Shelley's Revolutionary Year - a review by Ciarán O'Rourke

In 1990, Redwords published an important collection of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse and prose from the year 1819: Shelley’s Revolutionary Year (henceforth“SRY”). The collection was introduced (and I assume curated) by the great crusading journalist and Shelley devotee, Paul Foot. You can read his brilliant speech about Shelley to the London Marxism Conference of 1981 here.

Paul Foot’s introduction to the 1990 edition (now perserved as an “afterword”) opened with these words: “This is the first edition of the book which was proposed for publication 170 years ago by one of England‘s most famous writers.”

In May of 1820, Shelley, who was living in Pisa at the time, wrote two letters to his friend Leigh Hunt. In the letter he asked if Hunt knew of “any bookseller would like to publish a little volume of popular songs, wholly political, and destined to awaken and direct the imagination of reformers.“

Hunt declined to publish the collection - and what a loss it was. 170 years later Paul Foot set out to right the wrong by collecting together those works which he thought Shelley most likely would have included in the collection. 

In this slim volume you will find the Mask of Anarchy, Lines written During the Castlereagh Administration, Song to the Men of England, Sonnet: England 1819, Ode to Liberty and much more. Importantly, Paul elected to include Shelley’s essay, A Philosophical Review of Reform.

It’s been 30 years since this collection was published. And now, timed to co-incide with the 200th anniversary of Peterloo, Redwoods is republishing the collection - with an important difference: this time we are treated to a brand new introduction by the brilliant Shelley scholar Paul O’Brien: Beware the Risen People.

What I love about this collection is that it places some of Shelley’s most radical and trenchant writing all in one handy volume. And thanks to Paul Foot and Paul O’Brien, the reader is given an excellent sense of the importance and context of the poetry and prose. This is a perfect gift for the young (or old) radical in your life. Maybe it is even more important for those among your family and friends who are “radical-curious” or who are searching for political meaning in life. There is a very good reason why Shelley was revered by the Chartists and Owenites and later by luminaries on the left such as Marx and Engels. As Paul Foot said in his address to the London Marxism Conference in 1981:

Of all the things about Shelley that really inspired people in the 160 years 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…you [can] 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.

Echoing these thoughts, Paul O’Brien concludes his engaging introduction with these words:

Shelley has bequeathed us a body of work and an access to language that can inspire and energise people to organize and agitate for a better world…The famous closing lines from The Mask of Anarchy “ye are many - they are few” is more than a slogan or the title of an election programme; it is a call to action.

A few weeks ago, Ciarán O‘Rourke wrote me from Ireland to alert me to the existence of this new version of SYR. He also forwarded me a copy of his own review on the book which appeared in the Irish Marxist Review. I thought it was brilliant. I immediately wanted to republish it because I think it is important for modern fans of Shelley to hear authentic voices from the left speaking about the value of Shelley in the modern political context. With the kind permission of the Reviews editor, John Molyneux, I am pleased to republish (and promote!) Ciarán’s article. Thank you John!

First a few words about Ciarán O’Rourke. Ciarán is a brilliant young poet and Marxist from Ireland. He is the founder and editor of the online archive Island's Edge Poetry which features interviews with contemporary Irish poets about their work and craft. His first collection, The Buried Breath, is available from Irish Pages Press. He is based in Dublin, Ireland (www.ragpickerpoetry.net/). I can personally attest to the vibrancy and beauty of his poetry. After sampling some verse on line, I immediately ordered The Buried Breath.

Ciarán was born in 1991 and took a degree English and History at Trinity College, Dublin. He received a Masters in English and American Studies from Oxford in 2014, and is currently doing a doctorate on William Carlos Williams at his alma mater in Dublin. A winner of the Lena Maguire/Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize, his poems have appeared in a number of leading publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, The Irish Times, The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, The Spectator, and Irish Pages.

Oh, and one other thing, he is a HUGE fan of Shelley. Here is his article:

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Shelley's Revolutionary Year - a reflection by Ciarán O'Rourke

In the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which over seven hundred unarmed civilian demonstrators were injured, eleven killed, by cavalry sent by local magistrates to disperse the crowd, Percy Shelley’s impulse was to mourn the “people starved and stabbed in the untilled field”. Comparing “England” to an “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king”, Shelley excoriated those actual “Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, / But leech-like to their fainting country cling” - sucking the blood, like Marx’s later “vampire” capitalists, of the working people whose labour they both demanded and disdained. Later, Shelley addressed the survivors themselves, and in terms that connected the oppression they suffered as a group with the work they performed and the distribution of wealth that resulted:

            Men of England, wherefore plough 

            For the lords who lay ye low?

