Shelley’s Poetry, 1811–17

Abstract

Each of the following chapters may be read in tandem with one section of Chapter 2: this chapter with the second section, Chapters 4 and 5 with the third section and Chapter 6 with the fourth section. The four chapters offer full readings of nine poems, three from each of the periods of Shelley’s life outlined in Chapter 2, and briefer comments on other poems, some of them related dispositionally rather than chronologically to the major poems under consideration. The correspondences with Chapter 2, then, are by no means exact, even chronologically: nor should they be taken as gestures towards biographical or intellectual referentialism. One of this book’s primary contentions is that Shelley’s poems are too often read chiefly as the vehicles of extra-poetic “ideas”, or the effects of life “experiences”, existing before and outside the poems. As we have seen, Shelley himself regarded some of his poems in this way, giving the lead to his referential admirers. Our concern in these chapters, on the contrary, will be with the poems’ own personalities, their various senses of and capacities for life, the degrees and kinds of passional and metaphoric pressure they put or conceive it their function to put on ideas and life experiences: in short, with the poems not as inert receptacles or decorative reconfigurations but as genuinely transformative responses to ideas and experiences.