Reading and Studying Literature
Florafoza
Shelley_chapter2_part2.pptxChapter 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley: Inner and Outer Lives by Richard Allen and Clare Spencer
Arab Open University/Kuwait Branch
Shelley: the Political radical– this political persona came to dominate the poet’s reputation in the 20th century, replacing the Victorian mythological version.
In his article, The socialist Review, Paul Foot, a journalist& Shelley scholar, depicts Shelley as one who “developed a passionate hatred and contempt for the class society in which he found himself and wrote ‘diatribe[s] against the social order.” pp 52 Discuss the image of Shelley depicted in these lines.
The Mask of Anarchy was written in broadsheet ballad form in September 1819, responding to a political event in Britain that year. Discuss political/economic context. pp 52
Britain in 1819 suffered an economic recession.
Civil unrest led to protests and demonstrations of laborers and workers at Peterloo Square asking for the parliament reform.
The army violently suppressed the demonstration-- a massacre ensued leaving 18 deaths and hundreds seriously injured.
Read quoted lines from the poem and discuss the revolutionary/political theme.
The persona’s voice angry, accusatory, protesting, and revolutionary.
The Political Radical persona: England in 1819. The poem was written in 1819 but remained unpublished during his lifetime. A sonnet: A poem of 14 lines, which typically involves a 'turn' from the argument of the first eight lines to the final six which generate a conclusion. English sonnets traditionally use the metre called iambic pentameter. The last two lines—the couplet– usually offer a resolution to the poem.
Activity 5, pp 53. Discuss
Sonnet England in 1819 breaks with convention in both its use of rhyme and its organizational structure.
The rhyme scheme abababcdcdccdd gives an emphatic tone.
The poem lacks an obvious turn, consisting not so much of an argument as of a list of those accused: the monarch; the unreformed parliament; the army; the law.
Their sense and punctuation drives us to add additional stresses, for example on the word 'mad‘.
The poet-figure is clearly an angry one, pouring scorn on the 'leechlike' politicians who govern the country, and bursting through the constraints of the sonnet form in a declamatory, public attack. But all this rule-breaking culminates in the expected final couplet whose vision of a 'glorious phantom' of freedom may well remind us of the other, airier Shelley.
Shelley’s depiction of English 1819 is realistic. Discuss historical context, pp 54
A more personal manifestation of Shelley's political self appears in the poem To the Lord Chancellor (composed in 1820 but published in 1839). The poem was originally titled, To Lxxd Exxxn. It was a direct attack addressed to Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor in the British Government from 1801-1807 Eldon was caricatured and cursed by Shelley also in The Mask of Anarchy.
Discuss Shelley’s biographical context before discussing the poem, pp 55.
To the Lord Chancellor opens by cursing the politician on behalf of the country to which he has allegedly done so much damage.
In the third and fourth stanzas, the address becomes more intimate: the curse is now that laid by 'a father', motivated by 'a parent's outraged love' (11. 13, 17).
The attack takes on an individual and literal force: the 'tyrant' Eldon had made a court judgment three years before which in an important way changed the tenor of Shelley's own life, depriving Shelley of his custody over his children.
The figure of the political radical fighting for freedom against the tyranny of the law is overlaid by a picture of a distraught father deprived of the rightful care of his children.
The persona of the bitter, despairing father is a version of himself which Shelley constructed well after the direct impact of the court hearing.
Reading the two poems, England in 1819 & To the Lord Chancellor in a biographical context may make them look less revolutionary than they initially seemed: the first ending on a note of evasion; the second motivated by a personal grudge.
The apparently spontaneous political anger of England in 1819 is in fact channeled through the distance of geographic exile; and in fact the poem was composed at a time when reactionary rather than revolutionary forces were in the ascendant in both Britain and the rest of Europe.
To the Lord Chancellor is also less spontaneous and ingenuous than it would seem, whether regarded as a primarily political or personal outburst since it was written 2.5 years after the court hearing.
*** the understanding of the politics of these poems is modified by a sense of their history: the history of composition& the history of constructing Shelley the Romantic hero.
Shelley: A witness to history. Shelley's political concerns take on a wider historical scope. In his approach to the lives of the great figures of the past, the Romantic writer and artist seemed to be in search of imaginative equivalents for the factual accounts being written by historians.
Ozymandias & Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon
Ozymandias (composed in 1817) takes its inspiration from Shelley's encounter with a giant piece of Egyptian sculpture, the head and shoulders of Emperor Ramses II. Discuss historical context pp 57
Activity 6, pp56. Discuss images of power/ the role of the poet-speaker/the functions of the poems after reading them.
Control &domination— emperors whose rules were marked by wealth, terror, and bloodshed: Ramses II and Napoleon. However in the poems, the image of power is linked to ruins, fragmentation, erasure, and past grandeur.
The first person speaker is a listener, who plays mainly a marginal /passive role—journalistic role.
Power is represented as both grand and limited on a wide historical view.
The poems themselves consciously record and comment upon two world-historical events - the collapse of empires. Shelley may have been suggesting in poetic terms that the political disruption in Europe in the years around 1820 was taking place in a historical period in which heroism and a search for ideals coexisted with crisis and the end of an era.
How do these historical poems represent the role of the poet?
Ozymandias
-It offers a detached and seemingly objective scrutiny rather than direct attack.
- The sonnet employs three nested levels of narration, with Ozymandias's own words nesting inside the traveler's story, which itself nests inside the words of the narrating I.
-The effect is one of distancing, with -unusually - no sense of Shelley himself as a dramatized presence in the poem.
Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon (composed in 1821)
- The narrator begins by challenging Earth, demanding to know if the world can continue now Napoleon is gone: 'canst thou move, Napoleon being dead?' (1. 8). both voices are more fully characterized. There is a hint of the insistent, rhetorical version of Shelley.
- But it is the voice of Earth which is invested with real vigor, its language taking on a remarkable energy in heavy rhymes and monosyllables.
-Earth speaks through metaphors of renewal, which might remind us of the qualified optimism of 'Ode to the West Wind': 'the quick spring like weeds out of the dead' (1. 24); 'by the spirit of the mighty dead / My heart grew warm' (11. 31-2).
- The words 'hopes' and 'glory' appear in the final line of this poem about a fallen dictator. So there is some space in this narrative for the idealism which underpins the radical politics that surface openly in poems like, Sonnet: England in 1819.
The agency of the poet in these two poems is largely unacknowledged: - The 'I' in 'Ozymandias' listens silently to the tale of fallen glory; and Earth shouts down the speaker's peremptory questions about Napoleon: 'It is thou who art overbold' (1. 19).
Shelley: A life in pursuit of the Ideal. Mont Blank (composed in 1816)
Discuss compositional context of the poem on pp 62.
Mont Blanc explores extremes in search of something beyond the ordinary, political or historical world: a pursuit of the ideal. The Sublime
The irony of the poem is that the imaginative endeavor of the archetypal Romantic quester may well be the end in itself: the ideal is not necessarily attained.
the sublime, a key concept for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking about the imagination. The sublime involves landscapes or situations which elicit from the observer a state of awareness combining fear, admiration and awe.
The first-person speaker of Mont Blanc is constructed as just such a sensitive observer: the raw experience of the mountains he evokes in the first three verse paragraphs prompts his mind to the insights which then dominate the final two sections.
Activity 7 & Activity 8– refer to book directly.
