one-and-a-half-hour extemporaneous speech delivered to the London Marxism Conference of 1981.  I have estimated that the project took over two hundred hours – involving laborious transcription, research and editing. The entire speech was ultimately collected together and published on my website in the fall of 2015 by my research and editorial associate, Jonathan Kerr. You Paul epic speech "The Radical Percy Bysshe Shelley" by clicking the button below. Here is a link to the only audio we have, so you can listen along!! Here's to one of the greatest of all Shelleyans, Paul Foot. We will never forget you Paul, you left us too soon.

2.         Sitting in the number 2 position is the Shelley Conference 2017. The project was the brain child of Shelley scholars Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal, who were motivated by their frustration with the fact that, in Anna's words, there is no "regular event, academic or otherwise, dedicated solely to the study of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s works. Neither is there such an event for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” Given the outsize influence these two writers have had on our modern world, this fact is astonishing.  The Conference was a wonder and featured keynotes by three of the world’s leading Shelleyans: Nora Crook, Kelvin Everest and Michael O’Neill.  You can watch these here, here and here.  Slowly, I am also releasing panel presentations – but the process is somewhat time consuming.  My hope is that this conference will be followed by many more. Anna? Harrie? Percy and Mary owe you big time -- so do we all. Read Anna's article "Why the Shelley Conference" by clicking the button below

The Best Moment of 2017

1.         Pride of place this year goes to Jeremy Corbyn who adopted Shelley's poetry from The Mask of Anarchy as the foundation of his election campaign. The election slogan itself, “For the Many. Not the Few”, had a catalytic effect on the electorate and we can only guess at how many voters it mobilized. Corbyn then went on to quote Mask of Anarchy on several occasions.  The most memorable were at his campaign-concluding rally, and then after the election at Glastonbury. Both occasions were electrifying. Corbyn’s harnessing of Shelley earns pride of place in my year end list because it awoke tens of thousands of people to Shelley’s existence. Opportunities like this tend to be generational – and we just experienced one. His use was also a perfect illustration of why Paul Foot thought Shelley was so important. Shelley doesn’t just supply ideas (though there are plenty of those), he furnishes us with inspirational rhetoric and enthusiasm. Paul wrote, “Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people in the years since his death, the thing that matters above all is his enthusiasm for the idea that the world can be changed”. Well, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn, we just witnessed such change first hand. Read my article "Jeremy Corbyn is Right: Poetry Can Change the World" by clicking the button below.  Watch the speech below (Shelley is quoted at 2:40). Thank you Mr, Corbyn, your job now is to bring some of Shelley's egalitarian dreams alive. Don't stop with the slogan; Shelley can be your best friend. Don't let us all down.

If you have some moment I have missed, write to me here: graham@grahamhenderson.ca.  2017 was also a terrific year for my website and the associated Facebook and Twitter accounts.  You can read about my progress in building a modern Shelley community here: "The Year in Review - 2017" .  I have big plans for 2018. Happy New Year to everyone. Here's to a magnificent, Shelley-packed 201811

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The Worst Moment of 2017

Now, most folks also offer a reflection on the worst moments of the previous year.  I am no different. For me, hands down, the worst moment of 2017 for Shelley was the release of Haifaa al Mansour’s atrocious re-invention of the lives of Mary and Percy.  It is a hot mess. What facts she doesn't distort to suit her fictional story line, she simply invents.  A fact checker could spend weeks correcting her mistakes. Here it is in a nutshell: the film makers want you to believe that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in a single night based entirely on personal experiences of abandonment and bereavement. No collaboration. No apparent research. Yeah, it is THAT bad. In trying to put Mary on a pedestal it actually completely trashes her reputation for meticulous research, collaboration and hard, hard work. Oh, and after having been abandoned by Shelley in her hour of need (portrayed as a heavy drinker who directly causes the death of her first child) - a man who has stolen credit for her novel - she takes him back at the end of the movie with no questions asked. Because, ya know, that's how it happens in teenland, right?  It also trashes the reputation of almost everyone around her. Despite my hopes it would not find general release, it has. So Shelleyans can look forward to an invented story of Frankenstein’s creation which is jam packed with misrepresentations, false claims, fabrications and innuendo. You can read more about in my article, "The Truth Matters".  This publicity photo pretty much sums up the movie. This is what you will get - a ridiculous, fatuous teen drama. Avoid it if you can. Shame on those who made this film.

2017 - The Year in Review

2017 was a busy year for Percy Bysshe Shelley and later this week I will publish my Top Ten Shelleyan Moments of 2017 - watch for it!! It was also a busy year for my website and its associated social media platforms. The website experienced 12,000 Unique Visitors 15,000 Visits and over 21,000 Page Views. This is up almost 90% year over year in Unique Visitors.

These numbers are huge for a poetry site. The audience is world-wide. Where are the visits coming from? Perhaps not surprisingly the UK leads the pack with 5,500 visits. In second place is the United States (3,500), followed by Canada (2,300) and Italy (1,100!!!). The top five is rounded out by Ireland (900).

The late, great Paul Foot.

By far the most viewed posts were those which involved the publication of Paul Foot’s epic 1981 speech to the London Marxism Conference: "Paul Foot Speaks: The Revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley".

In general, the more political my posts were, the more popular they were – a fact I find very interesting. Shelley’s politics is what seems to excite modern readers the most.  That said, my hugely popular photo essay about the cemetery where Shelley is buried in Rome was a close second.

I introduced video posts this summer with a visit to the beach at Viareggio where Shelley drowned. I wish I could do more of this, but I actually have a full-time job that is quite demanding.

I am sadly months behind in my Shelleyan projects – and what has suffered to most is writing time.  So, my solution this fall was to hire a paid research and editorial assistant, Jonathan Kerr. Jon is a recent PhD in Romanticism from the University of Toronto. You will start to see a lot more of him!

Clearly people love Shelley and are extraordinarily passionate about him. I have had literally hundreds of comments from folks around the world who tell me Shelley changed their lives.  Reconnecting people with him has been one of the most rewarding, enriching things I have ever done.

