Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine
Shelley, along with his BFF Lord Byron, thumbed their nose at the commonplaces of their current era, and he (even more so than Byron) appeared to court controversy from right off the bat. Shelley was an aristocrat, born into wealth. He went to the top schools (Eton and then Oxford), but was expelled after he wrote a treatise on the glories of atheism. He got in big trouble for that, and then even more trouble with his father when he eloped with the teenage Harriet Westbrook. Her father owned a tavern, which just made the situation seem worse to his privileged family. He and Harriet traveled about the English provinces, as well as Wales and Ireland, as, basically, political rabble-rousers. Shelley was one of those people who stood on street corners distributing leaflets about injustice. Around this time, he started publishing poetry as well. Poems that reflected his radicalism, his atheism, and his political convictions, none of which made him popular.
Then he met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of the feminist political writer Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the anarchist. His marriage was on the fritz at this point, but you get the idea that Shelley wouldn’t have let such a thing as domestic bliss stop him from doing what he wanted. He and Mary ran away together, leaving poor Harriet behind. Mary’s stepsister Claire came with, causing all sorts of rumors to fly about what was going on, romantically, sexually, with the trio. They finally returned to England and he found out that Harriet had drowned herself. He then married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who then became Mary Shelley (now famous the world over for writing Frankenstein). They had a son who died when he was two. Shelley was devastated.
Percy and Mary and Mary’s stepsister Claire joined up with Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. Byron slept with Claire. Shelley wrote some poems. Mary wrote Frankenstein on a dare. Shelley continued his poetic and political radicalism. There was a sense of sexual sadism and depravity about him, at least that was his reputation, and his poems often pointed in that direction, with incest and violence and political revolt. He was obsessed with ancient times (as many were then, with the opening of Egypt to the world), and wrote a five-act tragedy called Cenci (it’s quite an interesting work) that took place in 16th century Rome. He wrote Ozymandias around this time.
In Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems, Camille Paglia writes of “Ozymandias”:
Compressed in size yet vast in scale, “Ozymandias” remains Shelley’s most accessible poem, employing effects that are prophetically cinematic. Its punishing landscape descends directly from Marvell’s “deserts of vast eternity,” the wilderness beyond Eden in “To His Coy Mistress”. This time, however, we are in Egypt, which had been opened to European exploration by Napoleon’s 1798 invasion. Like Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us” and “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” “Ozymandias” is a traditional sonnet but also a spontaneous Romantic effusion, reportedly written straight out in less than an hour on the flyleaf of a borrowed book.
Only one line is ostensibly in the poet’s voice: Shelley introduces the poem, then steps back and disappears. A second character, the shadowy “traveler”, begins to speak in the second line, and though his voice continues to the end, he too recedes as the monumental artifacts take over. There is a third voice inset in the poem – that of a royal ghost as sonorous and demanding as Hamlet’s stalking father.
Does the traveler really exist? Or is he a dream vision? In either case, he acts as proxy for Shelley, the wanderer who was to die in exile. The traveler “from an antique land” may be a space traveler, or, eerily, a time traveler, a messenger from antiquity (1). The poem’s relay of voices distances the visual material and makes us feel the passage of time. As a framing device, however, the succession of speakers is incomplete, since we never return to the opening person or place. The lack of closure may be due partly to the poem’s cataclysmic revelation: what the traveler sees is nature’s total victory over culture.
I remember after 9/11, with all the anger and all the rage, I was walking down below 14th Street, where you could still smell the air burning, where you really needed to wear some kind of mask to shield your face, and someone had written the engraving on the statue of Ozymandias on a piece of paper and tacked it up to a wall. I remember being baffled by that, as the person who tacked it up seemed to be saying, “LOOK OUT, TERRORISTS. WE ARE MIGHTY AND YOU SHOULD BE VERY AFRAID.” The words on the great pedestal of Ozymandias are “Look on my works ye mighty and despair”. Context is decisive. I remember thinking to myself, “Uhm, yeah, the rest of the poem shows a once-great empire crumbled in the dust and forgotten for centuries. So you might want to rethink using those particular lines as some sort of THREAT to those who want to kill us!”
In 1818, a prolific year for Shelley, they were living in Italy to be close to the Byrons.
Here is an excerpt from a letter from Percy Shelley to good friend Thomas Peacock. It’s hard not to roll your eyes at lines such as:
My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain–a practice in the hot weather exceedingly refreshing.
I mean, HONESTLY.
Bagni di Lucca, 2 July, 1818.
