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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Poor Shelley's after-fame is now almost as fluctuant as that scene of his ending, just a hundred years ago, when the waves bore him “darkly, fearfully, afar” (July 8, 1822). The centenary of his death finds his status as a poet involved in peculiar uncertainty. Writers who have agreed fairly well on other matters have differed widely in their evaluations of Shelley's style, particularly as compared with the styles of Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. And almost any company of immediate poetry-lovers—I mean, those who maintain a healthy distrust of professional critics and a warm faith in their own predilections—can wax uncommonly disputatious if one of their number affirms that Shelley was a very real poet, or a very unreal one. Apparently his art is quite singular in its capacity to captivate and to repel. It so repelled Matthew Arnold that it appeared to him a maze which wise men should rather walk around than penetrate. Though he surveyed it tellingly, he never passed right through it with his hand on an unbroken clue; nor have his followers done so. Critics of another type have yielded themselves so fully to the poet's fascinating meanders that eventually they could not emerge, with undimmed vision, into the open country beyond. In short, it has proved very difficult to bring the captivating and the repellent qualities of Shelley's work under a single impartial scrutiny. But at least it should be clear that such a scrutiny should now confine itself to Shelley's poems, submerging all other sources of impression. Extensive enquiry into the poet's life, theories, and affiliations was called for by the singular nature of his case. But this enquiry has become entangled, rather obscuringly, with the question which in the end must stand alone: How poetic is Shelley's poetry?
1 Paul Elmer More's essay on Shelley deals most penetratingly with the confused nature of Shelleyan criticism, and the actual nature of the Shelleyan temperament. But his treatment of the subject of spontaneity in Shelley's poetry seems inadequate. In reference to Francis Thompson's remark upon the closing scenes of Prometheus Unbound—“the spell on which depends such necromantic castles is some spirit of pain charm-poisoned at their base”—Mr. More says: “That charm-poisoned spirit was nothing less than the peculiar romantic illusion of the Revolution which ignored the native impulse of evil, ever lurking in the heart of man, ready to leap forth when its chains are shaken, and which valued the emotions in accordance with their mere spontaneity and intensity” (Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series, p. 18). But surely “the native impulse of evil” is itself among the emotions which are spontaneous and intense. Therefore Shelley's failure to give a proper value to that impulse means that his criterion was not “mere spontaneity and intensity,” and suggests that this phrase is not an exact key to his poetic art. The whole question would seem to turn on a proper distinction of the artistic mode from the moral mode of controlling emotion. Though these two modes are complementary, a too close approximation of them will produce confusion in the criticism of poetry. Certainly, the man Shelley was deficient enough in self-control, and often followed the impulse of the moment: this may be called “mere spontaneity.” But it is equally true that he was deficient in the artistic instinct of following an emotion through, into its full specific nature: this means that he lacked poetic spontaneity. He was animated by a quick, vague affectionateness. He never followed its lower motions into the sphere of vivid lust, nor its higher motions into the sphere of firm love, either in his life or in his poetry.