My Facebook, "The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley", page more than doubled its followers, cresting 3,000 in November. My Facebook analytics tell me that for an arts and humanities site, I have one of the most engaged audiences in the world.  I have introduced several features: every Tuesday you will find a poem and some commentary – this is selected and published by Jon Kerr. Then there is Throwback Thursday which will feature older article from the website – also selected by Jon. I am also republishing Paul Stephens brilliantly curated series of quotes from Shelley’s letters – and I have added commentary.  I try to schedule a link to an original article at least once a week. And, of course, I do my best to keep everyone up to date on Shelleyan news.

Over at Twitter we have over 700 real people following us. I make it a point to prune bots and advertising sites, so there the numbers are not inflated as they are in so many other feeds. I also have clear editorial guidelines. What you see in the feed is directly related in one way or another to Shelley’s ideas. Because he was such a renaissance man, this means the subject matter covered is wide indeed.

Operating “The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley” is a labour of love that requires a significant investment in time and money. Readers will have noticed that many of the Facebook posts are “sponsored”.  That sponsorship investment is made by me and I have actually spent several thousand dollars to build the audience – advertising is almost the only way I can guarantee you see my posts. But I believe it is worth it.

You can help reduce these costs by taking a couple of steps.  First, “Like” my page. I realize that some people worry about Facebook monitoring what you do or don’t like – but how much can it hurt to like a poetry site – and it really helps me.  My guess is that I actually have thousands more followers – but I can’t tell because they have not liked the site. Secondly, when you visit my page, at the top you will see three buttons side by side. “Liked” “Following” and “Recommend”.  If you hover over Recommend a drop down menu appears – select “See First”.

By doing this you have dramatically raised your chances of seeing my posts. Next, you can click the “Recommend Button”. Your recommendation will appear in your feed and help me spread the word. Finally, please rate my page. I have a sterling 4.8 (out of 5.0) rating – but more ratings boosts my sites credibility.  Phew, that is a lot. But doing this helps not just me, it helps Shelley.

Gazing out to sea at Livorno in May, 2017. Shelley sailed from here to his death. Just as on that day in 1822, the sky was brooding and storms threatened. It was an eerie moment.

Thanks to everyone who has been a part of this journey. Shelley was a highly motivated political creature who dedicated his life to changing the world. At some point he realized that he would never manage build sufficient momentum to do this in his lifetime. I think this was profoundly demoralizing. However, he recovered and I believe he started to write for future generations - in otherwords us.  If those of us who love him do not join him in this enterprise, then we are letting him (and ourselves) down. For my reflections on his relevance to the 21st Century, see my article, "Shelley in Our Time".

And with that I wish all of my readers a happy, restful holiday season.

Let Liberty Lead Us; Connecting the Radical Poetry of Cottingham, Eminem and Shelley

In Shelley's introduction to Prometheus Unbound, he proudly remarked that he had a “passion for reforming the world”. For a poet who struggled to publish his more radical poetry during his lifetime, he has a remarkable record for actually accomplishing his objective.  His effect upon the modern labour and union movements has been well documented. If we took a single example, his influence on Pauline Newman who, inspired by Mask of Anarchy, helped create the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (one of the most powerful and effective unions of the 20th Century) and the Worker's University (where courses on the radical poets of the French Revolution were taught), Shelley could be well satisfied. I have written about this here.

Today I want to look at two recent examples of poetry’s potential to reform the world: poet and performance artist Arielle Cottingham and rapper Eminem.

Arielle Cottingham at the Australian Poetry Slam Championship in 2016

Cottingham, a Texan now living in Melbourne, won the 2016 edition of the Australian Poetry Slam. She was recently interviewed by Andrea Simpson for the magazine ArtsHub. In an article meaningfully entitled, “Why We Need Poets More Than Ever Before”, Cottingham cited Shelley as an inspiration for her work and pointed to his famous comment in A Defense of Poetry: Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

I have unpacked what Shelley meant by this here. It was PMS Dawson who pointed out that Shelley used the term "legislator" in a special sense. Not as someone who "makes laws" but as someone who is a "representative" of the people. In this sense poets, or creators more generally, must be thought of as the voice of the people; as a critical foundation of our society and of our democracy. They offer insights into our world and provide potential solutions - they underpin our future.

I think this puts me in essential agreement with Cottingham who explained her own view to Simpson thusly:

[Shelley] argues that poets are the moral barometers of their times and circumstances – and look at the well-known poets today. Bob Dylan is lauded as the voice of a generation. Maya Angelou elevated the voice of the black woman to an unprecedented visibility. Gil Scott Heron wrote a single line of poetry so prescient that it became more famous than he himself did – "The revolution will not be televised." To quote Miles Merrill, "poets are more honest than politicians."

You can watch Cottingham’s championship performance at the Sydney Opera House here:

Cottingham’s electrifying peroration firmly positions her as a modern Shelleyan with designs on reforming the world:

We [women] will shout our poetry into every hurricane that history hurls at use. For we have always shaped history the way the moon shapes the tide; no matter how invisible it seems. We don’t have to be invisible anymore. So when the next storm comes, nail your doors open, bite down on your microphones, let history flood your lungs and unleash hurricanes of your own.

This make me think of another of Shelley’s remarks in the Defense where, using another extreme weather-related metaphor, he says,

The great writers of our own age are…the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social conditions or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging is collected lightening….

Well, speaking of discharged lightening, let’s now turn to Eminem. As Bari Weiss pointed out in the New York Times recently, rappers have led the way in providing opposition to the Whitehouse Racist's authoritarian-tinged presidency. But as she goes on to say:

Yet Eminem’s “The Storm,” a scathing four-minute attack on the “kamikaze that will probably cause a nuclear holocaust,” which he debuted at the BET Awards on Tuesday night, has already overshadowed all of these previous anti-Trump musical efforts. It’s made major news headlines. It’s already garnered 8.7 million views on YouTube. And there have been some two million tweets about the performance, with praise pouring in from stars including LeBron James and Ellen DeGeneres.

