Michael O’Neill

The Marvellous Clouds: Reflections on the Prose Poetry of Woolf, Baudelaire and Williams

This essay explores the prose poem as practised by Virginia Woolf, Charles Baudelaire in Petits Poemes en prose, and William Carlos Williams in Spring and All and Kora in Hell. The section on Woolf argues that her novel or ‘playpoem’ The Waves illustrates the capacity of prose poetry to attune itself to moods. The section on Baudelaire’s prose poems argues that they reflect on the nature of their own discourse in a way that the prose poem seems peculiarly suited to doing. The section on Williams seeks to illustrate the individual ways in which in his work, as in that of Woolf and Baudelaire, the prose poem is a locus where new meaning is always sensed as ‘approaching.’

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetic Science: His Visionary Enterprise and the Crisis of Self-Consciousness

Argyros Protopapas builds carefully and intelligently on the work of various critics, including D. J. Hughes, Earl Wasserman, Timothy Webb, Isobel Armstrong, Kelvin Everest, Sharon Ruston, Jerrold ...

1810–1816: ‘Breathing Hatred to Government & Religion’

When Shelley went up to Oxford in October 1810, Timothy Shelley, who had accompanied his son, took him to the booksellers and printers, Slatter and Munday, and told them: ‘My son here has a literary turn; he is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.’1 Given the chance, most young writers are only too ready to rush into print; what is striking about Shelley is that he managed to persuade publishers to take on his work. By the time he came to Oxford he was already the author of two recently published works: a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi, and (with his sister, Elizabeth) a volume of bad poems, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. Another Gothic novel, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, was ‘almost if not entirely complete’2 and was published by Stockdale in December 1810, while, in his first term at Oxford, Shelley published a collection of poems, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. According to Hogg, his friend and unreliable though entertaining biographer, these poems began life as serious compositions, but Shelley was helped by Hogg to convert them into pastiche and attribute them to a mad washerwoman who had tried to assassinate George III.3 Swelling this list of the poet’s early compositions are The Wandering Jew (unpublished ‘in book form until the Shelley Society solemnly brought it forth in 1887’)4 and The Necessity of Atheism, a pamphlet which was to lead to the expulsion of Shelley and Hogg from Oxford.

1816–1818: ‘Truth’s Deathless Voice’

The year 1816 was a difficult but significant one in Shelley’s literary career. It ended traumatically with the suicides of Fanny Godwin and Harriet Shelley. It got under way with bad health, to which would be added disappointment at the reception of Alastor and disillusion with Godwin, intellectual guide turned importunate sponger. The combination of these difficulties must have made leaving England for Switzerland in May, with Mary and Claire Clairmont, a welcome change. Abroad, Shelley’s luck altered; he met and began a close if strained friendship with Byron. The encounter was crucial for both poets. Byron was the most celebrated author of his day; Shelley virtually unknown — a fact which goes some way towards explaining Shelley’s intermittent sense of creative inferiority to Byron. But both poets already knew something of one another’s work: ‘Shelley’s admiration for Byron’s poetry (according to Claire, he was “Byron-mad” in 1815) was to some extent reciprocated by Byron when he read Queen Mab in 1813 and Alastor in early 1816.’1 The same critic describes well the difference between the political vision of the two poets before their meeting, a difference which was to grow more complex after they had met.

1818–1819: ‘Beyond the Present & Tangible Object’

The England which Shelley left for good in 1818 underwent in that year a precarious and brief emergence from the revolutionary crisis of 1817. This short period of stability derived from several causes, chief of which was the bottoming-out of the post-war slump: the textile and iron-making factories of the North were again able to sell their goods. The government took credit to itself for the timely use of coercion, but, ‘It was only to be expected that a revolutionary movement, which had been called into being by the economic crisis, should not survive its cause’ (Halevy, p. 29). The hopes of reformers received a check; the campaign to widen the suffrage had yet to command widespread popular support. With the repealing of the suspension of habeas corpus in January 1818, the extremist tones of, say, Shelley’s sentence, ‘Our alternatives are a despotism, a revolution, or reform’, seemed less appropriate. Whilst the Whigs improved their number of seats in the general election of 1818, they did so by downgrading the issue of parliamentary reform and focusing on the government’s financial record.

Introduction: ‘Internal Powers’ and ‘External Influences’

No critical issue is more topical or vexed than the value of the contextual study of literature. In writing this volume on Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) for the Macmillan Literary Lives series, I find myself in a complicated position. On the one hand, I still hold the view (expressed elsewhere) that ‘substantiation of context can tell us only so much about why a poet produces a masterpiece’1 — or, indeed, whether what he produces is a masterpiece. In a previous book on Shelley (The Human Mind’s Imaginings, Oxford, 1989), which I regard the present study as complementing, I focus more on the verbal particulars that constitute Shelley’s literary achievement than on contextualist considerations. On the other hand, it is increasingly plain to me that extrinsic stresses and pressures (whether to do with a writer’s social or personal experience, or bound up with larger historical, intellectual and economic trends) exert an undeniable if complex influence on the creation of literature. In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1818–20) Shelley himself formulates incisively the nature of the relationship between a poet’s ‘internal powers’ and ‘external influences’: A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man’s mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, inanother, the creations, of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape. (PW, p. 206)

1819–1820: ‘The Torrent of My Indignation’

If after 1820 Shelley was disappointed by the reception given to his writings, this was in large part owing to the fate which befell his most serious efforts to win popularity. Chief among these was The Cenci. Shelley started to write this tragedy in May 1819, after seeing the supposed Guido Reni portrait of Beatrice Cenci in Rome. He reread a manuscript account of the history of the Cenci family which Mary had copied in 1818 and translated (the translation was first printed with the play in Mary’s edition of 1839). In late July1 Shelley wrote to Peacock about the play, asking him to ‘procure … its presentation at Covent Garden’ (Letters, II, p. 102). In the same letter Shelley expressed hope that Eliza O’Neill, a famous actress of the day admired by Shelley for her performance in Milman’s Fazio, would play the part of Beatrice and that Edmund Kean would play the part of Cenci. With some justification Shelley felt confident that the drama would be accepted; he believed that: as a composition it is certainly not inferior to any of the modern plays that have been acted, with the exception of Remorse, that the interest of its plot is incredibly greater & more real, & that there is nothing beyond what the multitude are contented to believe that they can understand, either in imagery opinion or sentiment. (Letters, II, p. 102)

1820–1822: ‘Where the Eternal are’

From 1820 to the end of Shelley’s life (July 1822) a complex of forces, both internal and external, contributes to the production of his poetry. With hindsight such forces may seem unignorably fateful, and there is a temptation to view Shelley’s last years as though they represent the unfolding of a predetermined plot. When a poet’s virtually final recorded line begins, “‘Then, what is Life?” I said’ (The Triumph of Life, 1. 544: quoted from PP), it can be difficult to resist the feeling that one is reading a poetic last testament. However, to see the concluding years as marked by a passage from hope to despair, revolutionary ardour to ultimate disillusion, is to simplify; such a narrative design may have its own satisfactions, but it ignores many elements that refuse to conform to it.