Shelley’s Poetry, 1821–2

Abstract

During 1820 Shelley was already turning away again from that poetry of moral and political reformism which had been his trademark since Queen Mab, and to which he had returned with such excitement in the autumn of 1819. He had lost both confidence in that conception of poetry and enthusiasm for its practice, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, partly because of his own lack of popular success, especially compared with Byron’s, and partly because of his disillusionment with the tendency of political events in England and Europe. As we saw in Chapter 3, however, Shelley had been aware since 1815, at least, of the dispositional shortcomings of this style of poetic thought. One all too marginal consequence of that dissatisfaction was a conversational poetry of human relationship, exemplified in 1820 by the “Letter to Maria Gisborne” and in 1822, more profoundly, by the poems for Jane Williams. But Shelley’s other principal style of poetic thought, the one in which he explicitly criticised the disposition of Queen Mab and its successors, was a poetry in which the self is not the agent of the thought, as it is in the poems for Jane, but an object of the thought. Shelley’s last two completed major poems, written in 1821, were both of this kind. Epipsychidion was a love poem in the vein of Alastor, and Adonais was a poem about a poet in the vein of “Julian and Maddalo”. A third work, “The Triumph of Life”, a bleak dream vision of humanity, a kind of Mask of Anarchy without Hope, was still being written when Shelley died in mid-1822. The fragment resists tidy categorising, but even as a fragment it constitutes the most mordant and graphic of all Shelley’s Alastorean self-criticisms.