Weiss ties the greater impact to Eminem’s whiteness and the fact he comes from Detroit – both factors which pose something of an existential threat to the Whitehouse Racist:

Eminem knows that Republicans buy songs — his songs — too. His message to them is to stop buying. After focusing on the evils of the “racist 94-year-old grandpa” in the White House, he gives his Trump-supporting fans an ultimatum. “I’m drawing in the sand a line: you’re either for or against,” he says. “And if you can’t decide who you like more and you’re split / On who you should stand beside, I’ll do it for you with this,” he adds, giving his middle finger to the camera.

Weiss goes on to point out that those of his fans who support the Whitehouse Racist have already vowed never to listen to his music again. So Eminem has put a lot in play here. You can watch the full, searing, 4-minute recording of his freestyle cypher here:

Eminem opens by mocking Donald Trump's vague and meaningless "calm before the storm" threats.  But then, after a pause, he offers a real Shelleyan storm, discharging his collected lightening with a cold, calculated fury.

And speaking of cold, calculated fury, lets us finally turn our attention to Shelley. 

When Shelley famously declared that he was a lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist, he deliberately, intentionally and provocatively nailed his colours to the mast knowing full well his words would be widely read and would inflame passions.

Shelley's words, written in 1816, appeared in a Chamonix hotel register. The top line reads, in Greek, I am a lover of humanity, democrat and atheist. BOOM!

The phrase, lover of humanity, however, deserve particular attention. Shelley did not write these words in English, he wrote them in Greek using the term: philanthropos tropos. This was deliberate.  The first use of this term appears in Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Bound. This was the ancient Greek play which Shelley was “answering” with his own masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound. 

Aeschylus used his newly coined word philanthropos tropos (humanity loving) to describe Prometheus, the titan who rebelled against the gods of Olympus. The word was picked up by Plato and came to be much commented upon, including by Bacon, one of Shelley’s favourite authors.  Bacon considered "philanthropy" to be synonymous with "goodness", which he connected with Aristotle’s idea of “virtue”. Shelley knew this and I believe this tells us that Shelley identified closely with his own poetic creation, Prometheus. In using the term, Shelley is telling us he is a humanist - a radical concept in his priest-ridden times.

When he wrote these words he was declaring war against the hegemonic power structure of his time. Shelley was in effect saying, "I am against god. I am against the king. I am the modern Prometheus. And I will steal the fire of the gods and I will bring down thrones and I will empower the people." And not only did he say these things, he developed a system to deliver on this promise.

As I watch the performances of Cottingham and Eminem, I can only wish Shelley could as well.  I can imagine the wide grin that would cross his face.

Now, here is an example of Shelley's own discharge of collected lightening: England in 1819. This is a poem whose words, with very minor changes, could apply to the the man Eminem called a racist 94-year-old grandpa:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,--
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;
A Senate,--Time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestous day.

My point in drawing attention to these two modern poets is to remind us that one of the true fountainheads of radical poetic opposition to tyranny and oppression was Shelley. And whether modern poets knowingly operate in that tradition, as Cottingham appears to, or not, they do function as the voice of the people and in that sense as our representatives; or as Shelley would have said, as our legislators. They are all philanthropos tropos: lovers of humanity.

Today the liberal arts and the humanities are under a similar attack by the parasitic, cultural vandals of Silicon Valley. Right across the United States, Republican governors are rolling back support for state universities that offer liberal arts education. The mantra of our day is "Science. Technology. Engineering. Mathematics." Or STEM for short.  This is not just a US phenomenon.  I see it happening in Canada as well.  There is a burgeoning sense that a liberal arts education is worthless.

Culture is worth fighting for - for the very reasons Shelley set out. What Shelley called a "cultivated imagination" can see the world differently - through a lens of love and empathy. Our "gifts" are not given to us by god - we earn them.  They belong to us.  We should be proud of them. The idea that we owe all of this to an external deity is vastly dis-empowering. And it suits the ruling order.

A corollary of this, also encapsulated in Shelley's philosophy, is the importance of skepticism.  A skeptical, critical mind always attacks the truth claims of authority.  And authority tends to rely upon truth claims that are disconnected from reality: America is great because god made it great. Thus, Shelley was fond of saying, "religion is the hand maiden of tyranny."

It should therefore not surprise anyone that many authoritarian governments seek to reinforce the power of society's religious superstructure. This is exactly what Trump is doing by blurring the line between church and state. Religious beliefs dis-empower the people - they are taught to trust authority.

Eminem has drawn a line in the sand. Shelley has discharged his collected lightening. Arielle Cottingham has unleashed her hurricane. Let's join them at the barricades. Let Liberty lead us.

Eugene Delacroix, July 28, Liberty Leading the People. 1831. Oil on Canvas. The Louvre.

The Revolutionary Percy Shelley in His Time and Ours

Today I am pleased to release the recording of my presentation "The Revolutionary Shelley in His Time and Ours".  This was delivered on November 15th 2016 as part of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Shelley Seminar; run under the auspices of The Unbinding Prometheus Project and Penn Libraries. I hope you enjoy it.  You will find some introductory notes below.

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"I am a lover of mankind, a democrat and an atheist."

When Shelley wrote these words in the hotel register at Chamonix, he was, as PMS Dawson has suggested deliberately, intentionally and provocatively “nailing his colours to the mast”. The thumbnail above is a portion of the actual hotel register page. Shelley's handwriting can be seen in the top line. Here it is in full:

He knew full well people would see these words and that they would inflame passions. The words, however may require some context and explanation.  Many people have sought to diminish the importance of these words and the circumstances under which they were written.  Some modern scholars have even ridiculed him.  I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him.  They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.

Shelley’s atheism and his political philosophy were at the heart of his poetry and his revolutionary agenda (yes, he had one).  Our understanding of Shelley is impoverished to the extent we ignore or diminish its importance.

Shelley visited the Chamonix Valley at the base of Mont Blanc in July of 1816. Mont Blanc was a routine stop on the so-called “Grand Tour.”  In fact, so many people visited it, that you will find Shelley in his letters bemoaning the fact that the area was "overrun by tourists." With the Napoleonic wars only just at an end, English tourists were again flooding the continent.  While in Chamonix, many would have stayed at the famous Hotel de Villes de Londres, as did Shelley.  As today, the lodges and guest houses of those days maintained a “visitor’s register”; unlike today those registers would have contained the names of a virtual who’s who of upper class society.  Ryan Air was not flying English punters in for day visits. What you wrote in such a register was guaranteed to be read by literate, well connected aristocrats - even if you penned your entry in Greek – as Shelley did. 

