Dead Shelley

Stephen Spender’s essay on a mixed-up predecessor

Shelley by Stephen Spender

Spender’s view of Shelley is neither common nor uncommon. In the nineteenth century, Spender says, Shelley was very clearly one of the great and not one of the minor poets. But in Spender’s own day, the romantics had fallen from favour; some of their predecessors like Pope had been rediscovered and elevated, and they stood deprecated. And meanwhile, their language, while beautiful, had failed to speak to the moderns. The moderns wanted to talk in demotic English, in regional and working class accents. Many of them called themselves realists. Hard realists, flinty realists. Nothing romantic about them. Or they wanted to disappear into Pound-like madness and arcana in their literary studies.

Shelley sat awkwardly among members of that generation.

If Spender had a point, in this 1952 essay, it was to show that Shelley was a man of more than one attitude, more than one sort. A youthful radical, certainly — eager devotee of free love, the abandoner of a first wife, and a star-eyed preacher that the world was not as it ought to be. But also a man of maturer impulses. (Shelley, let us remember, is imagined by some to have been a faery-eyed twenty-year-old for all his adult life, but actually died at twenty-nine, on the cusp of what was, in the nineteenth-century as now, considered early middle age.)

Shelley was called ‘mad Shelley’ at school and was considered extremely wild in his day — disdaining of social convention and talking with a piercingly high-pitched voice. But he was also described by Leigh Hunt as having studious, moderate habits: not eating meat, not taking alcohol, and working all day long, except when it was time to go sailing or to visit the worthy poor for the purposes of charity. That Shelley fell out with his father-in-law, Godwin, is not surprising, in this telling; and not discreditable. He married the man’s daughter. Instead, Spender implies, we have to think a little more about the poetry and less about the reputation of its author.

But that reputation mattered so much to so many.

So many posthumously took ownership of Shelley’s remains — his literary memorial, and memories of his life. Mary Shelley, of course, whom Spender depicts as having gone off her husband after the tragic loss of their first three children, nonetheless held onto his heart after it was extracted from his immense funeral pyre; and guarded his reputation in the production of his collected works. (And Spender says the shade of Shelley lay heavily upon his wife’s later novels — just as his heart lay near to hand when she wrote them. Although, I must say, I wouldn’t know.)

It’s worth thinking of everything Mary Shelley gave up to marry so uncommon and ostracised a man — pursued by opprobrium and by debts, near chased across Europe, suffering bereavement after bereavement without end. No wonder such a widow might want to make the literary remnants of the late husband work to her advantage. To fashion a better man from literary remnants than the one who had married her.

Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a university contemporary of Shelley’s who was enfolded into Shelley’s operatic and restless romantic life, also memorialised his dead friend. And Edward John Trelawny, of course, wrote very dramatic works about Shelley and Byron — both of them once his friends and safely dead when he put pen to paper.

Spender’s pamphlet is too short to dwell deeply on the discrepancies and disagreements of these memoirists. An enjoyable essay could be written on the various collected works of Shelley’s that were published in the fifty years after his death, and the disputes between the accounts of all of those who claimed to have known him and to have known him well.

But there is also the writing itself to consider. Spender also wants us to think of Shelley as having written more variously: more variously, that is, than his latter-day followers and students often think. (Spender was not to know in the early 1950s, when this essay appeared, that Paul Foot would three decades later write Red Shelley and convince a large number of people not known for their appreciation for nineteenth century poets that Shelley was, in his own way, just like them.)

Spender’s catalogue goes like this. We have the didactic works like Prometheus Unbound and The Masque of Anarchy, where we learn in ringing phrases what Shelley thinks of existence and justice and things of that kind; and we also have the shorter lyrics more aptly found in anthologies; and we have the ‘spiritual autobiographies’ — stories where the poet portrays himself, in Spender’s telling, as the perfect victim, a decent, wonderful person who has acquired immense knowledge of life and love and those things that matter, and who is persecuted, most awfully persecuted, by a harsh, cruel world that does not understand nor accept his genius. And we have more confessional works, short little statements of, if they were pop albums, ‘how I’m feeling now.’ And we even have broad satire — although Spender, like me, is less convinced by the quality of this kind of thing. (Spender does like one satiric effort of Shelley’s to mock Wordsworth.)

Even Spender himself is in two minds on Shelley. His poetry is, Spender says, often sketched out, unfinished. Shelley was so eager to see his own work in print, Spender writes, that he never concluded anything, never mulled it over or let it sit or polished. The poet was possibly so able — capable of writing so easily and so naturally — that he never had to work at his compositions, to make his metaphors concrete and unmixed, to end his poems well and not hysterically, and so on.

All of these are bugbears of Spender’s. But when I read the sections of Shelley’s poesy that Spender quotes as examples of his laziness, of the bad craftsmanship that clogs up the collected works, I must admit I don’t think them bad or lazy or foolish. I simply see the literary mind of another era, a mind expressing thoughts that are not mine.