The Secrets of an Elder Day: Shelley after Hellas

Abstract

The problem of Shelley’s intention and meaning in his great fragment The Triumph of Life cannot be solved, I think, without first defining the relation of that poem (a) to the earlier poetry, which many people believe differs radically from The Triumph of Life, and (b) to the other poetry of the post-Hellas period, which at least one recent critic¹ believes is all derived from a single vision, a vision that contradicts the whole of Shelley’s earlier major poetry. Both of these relationships, however, are themselves explicable only in terms of the development (or lack of it) in Shelley’s thought between, for example, Alastor and Hellas.

Even harsh critics of Shelley have relented in the face of The Triumph of Life. T. S. Eliot, for example, believed that this was ‘Shelley’s greatest tribute to Dante’ and the ‘greatest’ of his poems. Most critics have felt that The Triumph represents a new response to language, and displays a far more immediate subtlety in its writing. The combination of its being unfinished and the poem on which Shelley was working when he died have given it a central importance in any discussion of the development of Shelley’s later thought. For some the poem’s vision of the human wrecks dragged in the wake of the chariot has represented Shelley’s final despair before the unchangeable human predicament, while for others the strange figure that appears to Rousseau offers the possibility of renewal and continued hope.