The words Shelley wrote in the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres (under the heading "Observations") were (as translated by PMS Dawson): “philanthropist, an utter democrat, and an atheist”.  The words were, as I say, written in Greek.  The Greek word he used for philanthropist was "philanthropos tropos." The origin of the word and its connection to Shelley is very interesting.  Its first use appears in Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound” the Greek play which Shelley was “answering” with his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound.  Aeschylus used his newly coined word “philanthropos tropos” (humanity loving) to describe Prometheus. The word was picked up by Plato and came to be much commented upon, including by Bacon, one of Shelley’s favourite authors.  Bacon considered philanthropy to be synonymous with "goodness", which he connected with Aristotle’s idea of “virtue”.

What do the words Shelley chose mean and why is it important? Because here is exactly what I think he was saying: I am against god. I am against the king. I am the modern Prometheus, and I will steal fire from the gods and I will bring down kingdoms and I will give power to the people. This is an incredibly revolutionary statement for the time.  No wonder he scared people. But not only did he say these things, he was developing, as we will see, a system to deliver on this promise. Part of his system was based on his innate skepticism, of which he was a surprising sophisticated practitioner.  And like all skeptics since the dawn of history, he used it to undermine authority and attack truth claims. "Implicit faith," he wrote, "and fearless inquiry have in all ages been irreconcilable enemies. Unrestrained philosophy in every age opposed itself to the reveries of credulity and fanaticism."

My presentation will discuss his revolutionary programme and its application to our modern era.  Enjoy.

The Truth Matters - a Review of Haifaa al-Mansour's Movie, Mary Shelley

THE TRUTH MATTERS

Haifaa al-Mansour’s new movie Mary Shelley premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 2017. For those anticipating a nuanced, balanced and careful study of the relationship between two of the world’s authentic literary geniuses, Mary and Percy Shelley, I am sorry, you will be disappointed. For all of its pretensions, this movie seems to be little more than a sort of thinking person’s Twilight or maybe Beauty and the Beast: two hot, beautiful young people with perfect skin and hair are thrust together by chance, torn apart by circumstance only to be at last happily reunited. It is riddled with factual errors and the plot involves an almost complete rewrite of history. Percy and Mary, as depicted in Mary Shelley, are essentially props whose lives have been casually rearranged to allow al-Mansour and her screenwriter to concoct a myth about the creation of Frankenstein. Were the movie to carry a warning, “based on a true story”, it would not go far enough. Mary and Percy have been done a disservice. The true story of Mary, Percy and Frankenstein deserves to be told – but it will await yet another day.

The real-life relationship between Mary and Percy offers us one of the very few examples of a male/female creative partnership between co-equals that was characterized by mutual respect and collaborative cooperation.  Yet for 200 years they have largely been subjected to binary analyses in which one or other of the two has been cast in an invidious role to exalt the other. We have only just now reached the point where they are being seen, as Anna Mercer recently remarked, for what they were: “two incredibly talented authors, who dedicated their lives to the study and writing of radical and innovative literature.”

Indeed, a major conference founded on this concept took place in London on 15 and 16 September 2017. As conference co-organizer and Shelley expert Anna Mercer wrote recently:

Our speakers will pay attention to biographical details in order to gauge how their shared lives (and also their shared travels) influence their texts, as opposed to the texts revealing truths about their lives. Can we remove the damaging opinion that the Shelleys’ relationship was something defined by scandal, infidelity, gossip, and anti-establishment teenage pursuits? They certainly would have wished we could do so. Let us return to their writings, and not the many, many biographical speculations created by scholars and other writers, some with good intentions, some without.

The proof is in the marketing...

al-Mansour tacks in exactly the opposite direction, creating a host of new biographical speculations designed to suit her theory that Frankenstein is almost completely autobiographical - reinforcing, as Anna Mercer recently pointed out to me, a lamentable sexist stereotype in wide circulation regarding female authors.

To make her point, al-Mansour offers up a veritable orgy of speculation that focuses on just the sort of “scandal, infidelity, gossip and anti-establishment teenage pursuits” which Mercer cautions us to avoid. I am increasingly of the view that acts of historical vandalism such as this are a variant on cultural appropriation. al-Mansour, apparently with full knowledge that she was rewriting history, created a narrative which she offered to the public with absolutely no warning about the veracity of the story. The story appears to be true; it looks and feels real. Clearly this is irresponsible and misleading; but I think it is worse. Mary and Percy had real lives - lives about which we know a LOT.  To warp and twist those stories to present a narrative about the creation of Frankenstein which suits the director's idea of how great works are created is a misappropriation of their lives; put bluntly, it is a fraud on history - a lie.

The characters, with the possible exception of Mary (but more on that later) are dismayingly two-dimensional: Percy is presented as an “irresponsible narcissist”; Byron is a “blood-sucking devourer of souls”; William Godwin (author of one of the most important philosophical works of his century: Political Justice) is a pottering, befuddled shopkeeper; Claire Clairmont is a gold-digger in search of a “poet of her own”. There is even an evil step-mother thrown in for good measure: Claire’s mother, Mary Jane, whom Godwin married after the death of Mary's mother (and, yes, I am aware the real Jane Clairmont was very difficult). There are some elliptical visual clues about who these people actually were. We see a flash of the title page of Political Justice; there is a glimpse of Shelley's poem, Queen Mab in a gorgeous bound gilt edition that of course never existed); and we see Byron swanning around a theater like a rock star. But these flash by and despite them, unless you know the historical background of these people, you would have no idea that some of these people were the intellectual titans of their age.

This is a movie that abandons virtually all pretense to historical accuracy in the opening five minutes. We all have come to expect this from the silver screen.  But it is one thing for directors in search of sensationalism and a “good story” to veer far from the truth (how often do we see the words “based on a true story”), but it is entirely another when the director in question has explicitly set out to tell the truth.  al-Mansour is unequivocal in this regard. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter director spoke of "finding inspiration in how Shelley defied what was expected of her." She said, “I think a lot of people know Frankenstein and, of course, the green monster, everybody knows that. But they don’t know her.” al-Mansour purports to set the record straight, to tell the world who the real Mary Shelley was. You can not do this by manipulating the truth.

