THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

poet’s retreat from political action into an alternative contemplation of nature. The idea of recoil and recuperation
which informs much of Wordsworth’s finest lyric poetry is certainly absent from Shelley’s two searching, if ultimately
ambiguous, meditations on the natural world, the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ (both 1816). In the
latter poem, the mountain seems to command action against ‘large codes of fraud and woe’ rather than represent a
silent, God-imbued check to human activity.
It is, however, in his essay A Defence of Poetry (written in 1821 and published posthumously in 1840) that Shelley
most confidently proclaims the essentially social function of poetry and the prophetic role of the poet. His assertions,
like Sidney’s before him, are large, even at times outrageous, but his examination of the idea of political improvement
as a criterion of literary value and his idea of poetry as a liberator of the individual moral sense carry considerable
intellectual force. The argument of the Defence opens with the development of a distinction between the workings of
the reason and the imagination, with the imagination seen as the synthesizer and the unifier which finds its highest
expression in poetry. Shelley dismisses as ‘a vulgar error’ the distinction between poets and prose writers, and
proceeds to dissolve divisions between poets, philosophers, and philosophic historians. Thus Shakespeare, Dante, and
Milton emerge as ‘philosophers of the very loftiest power’ and Plato and Bacon, Herodotus and Plutarch are placed
amongst the poets. Essentially, the essay seeks to demonstrate that poetry prefigures other modes of thought and
anticipates the formulation of a social morality — ‘ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created,
and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life.’ Love, ‘or a going out of our own nature
and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful’, is projected as the ‘great secret of morals’ and, by feeding the
imagination, poetry ‘administers to the effect by acting upon the cause’. Shelley’s argument continues to circulate
around these propositions; poetry enhances life, it exalts beauty, it transmutes all it touches, and it tells the truth by
stripping ‘the veil of familiarity from the world’ and laying bare ‘the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of
its forms’. The poet is priest and prophet to a world which can move beyond religion and magic; he is an
‘unacknowledged legislator’ for a future society which will learn to live without the restrictions of law; he is, above
all, the liberator and the explorer. Shelley’s projection of the poet as hero, as the leader and representative of society,
is more than veiled self aggrandizement, it is a reasonable assertion of the irrational power of the imagination against
a purely utilitarian view of art.
Adonais (1821), Shelley’s elegiac tribute to the dead Keats, pursues the idea of the poet as hero, here triumphant
even in the face of death and ‘awakened from the dream of life’. If Keats/Adonais is ‘one with Nature’ and has
become ‘transmitted effluence’ which cannot die ‘so long as fire outlives the parent spark’, the earth-bound survivor
yearns, almost suicidally, for a part in the same life-transcending immortality. The unfinished The Triumph of Life,
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derived metrically and thematically from Dante and Petrarch, suggests analternative, if phantasmagoric, vision of life.
The poem opens with a dawn and an ecstatic evocation of the sublime amid a mountainous landscape:
Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth.
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows
Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth
Of light, the Ocean’s orison arose
To which the birds tempered their matin lay
All flowers in field or forest which unclose
Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day,
Swinging their censers in the element,
With orient incense lit by the new ray
Burned slow and inconsumably ...
This initial celebration of energy and renewal is countered by the darkness of the narrator-poet’s ‘strange trance’, a
‘waking dream’ of a haunted past and an allegory of death in which the processing participants appear fascinated by
their mortality. When the poet recognizes and confronts the figure of Rousseau, the central questions of the poem are
raised. Rousseau, in a self indulgent probing of his own memories, describes too a circuitous process of forgetting and
erasing which necessarily evades answers as to the meaning of life. When, finally, the bewildered poet demands
‘Then what is Life?’ no answer is forthcoming. The poem breaks off, and with it the search for responsive definitions