Abstract
When after his move to Italy in early 1818 Shelley stared at the blank paper on which he was to write a letter—to his friends in England, say, often Peacock or Leigh Hunt, or to fellow emigrants such as Byron—he paused on the verge, in however subliminal a way, of a range of interconnected if often unwritten stories: poems that had been or were to be composed or published, whose full richness no letter could depict; imagined communities; a new culture and landscape to be broached; intermittent states of personal loneliness and isolation; utopian political hopes increasingly tinged with pessimism; bouts of domestic complications, loss, and criss-cross personal dynamics that were almost unspeakable, barely writable. Certainly his letters from Italy compose a fascinatingly individual and impressive contribution towards the genre of the Romantic letter. They answer, in their capacity to modulate tone and perspective, to his own description in A Defence of Poetry of Plato as a poet in his prose: like Plato in his philosophical dialogues, Shelley, in his letters, ‘forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style’.
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
Notes
- 1.
Shelley’s poetry and prose (apart from his letters) are quoted from Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), here p. 679.
- 2.
Letters of William Wordsworth: A New Selection, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. xxii.
- 3.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark ([1796]; London: Cassell, 1889), p. 21.
- 4.
Nora Crook is among those who, following G. M. Matthews (acknowledged by her), have explored the influence of Wollstonecraft’s work on Shelley’s poem for the dead Fanny Godwin, ‘Thy little footsteps on the shore’; see her fascinating essay ‘Shelley’s Women’, a chapter relevant to the present discussion, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 65–82 (at p. 81).
- 5.
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, p. 291 (hereafter referred parenthetically as Letters: PBS with volume and page numbers).
- 6.
I am grateful to Nora Crook for discussion of this point and for her overall comments on a draft of this essay.
- 7.
In the OED there is a relevant observation made under ‘correspond (v)’: ‘The etymology implies that the word was formed to express mutual response, the answering of things to each other; but before its adoption in English, it had been extended so as to express the action or relation of one side only, without however abandoning the mutual notion, which is distinct in the modern sense of epistolary correspondence’. It is that ‘mutual notion’ that Shelley’s letter eloquently brings to the fore. For thought-provoking reflections on the political implications of the concept and practice of ‘correspondence’ in relation to letter writing in the Romantic period, see Mary A. Favret’s important study, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and The Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 8.
Quoted from John Berryman, Collected Poems: 1937–1971, ed. and intro. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber, 1989), p. 77.
- 9.
Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), pp. 154–55.
- 10.
Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 261.
- 11.
See Carlson, p. 271 on Shelley’s alleged ‘lack of respect for “persons”’. Carlson, it should be noted, distinguishes her account of Shelley from the condemnation of his ‘lived practices’ typical of ‘humanist-feminists’ (p. 272).
- 12.
For Shelley’s practical help in ensuring that ‘Claire was able to maintain what she most valued in life, the prospect of independence’ (p. 53), see Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, 1798–1879 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 52–53.
- 13.
For insightful and incisive comments on epistolary exchanges between Shelley and Byron, see Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), which includes discussion of an article probably written by Mary Shelley, ‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’ (published in 1830), in which the author captures well the modes of self-presentation pursued by both poets in their letters: Byron cynical, ironic and unconvinced; Shelley keenly logical, persuaded of Shakespeare’s genius, and determined to prove it.
- 14.
Simon Haines, Shelley’s Poetry: The Divided Self (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 139.
- 15.
Jonathan Ellis, ‘Last Letters: Keats, Bishop and Hopkins’, Letter Writing among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 231–46 (p. 239).
- 16.
For discussion of the significance for Shelley of Rousseau’s epistolary novel, see Donald H. Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: A Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), esp. pp. 73–79.
- 17.
Madeleine Callaghan, ‘“Any Thing Human or Earthly”: Shelley’s Letters and Poetry’, Letter Writing among Poets, ed. Ellis, pp. 111–25 (p. 116). See also the same author’s groundbreaking study, Shelley’s Living Artistry; Letters, Poems, Plays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), which, among other things, ‘places under scrutiny the relationship between individual private letters and the artistic work’ (p. 4). See also for valuable commentary on ‘Shelley’s “Familiar Style”’, Anthony Howe’s chapter of that title in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. O’Neill and Howe, with the assistance of Callaghan (pp. 309–24): the chapter concerns itself with readings of Rosalind and Helen, Julian and Maddalo, and Letter to Maria Gisborne, but it is full of suggestive implications for reading the letters.
- 18.
Daisy Hay, ‘Shelley’s Letters’, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. O’Neill and Howe, with the assistance of Callaghan, pp. 208–22 (at p. 219).
- 19.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans with intro David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 52.
- 20.
The discussion of this June 1822 letter draws on material in my piece, ‘Reading Shelley’, Shelley Studies 22 (2014), pp. 13–15. This piece, in turns, draws on ideas articulated in my plenary lecture at a Shelley conference held in September 2007 at University College, Oxford.
- 21.
As is argued in Carlson, p. 268.
- 22.
Byron’s Letters and Journals: A New Selection, ed. Richard Lansdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. xvii.
- 23.
Lansdown, p. 311.
- 24.
See D. Harington-Lueker, ‘Imagination versus Introspection: The Cenci and Macbeth’, Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), pp. 172–89, which argues that ‘in Macbeth Shelley’s protean imagination could have found the outlines of a psychology of evil that would complement his own’ (p. 178).
- 25.
See Robinson, The Snake and Eagle, p. 36, from which Coleridge is quoted.
- 26.
Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mrs Shelley, 2 vols (London: Moxon, 1840), p. xxi; hereafter Essays.
- 27.
See Biographia Literaria , chapter XV, where Coleridge writes that one way in which ‘images’ ‘become proof of original genius’ is when ‘a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s spirit’, Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Stephen Potter (London: Nonesuch Press, 1950), p. 257.
- 28.
Benjamin Colbert, ‘Shelley, Travel, and Tourism’, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. O’Neill and Howe, with the assistance of Callaghan, pp. 594–608 (p. 595).
- 29.
Now thought not to be a letter, as Mary Shelley assumed it was in printing it as a letter in her 1840 edition, but a separate piece of ‘epistolary’ prose, ‘On Learning Languages’, tentatively dated by E. B. Murray to 1816, in his edition of The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, volume 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993): title given on p. 164.
- 30.
Edmund Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story ([1946]; London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 301.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Neill, M. (2020). ‘The Varied Pauses of His Style’: Shelley’s Letters from Italy. In: Callaghan, M., Howe, A. (eds) Romanticism and the Letter. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29309-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29310-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)