NON– F I CTI ON

Being Shelley The Poet’s Search for Himself

Ann Wroe Jonathan Cape/ 464pp. / £25

Review by Ross Wilson

IMMANUELKant, who is briefly mentioned as a “sage” halfway through Shelley’s unfinished poem ‘The Triumph of Life’, described his philosophy as the attempt to answer three questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? Late in his career, Kant added a fourth, under which these three questions were to be comprehended: What is man? Shelley was obsessed with a similar set of concerns: “whence I came, and where I am, and why”. As for Kant, Shelley saw these challenges as compellingly pointing to another, more fundamental problem: What is a poet? It is with this concern that Ann Wroe’s at once frustrating and engaging book deals. Wroe would, I imagine, be irritated were her work to end up on the ‘Biography’ shelf. That’s not to say that it doesn’t do decent service as a kind of imaginative life. Wroe demonstrates an enviable familiarity with pretty much everything Shelley committed to paper. There are also the requisite details of his doings, misdoings, and other quirks, including his attempts at electrifying his sisters, his veal-chop-munching lapses of strict vegetarianism, and his erotic shenanigans. Unlike a standard biography, though, the book is not arranged in anything like a chronological order. Instead, “its narrative track is the poet’s quest for truth through the steadily rarefying elements of earth, water, air and fire”. If this arrangement looks contrived, its explanation comes in the Coda – which picks up the threads of the book’s Prelude –with Wroe’s discussion of Trelawny’s supposed speech at Shelley’s cremation: “I restore to nature through fire the elements of which this man was composed, earth, air and water”. That innocuous reference –“this man” –is one side of the distinction at the heart of this book. Wroe has written a biography of sorts, but not, she claims, of Shelley the Man, but of Shelley the Poet. This distinction – Man/Poet –is one of two matching oppositions here, the other

being a rather general dichotomy between the earthly and the metaphysical. Of course, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that for Shelley, the poet was certainly a special type of man. The fourth spirit sent to succour the tortured Titan in Prometheus Unboundoffers one of the most important descriptions of poetic creation anywhere in Shelley’s writing; from his observation of “The yellow bees i’ the ivy-bloom”, the poet can, according to the spirit, create “Forms more real than living man, / Nurslings of immortality!”. Yet Wroe’s reader has to wait quite a long time until any very convincing account of these differences emerge, and the early part of the book in particular is punctuated by fairly unenlightening considerations of Shelley ‘as a poet’ or as one of his supposed poetic selves: ‘as Lionel’, ‘as Julian’, and so on. These flaws are unfortunate, not least because Wroe is capable of some very stimulating discussion of Shelley’s poems and, in particular, of his views on poetry. The book’s highlight is some imaginative but also seriously argued and detailed pages on the centrality of rhythm to Shelley’s theory, with their accompanying description of what this entailed for his method of composition. Perhaps Wroe’s bold statement that, for Shelley, “Sound itself carried sense” might have been built upon more extensively, but these pages certainly represent real insight. Likewise, the later sections of the book include some more extended consideration of the significance of Plato’s doctrine of the soul –especially as developed in his middleperiod dialogues, Phaedoand Phaedrus –to Shelley’s view of the relationship between aerial poet and earthly man. This discussion of Plato is welcome after an over-brisk treatment of Shelley’s reception of philosophy earlier on in the book. For a study which proclaims its concern with the poet’s

ODE ON THE DEATH OF SHELLEY

You set sail...acceding to the will of go, Stars appeared and night was mirrored in instinct, In instinct it rose and fell in endless flow: A bell in a storm whose ring from roar is indistinct. Floating, you walked ‘with inward glory crowned’ Through life’s games of grace and loss and strife, So restless and beautiful as you drowned Midway through the triumph of life. Was there anything your body missed As waves sprang up to bind you, As your soul and the world’s soul kissed Shores less real, tides more true? Story and teller, foot and print, must part; Rich and strange, you became the sea: its beats, your heart.

48 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007

Lucien Zell
metaphysics, too much is initially skipped over: Plato’s myth of the cave is insufficiently explored in its own right, in the context of the wider Platonic corpus and in connection with Shelley; Hume’s views on religion are cast as having been taken on wholesale; and, Shelley’s relation to British empiricism more broadly requires further treatment, despite Wroe’s inclusion of the poet’s important relation to late 18th and early 19th Century science. This omission is perhaps most crucial because Wroe’s central man/poet dichotomy is implicitly mapped onto a similar distinction between material world and metaphysical world. A full account of the nature and status of ‘metaphysics’ as such is a lot to ask, but what metaphysics is for Shelley – or for Wroe – never fully emerges. At its most vague, an interest in metaphysics seems to imply the desire for the triumph of mind over matter. But the relation of matter to mind, or to the immaterial more generally, is, as Wroe’s stated aim –“to reconstruct the world of a poet into which earthly life keeps intruding” – hints, one more complex than a wish for mind over matter would allow. It is not just that the metaphysical is opposed to the physical, that the poet is opposed to man, but rather that the one intrudes on the other, or, still more significantly, that as the philosopher-lover of Plato’s Phaedrus knows, earthly beauty is not just the rough copy of heavenly beauty but rather a participant in it. At her best, chiefly in the later discussions of Shelley’s Plato, Wroe also knows all this very well. There are moments, though, when the complexity of the relationship

ALMANDINE

Although she married twelve years after Keats died, Fanny Brawne wore the engagement ring he gave her until her death.

Since Louis hasn’t asked, I have not told. I am discreet — I clean it only when alone, rubbing the boxy beet

red stone into a dark mirror. Some law prohibits this: on the left hand, a wedding band; the right’s ring a promise

unfulfilled. Married, I am still engaged. I did not choose. Or that is not a ring there, but the past’s persisting bruise.

Carrie Etter

between metaphysical Shelley and Shelley in his “more materialist moods” is not adequately elaborated. An important instance of this is Wroe’s leap into the ideal during her reading of ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, Shelley’s response to Peterloo, the 1819 massacre of protestors for parliamentary reform in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester. The interest of this poem is precisely in its calibration of high ideals with the satisfaction of material needs. To the question “What art thou Freedom?”, the answer comes: “Thou art clothes, and

fire, and food / For the trampled multitude”. The most eloquent political wish, a 20th Century philosopher once claimed, is that no-one should go hungry anymore. Shelley’s insistence that the high ideal of freedom demands freedom from physical suffering is closed down too quickly by Wroe’s only comment on these lines: “Yet he meant to feed them also with visions of true, transcendent freedom, drop by insistent drop”. Wroe aims to shield herself at the outset from those who might complain that such a book is not about ‘real life’. Denouncers of ‘Romantic ideology’ are certainly to be resisted, and intimidation of metaphysical reflection in connection with Shelley’s poetry should not be sacrificed for the sake of lazily conceived ‘political’ readings. But something more than allusion to “true, transcendent freedom” is required; that is, a more thoroughgoing account of the way that the most earthly is attuned with the apparently most heavenly in Shelley’s poetry and thought. Shelley, Wroe informs us, thought Tasso’s claim for poets “proud, though sublime”: non c’e in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, che Dio ed il Poeta [There is none in the world that merits the name of creator, other than God and the Poet]. But is God, if He exists, in the world? Is the Poet, if He exists, in the world? This book is a suggestive, stupendously well-researched attempt to answer this question, although its answers, perhaps inevitably, are only partially satisfactory.

Ross Wilson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Cambridge Faculty of English