It occurred to me that it might be valuable to approach Mary Shelley (the movie) simply as a fairy tale – a movie with made up characters and a moral. al-Mansour’s herself described the movie as a “coming of age story” about a “strong woman.” Does it stand up? Does the story-line make sense? Do the characters feel real? Is Movie Mary the “strong woman” al-Mansour purports her to be?

Well, here are our two protagonists as the film presents them:

Douglas Booth as Shelley. As an aside, Shelley was famous for wearing his shirts open at the neck. The movie could not even get this right.

Percy Bysshe Shelley. This character is a poet and is presented early on as a revolutionary. He is impossibly handsome and clearly aware of his charms – a ladies’ man!

What he is rebelling against is uncertain, though he clearly does not like religion (that much was true). To make this point, there is a scene in which Percy takes Mary into an empty church, steals the sacramental wine and drinks it from the chalice while lounging on the altar – he such a bad boy. Here are some of the “anti-establishment teenage pursuits” to which Mercer points. Percy clearly has a gift for words – we hear a few snatches of some romantic poetry - but he is also something of an extroverted showman. He is explicitly characterized as an “irresponsible narcissist”. Percy is also dismissive of others – ridiculing or humiliating those who disagree with him – including Mary.

As for his relationship with Mary, in the course of approximately one year, he repeatedly lies to her, sleeps with her half-sister Claire, maybe sleeps with Byron (whose very public kiss on the lips Percy does not refuse), is psychologically and verbally abusive to Mary and demonstrates an alarming facility for "mansplaining". Unlike the real Percy who remained with Mary until his death, Movie Percy abandons her for months in her hour of need after stealing the credit for her book. Yikes. This Percy spends much of his time drunk - swigging directly from the bottle (the real one was a vegetarian teetotaler). He plays an abject fanboy to Byron's rock star, which is such a disappointment given the deep, complex and abiding relationship these two towering intellects developed in real life. Oh, and according to the movie he literally causes the death of their first child. He’s quite a catch, isn’t he!?

But maybe he is smart? Well, while we occasionally see Percy scribbling on scraps of paper, there is very little evidence that he has produced anything of significance whatsoever. There are suggestions that he is famous. For example, two star-struck young women encounter him in a park and implausibly identify him as “the poet Shelley” and ask for an “autograph” (he complies with what actually appears to be a ball point pen!). The real Shelley was of course almost completely unknown and how anyone could have identified him in an age before photography and celebrity magazines is difficult to ascertain. So, it would appear then that Movie Percy is “airport famous”. But wait! alMansour also treats to scenes in which we see him angry, sullen and despondent as his poetry is repeatedly rejected by publishers.  So which is he? Airport famous or rejected-poet-in-the-garret? Movie Percy also never discusses with Movie Mary any of the sophisticated philosophical theories for which his real counterpart was famous. Despite what appears to be a fetish for books, we never see him actually reading one - either alone or with Mary. This is something for which the real couple are well known; their book lists are legendary. Late in the movie, after he has read Mary’s novel, he bursts in upon her with empty praise for its brilliance and then offers one of the most astoundingly stupid, mansplained editorial suggestions in the history of literature.  There are many more examples of this. The movie version of Percy is a drunk, a dullard and a dupe.

The characters in Bloomsbury where the Shelleys never lived.

But does he have money? He certainly appears to: swaggering into Mary’s home and promising to lavish money on the Godwin family. After eloping, he and Mary move into a fashionable address in Bloomsbury. While the two very briefly lived in Bloomsbury, clearly alMansour never bothered to find out exactly how they lived.

In our movie, they live in opulent luxury - an opportunity to dress up they actors in period costume. This is false. While Shelley's father was wealthy, Shelley had great difficulty accessing any of this wealth as he and his father had dramatically fallen out over his atheism. To this point we know nothing about this and Percy is presented as an independently wealthy young aristocrat.  It is therefore a shock to Mary when the creditors arrive in the middle of the night to seize everything. Movie Percy even lied about his wealth, it would seem.

Do I have any takers for this cretin?  al-Mansour has one: Mary Shelley. The question is why? Those familiar with the biography of the real Percy can readily understand why a precocious young genius like Mary would chose to be with him. She sought out an equal – just as he did. For all his faults, the real Shelley was nothing like the dim-witted, pretty-boy showcased in Mary Shelley. But what would be the motivation for Movie Mary to pick Movie Percy?

Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley, shown here having her hair carefully arranged, because, well, you know, people's hair in 1816 was perfect.

Mary Shelley. This character is a preternaturally brilliant and drop dead gorgeous teenage girl with aspirations to write.

She overcomes a tyrannical step-mother who opposes her interest in books and writing. She has a befuddled father who owns a book shop and seems to live with his head in the clouds but who offers her perhaps the crucial piece of advice in the film: that she, must “find her own voice” and ignore what other people have to say.  Movie Mary is presented as a character with a strong moral compass who reveres her dead mother and cares for everyone around her. She is driven, passionate, self-assured and inspiring. She is not cowed in the presence of Lord Byron, instead stands up to him at a critical point, getting, as they say, “right up in his grill”.  She forces Byron (played in a preposterously over the top manner by Tom Sturridge) to take responsibility for the daughter he fathered with Claire – in real life it was Percy who undertook this tricky and distasteful task.

It is widely believed that Frankenstein was written in response to Lord Byron’s challenge that his guests at the Villa Diodati (Percy, Mary, Claire and Dr John Polidori) compose a “ghost story”. In our movie, only Mary and Polidori rise to the occasion – Percy and Lord Byron being too piss-drunk to do much more than fall about the room – at one point Byron actually leaps on a divan and imitates a baboon replete with monkey noises. Embarrassing. But Mary overcomes all of this! Back in London, and with zero support from her hopeless boyfriend, and with her father’s voice literally ringing in her ears (“do it yourself baby!”), she writes all 60,000 words of Frankenstein in the course of a single night – pausing only for a midnight snack. I am not making this up. She triumphantly slaps it down on a bewildered Percy’s writing desk first thing the next morning. “Take that, you deadbeat” one can imagine her saying before she turns on her heel and storms out of the room.  Mary also, entirely on her own, arranges to have her book published, having faced down a blizzard of rejection notices (the world of early 19th century publishing being imagined as identical to our modern version – it was not). In real life it was Percy who found a publisher for the novel.