            Wherefore weave with toil and care 

            The rich robes your tyrants wear?

            Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save, 

            From the cradle to the grave

            Those ungrateful drones who would 

            Drain your sweat - nay, drink your blood?

Peterloo had unleashed the poet into something close to a class analysis of his society, governed increasingly by force under Lord Liverpool’s Tory administration. 

The Peterloo Memorial

 The event stands in history as an emblematic and explosive manifestation of the abhorrence of establishment elites for the democratic rights of a subjugated majority; it was a singular atrocity, but also an omen, in which “the painted veil” of social relations was momentarily lifted, revealing the violence beneath. Indeed, as Paul O’Brien notes, versions of “Peterloo” have “been played out on many occasions in the past two hundred years”, including on “Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972” and in “the battle of Orgreave during the miners’ strike in 1984.” In this respect, the massacre may be understood as holding out to us today that same question which Shelley was clear in answering in 1819: which side are you on? As this selection of the poet’s writings from that year makes plain, the brutality of the Peterloo attack and the pervasiveness of the subsequent cover-up was in fact a catalyst for one of the most productive and incendiary creative periods of his life - and as such serves to foreground the political impetus of a figure too often portrayed as an imaginative if overly earnest dreamer, or the prodigal literary son of the (ultimately reactionary) William Wordsworth. This book serves as a corrective to both of these interpretations. 

Born in 1792 into a minor aristocratic family, expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism, obsessed with French revolutionary discourse and the relatively recent rebellions in Ireland, Shelley burned bright and died young (in a boating accident in 1822): he is known today, after decades of critical near-invisibility, as one of the most gifted English poets of the nineteenth century. He was also the most radical. 

If Shelley’s instinct in life was to resist all forms of entrenched authority (religious and political), his distinction as a Romantic was to crystallise this rebellion into an often heart-quickening poetry and an incisive style of prose argumentation that together - and despite the occasional limitations of his perspective - sought without fail to kindle and keep alive the revolutionary promise of his times. As Paul Foot helpfully summarises, “Shelley’s enormous talents were used not to butter up the rulers of society”, as has been the case of many other prominent writers, then and now, “but to attack those rulers from every vantage point.” If Shelley sometimes vacillated on questions that later socialists have held dear - questions of universal suffrage, the roles of capital and private property in society, or the validity (and methods) of revolutionary insurrection over political reform - his concern was always to unmask the structures of power that dominated his society. He set out to find in nature, in the upsurge of democratic and nationalist movements across Europe, and in the individuality of his own sensations, the stirrings of a world-transforming change, both spiritual and material. In this sense, the Shelley of mystical visions, celebrated by W. B. Yeats, and the Shelley of inspired insight and radical action, beloved of Karl and Eleanor Marx, among many others, were inseparably the same - as this book valuably reminds us. 

 For all his sweeping intuition as to the spiritual unity of the universe (“The One remains, the Many change and pass”), Shelley was incapable of imagining the world without also recognising the social antagonisms of human society as such. What is slavery, he declares:

            ‘Tis to work and have such pay           

            As just keeps life from day to day 

            In your limbs, as in a cell 

            For the tyrants’ use to dwell, 

             So that ye for them are made 

            Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade, 

            With or without your own will bent 

            To their defence and nourishment. 

            ‘Tis to see your children weak, 

            With their mothers pine and peak, 

            When the winter winds are bleak, - 

            They are dying whilst I speak.

Karl Marx with family and Engels - all of them fans of Shelley

Shelley’s hatred for the institutions and privileges of his own class, his insistent recognition of the vicious force with which these last were defended, could also at times shapeshift into a sense of personal isolation and despondency - a feeling all “Me”, as he once wrote, “who am as a nerve o’er which do creep / The else unfelt oppressions of the earth”. More often, however, Shelley presented a vision of the earth in motion, in which the turning seasons and the all-too-palpable pains of social oppression could both be galvanised “to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe” - a vision in which the “sneer of cold command” of ruling elites was by its very nature vulnerable to these “boundless”, surging forces of transformation the poet discerned. Amid all the destruction of his times - from the bloody final acts of the French Revolution, to the unfettered butchery of the Napoleonic and Peninsular wars, to the savage repression enforced against Irish and domestic populations - Shelley had an uncanny ability to draw the outlines of a new society, urging rebels the world over “To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; / To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates”. As in this passage, there are moments in the sweep and rush of Shelley’s writing that seem the very distillation of revolutionary struggle. 