My dear Peacock,
I received on the same day your letters marked five and six, the one directed to Pisa, and the other to Livorno, and I can assure you they are most welcome visitors. Our life here is as unvaried by any external events as if we were at Marlow, where a sail up the river or a journey to London makes an epoch. Since I last wrote to you, I have ridden over to Lucca, once with Claire, and once alone ; and we have been over to the Casino, where I cannot say there is anything remarkable, the women being far removed from anything which the most liberal annotator could interpret into beauty or grace, and apparently possessing no intellectual excellencies to compensate the deficiency. I assure you it is well that it is so, for these dances, especially the waltz, are so exquisitely beautiful that it would be a little dangerous to the newly unfrozen senses and imaginations of us migrators from the neighbourhood of the Pole. As it is–except in the dark–there could be no peril.The atmosphere here, unlike that of the rest of Italy, is diversified with clouds, which grow in the middle of the day, and sometimes bring thunder and lightning, and hail about the size of a pigeon’s egg, and decrease towards the evening, leaving only those finely woven webs of vapour which we see in English skies, and flocks of fleecy and slowly-moving clouds, which all vanish before sunset ; and the nights are for ever serene, and we see a star in the east at sunset–I think it is Jupiter–almost as fine as Venus was last summer; but it wants a certain silver and aerial radiance, and soft yet piercing splendour, which belongs, I suppose, to the latter planet by virtue of its at once divine and female nature. I have forgotten to ask the ladies if Jupiter produces on them the same effect.
I take great delight in watching the changes of the atmosphere. In the evening Mary and I often take a ride, for horses are cheap in this country. In the middle of the day, I bathe in a pool or fountain, formed in the middle of the forests by a torrent. It is surrounded on all sides by precipitous rocks, and the waterfall of the stream which forms it falls into it on one side with perpetual dashing. Close to it, on the top of the rocks, are alders, and, above, the great chestnut trees, whose long and pointed leaves pierce the deep blue sky in strong relief. The water of this pool, which, to venture an unrhythmical paraphrase, is “sixteen feet long and ten feet wide,” is as transparent as the air, so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem, as it were, trembling in the light of noonday. It is exceedingly cold also. My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain–a practice in the hot weather exceedingly refreshing. This torrent is composed, as it were, of a succession of pools and waterfalls, up which I sometimes amuse myself by climbing when I bathe, and receiving the spray over all my body, whilst I clamber up the moist crags with difficulty.
I have lately found myself totally incapable of original composition. I have employed my mornings, therefore, in translating the Symposium, which I accomplished in ten days. Mary is now transcribing it, and I am writing a prefatory essay. I have been reading scarcely anything but Greek, and a little Italian poetry with Mary. We have finished Ariosto together–a thing I could not have done again alone.
“Frankenstein” seems to have been well received, for although the unfriendly criticism of the “Quarterly” is an evil for it, yet it proves that it is read in some considerable degree, and it would be difficult for them, with any appearance of fairness, to deny it merit altogether. Their notice of me, and their exposure of their true motives for not noticing my book*, show how well understood an hostility must subsist between me and them. . . .
P. B. Shelley
The Shelleys and the Byrons and their various entourages traveled a lot, moving to Rome, to Pisa. The Shelleys settled down in La Spezia on the Bay of Lerici. Shelley bought a sailboat. He called it Don Juan, after Byron’s poem. Shelley was not a good sailor, and he could not swim, but he loved the pastime. In July, 1822, a storm came up during one of his outings, and he drowned. When he washed onshore, his body had deteriorated. He had a book of Keats’ poems in his pocket. (He had always loved Keats, and had invited Keats to join him and his merry band of reprobates in Italy. Keats said No. When Keats died, Shelley wrote a poem as a tribute.)
Robert Graves compared Shelley and Keats in this unforgettable passage:
Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret. When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: “The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom”, he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with old man’s beard. He is not aware of the veteran bees whirring their frayed wings or sucking rank honey from the dusty yellow blossoms of the ivy.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, writes on the Keats/Shelley connection, as well as on the Shelley/Byron connection:
Shelley does things Keats never attempted. He does things no other English poet has achieved. Perhaps he is, as Grave suggests, a spiritual hermaphrodite. Perhaps his philosophy is, in some respects, off the wall, though not so zany as Blake’s… If Shelley is not quite so effective a name [as Byron] to conjure with, if his biography and beliefs – in free love, revolution, and so on – are less celebrated, it is because Shelley had a better mind, capable of exploring ideas as well as expressing memorable opinions. He did not pay court to an audience. He did not pose at the heart of his best poems. There is no equivalent to the Byronic hero in Shelley. He was a poet first and last, and if a man of vision, a man of specifically poetic vision. He is, as C.H. Sisson has said, “The last English poet to write as a gentleman.” What blurs his work are in fact the “modern ideas” [Matthew] Arnold attributes to him ideas that are no longer modern and no longer apply, and a conscious distance from what Arnold means by “life”.
Shelley’s roots in specific landscape and community are as shallow as Byron’s were. Perhaps we should say that the aristocratic milieu into which he was born could not contain him. It did provide him with a voice, but at heart he is a disciple of Goethe, a European. The Mediterranean irresistibly called to him. He learned from classical philosophy and literature, Italian and Spanish culture. Dante was his master and he translated some of the Divine Comedy. He translated passages of Homer, Euripides, Virgil, Cavalcanti, Calderon and Goethe.