Boom!  What a superwoman.  Which begs the question: what does this superwoman want with that super-loser. The movie provides absolutely no satisfactory answers.  But boy, does this gal want her man.

Note the credit.

Mary Shelley, is, however, more than a movie about “boy meets girl” – or at least it pretends to be. It is about the creative process itself.  How the heck did one of the most famous novels of all time actually get written? Alas, al-Mansour seems to have replaced the “great man” theory of history with the “great woman” theory. Mary works entirely in isolation. In contrast with the real Mary Shelley who was an extraordinarily voracious reader, the movie Mary appears to read nothing. She relies instead on her own sources of inspiration. And here they are: the ghost stories of her childhood, the death of her mother and her daughter Clara, the abuse and abandonment she suffers at the hand of Percy, a demonstration of galvanism, an article on galvanism supplied by Polidori, and a dream in which a corpse is brought to life.  This raw material is sufficient to allow her to produce a complex 60,000 word novel in a single night. This is nonsense.

One of the grievous sins of this movie is that it utterly removes Mary from her intellectual milieu. She is presented as the archetypal lonely genius. Anyone who has an even remote familiarity with Mary, Percy and their circle will know that they had a thriving network of brilliant friends all of whom fed off one another. This portrait brilliantly emerges from the pages of Daisy Hay's wonderful book, Young Romantics. For example, we know for a fact that Shelley played a large role in influencing the Wordsworthian character of Childe Harolde, Canto III. This famous Canto was written while the group was at the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816. In the movie, Mary and Percy do visit Byron, but the entire episode is presented like a sort of weekend bacchanal during which Percy and Byron are far too drunk to discuss poetry let alone write a single word. Mary was an active participant in this circle. In reviewing Hay's book, Michael Holroyd noted:

“The originality of this engrossing narrative comes from Daisy Hay's unusual focus on the passionate allegiances and literary influences between her characters. With great skill she weaves in and out of the lives of these poets, novelists, and philosophers, their husbands, wives, lovers, and children, exploring the dual nature of the creative impulse, its individuality, and the stimulus of kindred spirits. It is a most impressive achievement.”

These are facts.  And they are not unknown facts.  For someone like al-Mansour, who proudly notes that she was a literature major, to have ignored them is irresponsible.

The real Mary actively collaborated with the real Percy - and she was inspired by the writing of many famous people, including her mother and father and classical Greeks such as Aeschylus; whose plays she was familiar with through Percy.  Aeschylus' play Prometheus Bound played a large role in the novel Frankenstein which was, after all, subtitled, The Modern Prometheus. Percy Bysshe Shelley himself actually contributed around 5,000 words to Frankenstein and made editorial suggestions - this is a small but significant role. This is not speculation and al-Mansour simply could not have missed this fact - an entire book was written on the subject by a distinguished professor of literature, Charles Robinson.

View fullsize

A page of Frankenstein on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Percy's handwriting is the dark ink, Mary's in a lighter ink.

The actual manuscripts for Frankenstein may be found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. You can see the marginal suggestions Percy made and the contrasting handwriting.  But nope! Not Movie Mary, she does it alone.  Oh, and she does it exclusively in pencil when every single version we have of the manuscripts is in ink.

The concept of great art as something created in a vacuum is an idea that has been dying a slow yet richly deserved death. In the case of Mary and Percy, we know for a fact that the two of them collaborated on Frankenstein.  This doesn’t weaken Mary’s claim to authorship – it enriches it.  Two brilliant people worked together; each respectful of the other’s genius.  What a story that would be! Except that is not the story al-Mansour tells. She had an opportunity to celebrate one of the more unusual creative partnerships in history. Instead, in order to uplift Mary, she felt it necessary smash Percy to atoms and deny his collaborative role in the creation of Frankenstein. Worse, it distorts Mary's actual creative process. We have her journals! We know that she laboured over the manuscript for months even years: polishing, honing, researching and rewriting. What agenda does it serve to lead people (particularly the young people to whom this movie seems to be pitched given the casting of heart-throbs) to believe that writing a 60,000 word masterpiece is something that happens overnight? Leonard Cohen famously took 6 or more years to write Hallelujah.

al-Mansour has effectively stolen Mary's world from her and replaced it with something almost sterile and antiseptic - despite all of the Hollywood melodrama. How much richer and more exciting was Mary's real life.

This sums it all up. Elle Fanning with her perfect hair and ever present pencil working in isolation seeking inspiration only from her own experiences.

How bad does this get? At the end of the movie, Mary’s father brings together a group of people at his bookshop – ostensibly to celebrate the publication of Frankenstein but actually to allow for a staged confession by Percy.  Like so many of the scenes in the film, this never happened.  But who cares, this is Hollywood, right?

SPOILER ALERT

Settle in, boys and girls, here is how our fairy tale ends.  Mary, tipped off to the meeting by her father, sneaks into the gathering unobserved and hides in a corner.  Godwin thanks the assembled throng of aged, whiskered, white males for coming. He notes that the novel was published anonymously. It is further alleged that Percy capitalized on this by writing a signed introduction which he knew would invite the world to conclude he had written the novel. To underline this point, al-Mansour manufactures a meeting that NEVER happened.  She imagines Mary and Polidori coming together to console one another: Percy is point blank accused of stealing the credit for Frankenstein and Byron for stealing the credit for Polidori's book, The Vampyre.

Godwin then offers a precis of the novel which incredibly casts Percy in the role of Victor Frankenstein and Mary in the role of the monster. He says it is a novel about:

“…the absolute necessity for human connection. From the moment Dr. Frankenstein’s creature opens its eyes it seeks the touch of its creator, but he recoils in terror leaving the creature to the first of its many experiences of neglect and isolation. And if only Frankenstein had been able to bestow upon his creation a compassionate touch, a kind word, what a tragedy might have been avoided.”

