Suzi Feay
His Words Among Mankind
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Percy Shelley for Our Times, edited Omar F Miranda and Kate Singer, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 304 pages, £85.
The Shelley Conference 2024, Keats House Hampstead, 28-29 June.
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This summer’s Shelley conference, following similar gatherings in 2017 and 2022 (the bicentenary of the poet’s death), hinged on the publication in 1824 of the first collected volume of his poems, edited in an act of love and mourning, by his devastated widow, Mary Shelley. The papers presented this year thus marked the movement from the life to the afterlife; from creation to reception.
The late and much-missed Michael O’Neill, whose poems have appeared in this magazine, was evoked several times over the course of the two days, with Francesco Marchionni’s session, ‘Shelleyan echoes in the poetry of Michael O’Neill’, devoted to him. ‘We can only hope he is “a portion of that loveliness”,’ affirmed Marchionni, quoting from ‘Adonais’, the elegy for John Keats.
The conference also launched the publication of a collection of essays, Percy Shelley for Our Times. The editors were present, as well as the doyenne of Shelley studies, Norma Crook, and other luminaries (though I was disappointed that the marvellously named Bysshe Inigo Coffey was not able to attend). Panel discussions were lively, while individual presentations ranged from the formal and poised to the conversational and lively. The weather was balmy, the atmosphere congenial and collegiate, the conversations in the garden fruitful.
Perhaps the most striking talk was by Katy Boyer of Pennsylvania State University, on ‘the Romantic corpse and its deathly affects’. This was a detailed, not to say gruesome account of the drowned body’s ‘afterlife’ in the ocean, bashed and battered by the boat’s debris, floating in a cloud of its own blood in the ‘drowning position’ and attracting a host of eager feeders. Among the papers playing close attention to the poems, it was striking that two speakers, Steve Tedeschi of the University of Alabama, and Lisa Vargo of the University of Saskatchewan, chose to focus on the unfinished and comparatively minor poem ‘The Zucca’, which appeared in the 1824 volume with Mary’s helpful gloss, ‘*pumpkin’). Mary’s work in establishing texts and editing from rough drafts have led to critical headaches ever since. More amusingly, Tedeschi wondered whether Shelley really had pilfered a plant (‘I bore it to my chamber’) – and was it even a pumpkin?
Crook’s own lively talk focused on Mary Shelley’s choices for the 1824 volume, from the mass of papers and publications left after the poet’s unexpected death. There were ‘not enough long, printable poems’, i.e. the ones that weren’t libellous or politically tricky, and in the 1824 volume she was concerned to demonstrate her late husband’s poetic versatility. Gary Kelly from the University of Alberta delivered a detailed and granular survey of the cheap editions of Shelley in circulation in the mid 19th century that cemented his reputation as a star of the Left. Dimitrios Psomiadis of the University of Thessaloniki reminded us, in his talk relating Shelley’s philosophical ideas to trends in 20th-century philosophy, how varied and broad were the intellectual pursuits of a young man who died just short of 30.
Though there were papers from several UK universities, the global sweep of contributors was striking. (Others came from Lisbon, Lagos, Italy, Madrid and New Zealand.) Shelley’s abundant translations from Greek, Italian, German, Spanish were another focus. Shelley it seems speaks to readers from all walks of life, backgrounds and nationalities. But who is this ‘Shelley for Our Times’?
First, a gripe. I’ve always found suspect the use of ‘Percy’, a name the poet rarely used in life. He was Bysshe to his family and Shelley to everyone else, including Mary. ‘Shelley and Mary’ used to be the acceptable and clear term until feminism recast the phrase, in some cases even reversing the emphasis to ‘Percy and Shelley’, in part, I’m convinced, because‘Percy’ sounds rather silly to modern ears. After the conference and essay collection, I have to concede that ‘Percy Shelley’, however awkward, is the agreed contemporary term.
The conference papers were necessarily more accessible than those in a volume designed to be pored over and digested at length. Part of the editors’ mission can be crudely stated as pitching a ‘woke Shelley’, a poet who destabilised gender norms and somehow anticipated the concept of non-binary; Shelley as ‘burgeoning disability theorist’, the ‘first celebrity vegan’, a rewilding ‘Black Shelley’ who intuited the operations of quantum physics, addressed transhumanism, and even (obliquely) had something to say about aboriginal land rights.
Naturally there is finger-wagging along with the approval: contributors castigate his ‘philhellenic bias’, ‘white privilege’, cis heteronormativity, classism and ‘homophobia’. A couple of the US contributors infer that Shelley was an aristocrat, thus failing to grasp nuances of the British class system; he and Lord Byron, both democrats, were keenly aware that they originated in different social strata and Shelley came to resent what he saw as Byron’s aloof condescension.
Then there are Shelley’s omissions. ‘For all his sensitivities and allyships, Shelley’s work is nevertheless haunted by his failure to address racial politics directly,’ i.e. slavery. The reader falls gratefully upon Benjamin Zephaniah’s heartfelt ‘I love the guy’, quoted here. Still, decades of feminist scolding about Shelley’s behaviour towards women at last seems to have abated; the contribution by co-editor Kate Singer even commends his ‘forward-thinking polyamory’.
