Intimations of Shelley's fallibilityBOOK REVIEW Shelley's poetry: The Divided Self, By Simon Haines.
ANU scholar Simon Haines's Shelley's Poetry: the Divided Self analyses the dichotomy in what Haines calls the "self" of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry the characteristic division between reason and passion, between language seen as a vehicle for ideas and ideas seen as the vehicle's driver. But the book presents the poetry very much as a whole. It traces the evolution of Shelley as a poet, both his poetical oeuvre and his developing, yet overall remarkably unchanging, view of poetry between the age of 18 and his death in 1822 at 30. Shelley's view of poetry, described by Haines as "that overprotected child", oscillated between two apparently opposed yet connected attitudes summed up in the book as "utilitarian" and "expressionist". For Shelley, poetry was either the servant of powerful ideas, which could "improve the masses", or an "outlet" for "all but uncontrollable emotions". Haines is concerned primarily with Shelley's poems, rather than his poetics, and the book maintains a fairly rigorous separation between the two. In doing so, it throws down the gauntlet to critics from Coleridge to Harold Bloom, "referentialists" in Haines's terms, who have treated Shelley's poetry as the key to events in his life (on the biographical readings) or to transcendent political, aesthetic or religious ideas (on "symbolist" accounts). Instead of this one-way assimilation of the poetry to Shelley's philosophy or "life-experiences", Haines proposes a very different relationship between the poetry and Shelley's life, that of a close analogy. He asks us to consider the possibility that "poems" and "passages of poetry" in general are like "selves" and "passages of a life", in that we ask ourselves similar questions about each: is the thought of the poem "wise", "simple-minded", "afflicted"? Haines sees poetry as a form of thinking in its own right, a thinking specifically about lives. In the spirit of Shelley's contemporaries, Keats and William Hazlitt, he discerns a particular potential for the dramatic imagination in poetry, including lyrical poetry, as much as in the novel, short story or drama. While Haines resists collapsing Shelley's poems into philosophical or biographical systems of reference, he draws illuminating parallels between Shelley's poetic self and his views of literature, art and individual human beings. The self or "cast of mind" that Haines derives from Shelley's poems is one that turns consistently away from human and other particulars and towards abstractions and ideals. An unpleasant trait evident in Shelley's letters is his disdain for what he calls "the mob". On his travels in Europe the spectacle of ordinary people routinely struck him as "disgusting". In his reading of Shelley's major poem Prometheus Unbound, Haines makes a case for regarding the poem as an idealistic projection that never engages with the lives of the individuals whose lot it claims to want to improve. The darker side of the poem's vision of mass liberation, on Haines's account, is the distaste, even revulsion, for people which also comes to the fore in Shelley's last poem The Triumph of Life. Haines provides a fascinating glimpse of what might be termed the proto-decadent poetry of this last phase of Shelley's life - poetry whose pessimistic vision of death-in-life was paradoxically more enlivened and vivid than any its author had written before. Haines also traces in Shelley's last writings the beginnings of a sense of his own fallibility, which could have yielded a different kind of poetry. While critical of Shelley's poetry, Haines shows the interrelatedness of its strengths and weaknesses. Analysing a key moment in Prometheus Unbound where the poet is figured as a visionary, Haines writes: "The insistent rhymed octosyllabics [. . .] lend their characteristic emphasis to the simple, haunting image of lake, sun, ivy, bees (little suns in the dark ivy), and watching poet, all captured in a day-long moment. The scene has the spiritual presence, the immanence, to be found only in Shelley's best poetry. [. . .] Perhaps to cavil at these lines is perverse: but is it not also typical of Shelley that we are left in the end outside the poet's vision; that we watch him, not the poem created "from" these things?" At the end of Haines's book we are left not only watching the vulnerable self of the poetry, but watching beyond it with it as well. Mary Besemeres | |