Shelley was a legend in his own time.
Tennessee Williams wrote in a letter to his grandfather, Nov. 22, 1928:
I have been reading a good number of biographies this year which I am sure you will commend. Probably you remember how I picked up that volume of Ludwig’s Napoleon on the boat and liked it so well that the owner had to ask me for it. I tried to get it at the library but it was out. Instead I got a life of the Kaiser Wilhelm by the same author. Since then I hve read several others of celebrated literary personages. I have one at home now about Shelley, whose poetry I am studying at school. His life is very interesting. He seems to have been the wild, passionate and dissolute type of genius: which makes him very entertaining to read about.
So. What about the writing? From what I recall, we only had to read “Ozymandias” in school, that was my main introduction to Shelley. The rest of his poems went unstudied. In graduate school, we had to read Cenci, his play – which is a tormented feverish work, and gives the sense (retrospect at work, of course) that this was a man who knew, somehow, that he wouldn’t live long, so he had to get it all out as quickly as possible before he departed. You can still see why his work was so disturbing in his day and age. Hell, it’s disturbing in OUR day and age.
Auden had a great dislike of Shelley (many people do, people find him distasteful) and wrote in a review of a biography on Shelley:
I cannot believe that any artist can be good who is not more than a bit of a reporting journalist … Abstractions which are not the latest flowers of a richly experienced and mature mind are empty and their expression devoid of poetic value.
Matthew Arnold was one of Shelley’s greatest champions, and wrote of him:
[Shelley was] a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating his wings in a luminous void in vain.
Arnold lumped Shelley and Byron together (as they often were), saying that they were the major poets of the day (not Wordsworth, or Walter Scott or Keats) – and their works would stand the test of time. Arnold wrote:
[Shelley and Byron will be remembered] long after the inadequacy of their actual work is clearly recognised, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature; their names will be greater than their writings.
During William Carlos Williams’s final illness, he said to his friend Robert Lowell (nickname “Cal”):
“Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?”
That anecdote has always really moved me. You’re no slouch yourself, William Carlos. But we all have those idols in our minds, the ones we try to live up to, the ones we try to “beat”.
Schmidt sums up:
Shelley rejects a rationalist tradition of normative and conventional art. He stresses emotional fluency, the mystical source of poetry (the dying coal); he believes in the centrality of the poet. Such views have not been popular in England since the First World War, though they have retained or gained currency in other anglophone lands. That poetry is “not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind,” that there is no “necessary connection” between it and “consciousness or will” – such views can cause offense if taken seriously. We do well to distrust Shelley. But within the vast realm of his poetry, plays and prose exist, apart from masterpieces to be valued, lessons to be learned, even if only by reaction. His imaginative strategies cannot be borrowed, any more than Milton’s can, but they remain in a deep sense exemplary. A young poet keen to attract a popular audience can ask Byron for a master class. A serious and questing poet will recognize in Shelley a more challenging mentor, and one who will give only private instruction.
I find all of this FASCINATING.
I always liked Shelley more than Byron. “Ozymandias” spoke to me as a high school kid, and I love Paglia’s point that the poem, in and of itself, seems to predict the 20th century art of cinema. Its art is strictly cinematic. It’s a story being told, first of all, so the whole thing is already second-hand. “Once upon a time …” essentially. So we start with two voices chatting, and then the story opens up, and we see the shattered statue in long shot – panorama shot even, and the entire movement of the poem is a slow zoom-in. And then, conversely, a slow zoom back out. Shelley’s eye is strictly a 20th century eye. In our current day it is difficult for writers NOT to be “cinematic” because the medium is so influential.
But here, in a 19th century Romantic poet, it is startling.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
Sheila,
I recall reading some other take on the poem. He conjectured the true, the eternal, in effect, the King of Kings Ozymandias was mocking the temporal King. The actual identity of the King of Kings, we were to take it, was to be found in the name; Ozymandias meaning, from the Greek, ozy = air, and mandias, from mandate = rule – ‘ruler of the air’.
I guess this settles nothing and just invites more conjecture such as: was Shelley’s Ozymandias nature/time or perhaps THE King of Kings. The little bits I’ve happened across about Shelley, and now your post, suggest nature boy probably had the former in mind – but you never know, he might have looked a rippling brook but had deep still waters beneath him.
I fall upon on the thorns of life, I bleed
Yeah, Shelley was cool
this poem TERRIFIED me the first time i read it…
let me correct that:
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
Dude was using exclamation points!
Seang – Ha! Yes, those exclamation points!! Boy was nothing if not dramatic. And very cool.
Bren – it scared me too. It kind of still scares me. Those images!!
George – wow, I really like that take on it, too. Fascinating.