Nikki Hessell’s thoughts on ‘Shelley, Treaty Making and Indigenous Poetry’ are engaging and well-argued, affirming Shelley’s significance in providing continuing inspiration to indigenous American poets. Mary Shelley’s posthumous titling of one of her husband’s fieriest sonnets, ‘England in 1819’ is ingeniously linked to that year’s treaties between settlers and indigenous peoples in Canada and the US, agreements that were to prove highly disadvantageous to the latter. Nothing fair or equitable, a raging Shelley could have warned them, could be expected from ‘princes, the dregs of their dull race… mud from a muddy spring’.
Julie A Carlson references the Shelley-inspired poem ‘barbara lee’ by the black radical poet Fred Moten, which opens with the famous line from the ‘Defence of Poetry’: ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ In 1996, Lee was the second black woman elected to Congress, and the only representative to vote against Bush’s military authorisation act in the wake of 9/11. Carlson coins the term Shelleean to connote this particular version of Shelley for our times.
James Chandler’s ‘Radical Suffering’ questions why Shelley is rarely given credit as a forerunner of Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence, given the strategy’s prominence in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, the poet’s furious condemnation of the Peterloo massacre. Alan Richardson’s ‘Loathsome Sympathy’ analyses the verse drama ‘The Cenci’ by means of 18th century theories of sympathy. The play’s villain, like Hannibal Lecter and Tony Soprano, exemplifies ‘dark empathy’, where an ability to understand the pain of others is twisted into the means to torment them further. Contemporary references such as this are one way to bring Shelley into ‘our times’. Contributors mention Pharrell Williams, George Monbiot and Trayvon Martin, and drop phrases such as ‘OK Boomer’ and ‘What’s love got to do with it?’
Writers regularly stray far from the poet’s actual words. Mary Fairclough’s ‘Action at a Distance’ moves from the early sonnets about disseminating radical texts via fire-balloons and messages in bottles of the Devon coast, to a discussion of ‘feminist scientific theory’ by Karen Barad in her 2007 book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. We have already come across Barad’s work in Kate Singer’s essay on ‘The Witch of Atlas’, ‘Creatrix Witches, Nonbinary Creatures and Shelleyan Transmedia’, in which her theory is explained thus: ‘Observation alters whether we see light as particles or as waves, and from this principle [Barad] derives her notion of “inter-action”, where materials are not separate and then put into relation but rather shown as always entangled until they are “cut” by apparatuses and discourses into various kinds of things, whether subject and object or other ontologies altogether.’ How ‘cuts’ differ from ‘thinking about stuff’ is not altogether clear to me.
Mathelinda Nabugodi’s ‘Shelley and the Discourses of Slavery’, having bewailed the poet’s failure explicitly to address the slave trade, considers his ‘Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love’. Nabugodi notes that the thrust of his argument in this intended preface to his translation of Plato’s ‘Symposium’ is ‘to explain why Greek men preferred to have sex with other men’. Shelley points out that ‘one half of the human race received the highest cultivation and refinement; whilst the other, as far as intellect is concerned, were educated as slaves…’ This tumbling together of categories to Nabugodi suggests that for Shelley ‘uncultivated and unrefined women, slaves and savages are all equally undesirable’ but surely Shelley is describing, not endorsing, the subjection of women and enslaved peoples.
Singer’s essay contrasts the creation of the Hermaphrodite by the Witch of Atlas, to Frankenstein’s creation of the monster, suggesting that as a ‘non-human being … who interrogates at once binarized sex, genderand racialized thingliness… [the Witch] delinks bodily sex from gender and heteronormative sexuality… offers more fluid bodily performances… that verge on what we might call nonbinary genders.’ Shelley’s first stanza states that the witch lives ‘on Atlas’ mountain’ but to Singer the title and brief mention amount to ‘the poem’s subsequent erasure of Africa’. And they say poetry makes nothing happen! Of the remainder of the book I merely append the sceptical queries in my notes: ‘Is the Witch a colonist? Is the Witch Black? Did Shelley “fear” anal sex? Is he writing about intersex people?’
To analyse Shelley by means of concepts he cannot possibly have anticipated is part of what makes him of and for our times, however grating designations of him as, for example, a ‘white cis male’ awash in European privilege may be. Carlson even makes the charming suggestion that breathing exercises might help if anyone is triggered ‘when confronting “race”, in Shelley, and in the classroom’. Here the work itself could act as both wound and salve: ‘Shelley’s poems excel in modulating breathing patterns, lulling through sound, regulating heartbeats and pulses’. Whether or not you buy the idea that his repeated image of ruins overgrown with vegetation (as in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome where much of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ was written) implies a belief in rewilding, these energetic essays move us with their insistence in the poet’s continued, indeed urgent relevance. Just as in that weekend in Hampstead in June, it’s a pleasure in itself to spend time with thinkers for whom Shelley really matters; who continue to blow his ‘Ashes and sparks, my words amongmankind!’ into a roaring blaze.
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Suzi Feay was literary editor of the Independent on Sunday and now writes for The Guardian, The Spectator, FT and TLS. Her YouTube channel, Suzi’s Book Bag, features regular author interviews. Recent Shelleyan activities include playing Leigh Hunt in the forthcoming short film about the poet, ‘Dream Boat’.
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