Of course, in re-claiming the work from a politically anemic and largely conservative literary tradition, there is always the risk of heroising the poet into another kind of myth - of erecting an image of radical purity in place of the much messier reality that was Shelley’s life and personality. Here, for instance, the furious compassion and searing political fire of Ballad of a Starving Mother is praised by the editors (and quite rightly, too), and yet the powerful and even callous solipsism that at times defined Shelley’s own marital relationships, first with Harriet Westbrook and then with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, goes unmentioned. Such qualities were erratic, and were perhaps intensified by Shelley’s youth; and yet it is surely difficult not to perceive Shelley’s sometimes extreme self-absorption at the emotional and physical expense of the women around him as a reflex of his status as a man of many entitlements in an intensely gender-divided society - a society of which, as we have seen, Shelley was an outspoken critic.

Such biographical complexity is lacking from the portrait of the poet we receive in this volume, which seems a loss: partly because socialists deserve a fuller picture of the past and the literary figures whom they are encouraged to quote, and partly because a socialism sanitised of human contradiction will surely fail to live up to its name. This would be a final defeat, for us and for Shelley, the poet who dedicated his work to the winds and “Wild Spirit” of renewal, “Destroyer and preserver” both - and who met, in the “Autumn” of world history in which he lived, the vista of “Pestilence-stricken multitudes” with his own enduring challenge: “Be through my lips to unawakened earth // The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

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Afterword

In response to Ciarán’s important final remarks about the volume’s lack of “biographical complexity” and its failure to address the “callous solipsism that at times defined [Percy] Shelley’s own marital relationships”, I would suggest the reader turn to any of the major biographies, but perhaps in particular to John Worthen’s recent book: The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography or James Bieri’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. Both treat the subject with rigor and candour.

However, Shelley is hardly the misogynistic cartoon-like madman that some recent books (Fiona Sampson’s In Search of Mary Shelley) and movies (Mansour’s Mary Shelley) have sensationally suggested. One thing worth recalling is that Mary stayed married to (and with) Percy until the day he died and then remained devoted to him for decades afterwords - until her own death. Mary was a brilliant and powerful personality - she seems to have made her own judgement. To replace that judgement with arm-chair psychiatric work and casual (almost “click-bait” style calumnies) at a distance of 200 years is a stretch. I reviewed the movie in my essay The Truth Matters. Lesley McDowell, writing in The Herald had this to say about Sampson’s ad hominem jeremiad (in which she attacks everyone around Mary as well - including Claire Clairmont and William Godwin):

“Biography is meant to be an objective art. Stick to the verifiable facts; maintain an authoritative tone; don’t invite conjecture and definitely don’t play armchair psychologist. Fiona Sampson, a prize-winning poet and editor, has eschewed all four rules as she seeks to get inside the head of Mary Shelley, so intent on seeing everything solely from her subject’s perspective that she becomes almost enthusiastic about attributing blame for what happens.”

For a fascinating insight into the depth and strength of Mary and Percy’s relationship you can read Anna Mercer’s article ‘Your sincere admirer’: the Shelleys’ Letters as Indicators of Collaboration in 1821. Since that article was written, Anna has published a book-length study of the subject: The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. You c an buy it here. Written by expert on the subject matter, Anna’s approach is refreshing, clear-sighted, rational and grounded in fact as opposed to supposition.

But about the need for socialists (frankly all of us) to get a “fuller picture of the past and the literary figures whom [we] are encouraged to quote”, Ciarán is absolutely right. Because, as he writes, “a socialism sanitised of human contradiction will surely fail to live up to its name.” The full picture is on display in the carefully researched biographies of Shelley by Bieri, Worthen and Richard Holmes. Having done that, let us not then forget what Paul Foot wrote:

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 the 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, wome 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. The person who says, “Can man be free if woman be a slave” is Cythna in The Revolt of Islam! She is taken captive and then she goes to her captors and calls on them to free her and the other prisoners and join with the revolution: “This need not be; ye might arise, and will / That gold should lose its power, and thrones their glory.”

         And that comes from a woman. And he understood, just as we had better understand, and we better understand it fast, because it is a prejudice that goes back deeper than any other prejudice that exists in society today. We’d better understand that point: that when the women start to take control, and it’s not just the question of understanding oppression, paying lip service to the oppression, but the possibility of taking part and sharing in the revolutionary upheaval, actually of leading it. That, I think, is one of the most inspiring parts of Shelley’s poetry.

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 Ciarán is founder and editor of the online archive, Island's Edge Poetry, which features interviews with contemporary Irish poets about their work and craft. His first collection, The Buried Breath, is available from Irish Pages Press. He is based in Dublin, Ireland (www.ragpickerpoetry.net/).