Wow. Just wow. At this point Percy slips into the room to applause. He pauses for dramatic effect, makes eye contact with Mary and begins:

“I know many of you wonder who could have written this horrific tale and why it was published anonymously. I see some of you suggest the work belongs to me. Indeed, you could say the work would not exist without my contribution. But to my shame, the only claim I remotely have to this work is inspiring the desperate loneliness that defines Frankenstein’s creature.  The author [voice breaking] of Frankenstein is of course, Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin. It is a work of singular genius and she is indebted to no one in its creation.”

This we know, as a matter of public record, is a lie. But as a movie-land mea culpa, it is a tour de force and Movie Percy executes it with every ounce of his formidable masculine charm. We are now at the moment of truth, are we not? How does this powerful, vindicated woman respond to her abuser? Slap him and leave the room? Throw a drink in his face? Sue him? Surely if we are all honest with ourselves we are rooting for her to give him the heave ho. But no. In this perverse fairy tale, the abused must take back her abuser. Because, what?  That’s true love!?!?! Whoa.

Percy’s confession produces the desired cinematic result. Here are the last words spoken in the movie:

MWG:        Percy?

PBS:           Mary?

MWG:        I really thought you’d left for good.

PBS:           I never promised you a life without misery. But I underestimated the depths of despair that I regret you had to endure.

MWG:        I lost everything to be with you Percy. We set out to create something wonderful. Something beautiful. But something volatile seethed within us. Behold, the monster, galvanized. [referring to herself]. But if I had not learned to fight through the anguish, I would not have found this voice again. My choices made me who I am and I regret nothing.

Kiss and fade to black.

ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME. This? This is the moral of our fairy tale? Is this a role model for young women? If you are going to create a fairy tale which pays scant attention to the truth, why would you have your protagonist absolve her abuser in such an abject manner and take him back. This is not empowering. Surely a 21st Century happy-ending would see Movie Mary smack Movie Percy upside the head and walk out on him (or at least read the rat-bastard the riot act). That ending would at least have been consistent with the lies the movie is founded upon. That ending would have had me on my feet.  As it stands, the movie utterly fails to provide any motivation for Mary to take Percy back. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one helluva plot failure.

In addition to the wholesale rewriting and manipulation of history, errors abound, some of them egregious and some benign.  For example, one of the end title cards notes that Byron’s daughter died at the age of ten – this is not true, she died in 1822 at age 5.  For a mistake like this to have slipped by the people involved with the movie speaks volumes about their concern for the truth. The cavalier rearrangement of the truth to suit the movie’s plot line is characteristic of the movie.  It feels at times like the lives of Mary and Percy are reduced to the status of stage props to suit a theory held by the creative team of Mary Shelley. 

What makes this a truly bad movie is that is aspired to be so much more and fell so dramatically short.  Unlike a superficial and trite film like Ken Russell’s atrocious Gothic, Mary Shelley aspires to be taken very, very seriously.  And, sadly it will be taken seriously. I have read almost all of the reviews (almost all of them are tepid).  None of them dig below the surface. Mary Shelley has the potential to corrupt the way people think about Mary and Percy for a generation. And this is unfortunate because the movie has appropriated and distorted one of the most important and nuanced creative relationships that we know of, and renders it in a flat monochrome. The protagonists of this film should be role models for no one. This is not how Frankenstein was written; this is not how their lives were lived.

Had al-Mansour confined herself to recounting the actual facts surrounding the creation of Frankenstein, her movie would have been so much more compelling and satisfying, because the story would ring true. Mary Shelley could have offered a much better insight into the creative process involved in the writing of Frankenstein and two of the greatest literary talents in the English language. It could have told the truth, and the truth matters.

Good lord.  What did we expect? Explain to me why Booth, who is not the star, is seated in the center.  Oh wait...never mind.

The Shelley Conference - London, 15-16 September 2017

On Friday and Saturday the 15th and 16th of September, in London, the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at University of York, is presenting a two day conference that celebrates the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The event is organized by two brilliant young young Romantics scholars: Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal.

I will be speaking at this conference.

Keynote speakers include some of the very top people in this field: Professor Nora Crook, Michael Neill and Kelvin Everest.  But there are also a host of panel discussions that look excellent.  I strongly recommend this conference to anyone who can make it.  The price is right and many of the topics are mouthwatering.

Some of the names that will be familiar to my readers include: Mark Summers who will talk about "Reclaiming Shelley's Radical Republicanism";  Anna Mercer on the extent to which Percy and Mary collaborated; Jacqueline Mulhallen on "1817 - a Philosophical Year for Shelley"; and Lynn Shepherd on "Fictionalizing the Shelleys". 

As for me, my topic will be the subject of "Romantic Resistance."  Shelley's writing affords modern political activists a veritable treasure trove of ideas and, as one of my readers put it, "Words of Power".  As we contemplate a world in which wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands, a world in which superstition and religion are increasing their pernicious influence, a world in which tyrants are proliferating, we must see that our world is very much Shelley's. We have need of his guidance.  He was one of the greatest political thinkers of any age.

The event takes place at the Institute for English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London Greater London WC1E 7HU (near to the British Museum).

Paul Foot understood this.  He persistently and passionately promoted Shelley's ideas to a generation of leftists whom he believed had lost their intellectual vigor as well as their connection to the problems of everyday people. 

Paul Foot

He offered this reason for restoring Shelley to prominence: modern activists need, he said in his famous speech to the 1981 London Marxism Conference,

"...a language which has some bite and zest and enthusiasm. That’s what we have to do and that’s why I think reading great revolutionary poets like Shelley is fundamentally important. It is filled with all kinds of images, all kinds of similes and metaphors - ways of saying things, different ways of saying things. The great masters of language really understood language and could use it like great musicians use the piano. These are things we need to soak up. Particularly when those great masters of language are in line with our politics."

But I think there is more, much more, than just language.  Timothy Webb once said of Shelley that “politics was probably the dominating concern of his life.” My presentation will demonstrate how Shelley’s politics, his philosophical skepticism and his theory of the imagination combine to offer some potent solutions for the troubles of the early 21st Century.  Given recent events, it is time that we cast a fresh eye on romantic, specifically Shelleyan, theories of resistance.

