Abstract
Barnett explores the importance of music to Shelley’s work after his Marlow period, when the circle adopted the shared consumption of music as performative paganism, a liberal, taste-based, pastoral indolence and aesthetic luxuriousness of ten labeled by the Tory press as depraved and obscene sensuality. Music was not merely a pastime for these writers; it was a way of enacting a pagan, self-sustaining, communal enjoyment of sensual pleasures. Barnett’s reading of Prometheus Unbound illuminates the ways in which music—particularly opera and ballet—not only influence the style of Shelley’s poetics but transform it by providing Shelley with a new mode of discourse that can overcome the deficiencies of what he calls “inefficient and metaphorical” words.
No, Music, thou art not the “food of Love,”
Unless Love feeds upon its own sweet self,
Till it becomes all Music murmurs of.
—Percy Shelley, “Another Fragment to Music” 1
What are mountains trees, heaths, or even the glorious and ever-beautiful sky [of Italy], with such sunsets as I have seen at Hampstead, to friends? Social enjoyment, in some form or other, is the alpha and omega of existence. All that I see in Italy—and from my tower window I now see the magnificent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain—is nothing; it dwindles to smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour. How we prize what we despised when present! So the ghosts of our dead associations rise and haunt us, in revenge for our having let them starve, and abandoned them to perish.
—Percy Shelley letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 22(?) August 1819 2
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Barnett, S.L. (2017). Shelley’s “Perpetual Orphic Song”: Music as Pagan Ideology in Prometheus Unbound . In: Romantic Paganism. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54723-7_6
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