Abstract
Two recent commentators on Shelley’s Adonais have made a point of reminding their readers that it is not a Christian poem. Jean Hall warns us that Shelley’s ‘immortal world is not to be construed literally. After all, Adonais is a poem of immortality written by an atheist.’1 She also quotes from Shelley’s Essay on Christianity to show that what attracts him to the Christian belief that decaying mortality may be transformed into glorified immortality is not its theological, but its imaginative, truth. Likewise Richard Cronin, though emphasising Shelley’s debt to the ‘Christianised pastoral elegy’, insists:
Shelley was not a Christian; Adonais is not a Christian poem. Adonais works towards a consolation for the fact of death without reliance on any received dogma. It is a Christian pastoral elegy from which all Christian theology has disappeared.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Jean Hall, The Transforming Image: A Study of Shelley’s Major Poetry (Urbana, Ill., 1980) p. 134.
Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (London, 1981) p. 174.
See, for example, the conclusion of stanza XLII, which, as Milton Wilson puts it, introduces ‘a somewhat jarring echo of Christianity’ — Shelley’s Later Poetry (New York, 1959) p. 248.
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L.Jones (Oxford, 1964) vol. 2, p. 294.
The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York, 1965) vol. 2, p. 387.
Quoted in Tennyson: ‘In Memoriam’, ed. Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw (Oxford, 1982), p. 24, n. 2. (All quotations from In Memoriam are taken from this edition.)
See Alan Sinfield, The Language of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ (Oxford, 1971), and, in particular, Chapter 2,’ “In Memoriam”: The Linnet and the Artifact’.
Robert Pattison, Tennyson and Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) p. 108.
A. Dwight Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1977) p. 150.
‘In Memoriam’ (1936) rpt. in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1975) pp. 243–4 and 245.
Letter to J. C. Shairp; quoted by A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1966) p. 261.
Quoted in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allot, 2nd edn ed. Miriam Allott (London, 1979) p. 357.
Copyright information
© 1985 R. P. Draper
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Draper, R.P. (1985). Shelley, Tennyson and Arnold: the Pastoral Elegy and Doubt. In: Lyric Tragedy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17916-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17916-9_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-17918-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-17916-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)