When Shelley declared in Chamonix that he was a “lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist” he did so knowing his words would be widely read.  The “Chamonix Declaration”, as I refer to it, was a more revolutionary statement than has commonly been assumed.  I will offer a new interpretation of what Shelley meant by these words and the radical programme he proposed to upend the political and religious status quo.

Mont Blanc

To do this I will reopen the question of Shelley’s philosophical skepticism and the role it played in his theory of revolution.  For Shelley skepticismwas a critically important tool to undermine authority and attack truth claims. In an age of “alternative facts” and “fake news” the value of skepticism as a discipline and approach to tyranny is all too evident. Mere skepticism was not and still is not, enough, however, to effect permanent political change.

I will argue that Shelley therefore evolved a theory of the imagination, at a time almost exactly contemporaneous to the Chamonix Declaration, to provide a mechanism for permanent revolutionary change; the type of change that would avoid the backsliding into chaos and tyranny he witnessed in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Shelley has answers that remain as relevant today as they were in his time; just how we communicate those answers to the general public will also be discussed. Shelley famously wrote, "Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: the power is there," he did not mean for us to think the power lay outside us.  It is actually within us all.  We have the power to change the world.  But we have to act.  Paul Foot understood this well when he said:

Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people since his death, the thing that matters above all is his enthusiasm for the idea that the world can be changed. It shapes all his poetry. And when you come to read Ode to the West Wind where he writes about the “pestilence stricken multitudes” and the leaves being blown by the wind; then you understand that he sees the leaves as multitudes of people stricken by a pestilence. You begin to see his ideas, his enthusiasm and his love of life. He believed in life and he really felt that life is what mattered.  That life could and should be better than it is. Could be better and should be better. Could and should be changed. That was the thing he believed in most of all.

Please join me and others in London on September 14-15 for a wonderful excursion into the brilliant minds of Percy and Mary Shelley.

Shelley Square in Viareggio, Italy.

Of Myth and Reality. My Visit to the Beach at Viareggio.

On 8 July 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley died at sea off the Italian coast in the Ligurian Sea. Days later his badly decomposed corpse washed ashore on the beach a mile or so north of Viareggio. The body was discovered and buried by the local militia. Much later Shelley was exhumed and cremated by an Italian work party under Edward Trelawney's supervision.

Shelley lived in San Terenzo near La Spezia.  He sailed from Livorno on the 8th and his body was discovered on the beach north of Viareggio.  Livorno to San Terenzo by sea is approximately 60 kilometers by sea. 

The circumstances of his death and the actions of his friends and loved ones contributed to a veritable circus of hagiography and myth-making that continues to this day - replete with the development of a trove of "relics" and icons many of which are of dubious provenance - including his heart, allegedly pulled from the flames of the white hot furnace by Edward Trelawney.  It is important to remember that no one saw Trelawney do this.  Trelawney was an inveterate liar, who continually embellished and reworked his version of what happened.  We have only his word to rely upon.  Expert medical opinion tells us that it would have been impossible for the heart to have withstood the flames.  But the myth lives on and has assumed quasi-religious. if not outright religious, overtones. 

The scene depicted in this famous 1889 painting NEVER HAPPENED.  Byron was not there.  Mary was not there. Hunt was not there. Shelley was cremated in a jury-rigged furnace. His body was badly decomposed.  This painting is a lie.

Shelley, who was a sophisticated skeptic and one of history’s great atheists, would be appalled. Because Shelley worked with mythological material so much, he is often through of as a "myth-maker".  Harold Bloom must assume much of the blame for creating this idea, and Earl Wasserman for canonizing it.  However, the great Gerald Hogle in his book, Shelley's Process points out that Shelley was almost the opposite of a myth-maker - he was a demythologizer. No less a person that the great Stuart Curran complimented Hogle for reaching "the highest ground ever reached by Shelley criticism." So what Hogle says carries enormous weight.  You can buy it here - but I warn you - it is an incredibly difficult read.

But it also makes common sense. Shelley viewed religion as the "handmaiden of tyranny". Hogle suggests that Shelley saw myth as a "means of social control" in which the values espoused by the myths are "concepts fabricated and disseminated by a hegemonic group...striving to preserve its supremacy and using them to conceal from the public eye an underlying war between classes." [Hogle, 169)  Hogle views Shelley's tactics in his greatest poem Prometheus Unbound as disruptive: as a "dispersion of older mythic patterns" into new iconoclastic versions. So of course Shelley would have the same issues with myth (all myths) as he does with religion - for all religion are founded on myth.

It is for this reason unfortunate that his family and friends together with generations of admirers and biographers created myths about his life and death.  And these myths were used in almost exactly the same way that all myths are used - to create a canonical story that disguises or masks the truth.  In Shelley's case the truth that was masked was his revolutionary political philosophy.  This is exactly what Paul Foot was talking about in his 1981 speech to the London Marxism Conference.  I have written about it and reproduced it here. 

On the anniversary of his death, however, let's put aside the controversies and the mythologies.  In May of this year, I visited the places in and around Viareggio on the Ligurian Sea.  This is where Shelley lived out the last few days of his short life. The video which is at the heart of this post was recorded on the beach at Viareggio.  Somehow standing on that beach made it possible to strip away the accretion of the mythology and to confront the numbing reality of his death.  I found the moment almost overwhelming.

I invite you all to join me on this virtual pilgrimage; and to pause for reflection. Why not read one of his poems in his honour? Tell me which one you picked in the comments. Thank you.

I chose Arethusa. You can learn more about the myth here.

Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains,---
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;---
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
The Earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.

II

Then Alpheus bold,
On his glacier cold,
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks---with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
And the black south wind
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below.
And the beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent's sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph's flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.

III

'Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!'
The loud Ocean heard,
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The Earth's white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam;
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream:---
Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind,---
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

IV

Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearlèd thrones;
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light;
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest's night:---
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the Ocean's foam,
And up through the rifts
Of the mountain clifts
They passed to their Dorian home.

V

And now from their fountains
In Enna's mountains,
Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;---
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
When they love but live no more.

The Casa Magni where Shelley and Mary lived in the Village of San Terenzo - as it might then have looked.