Classic Poem

The ideas of Wordsworth and of Coleridge about poetry have often been
discussed and are familiar. Those of Shelley are much less so, and in
his eloquent exposition of them there is a radiance which almost
conceals them from many readers. I wish, at the cost of all the
radiance, to try to see them and show them rather more distinctly. Even
if they had little value for the theory of poetry, they would still have
much as material for it, since they allow us to look into a poet's
experience in conceiving and composing. And, in addition, they throw
light on some of the chief characteristics of Shelley's own poetry.

His poems in their turn form one of the sources from which his ideas on
the subject may be gathered. We have also some remarks in his letters
and in prose pieces dealing with other topics. We have the prefaces to
those of his works which he himself published. And, lastly, there is the
Defence of Poetry. This essay was written in reply to an attack made
on contemporary verse by Shelley's friend Peacock,--not a favourable
specimen of Peacock's writing. The Defence, we can see, was hurriedly
composed, and it remains a fragment, being only the first of three
projected parts. It contains a good deal of historical matter, highly
interesting, but too extensive to be made use of here. Being polemical,
it no doubt exaggerates such of Shelley's views as collided with those
of his antagonist. But, besides being the only full expression of these
views, it is the most mature, for it was written within eighteen months
of his death. It appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth's
Prefaces or to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria; but there are a few
reminiscences of Sidney's Apology, which Shelley had read just before
he wrote his own Defence; and it shows, like much of his mature
poetry, how deeply he was influenced by the more imaginative dialogues
of Plato.


1.

Any one familiar with the manner in which Shelley in his verse
habitually represents the world could guess at his general view of
poetry. The world to him is a melancholy place, a 'dim vast vale of
tears,' illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but glorious
power. Nor is this power, as that favourite metaphor would imply, wholly
outside the world. It works within it as a soul contending with
obstruction and striving to penetrate and transform the whole mass. And
though the fulness of its glory is concealed, its nature is known in
outline. It is the realised perfection of everything good and beautiful
on earth; or, in other words, all such goodness and beauty is its
partial manifestation. 'All,' I say: for the splendour of nature, the
love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law,
the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art, the truths deformed by
superstitious religion,--all are equally operations or appearances of
the hidden power. It is of the first importance for the understanding of
Shelley to realise how strong in him is the sense and conviction of this
unity in life: it is one of his Platonic traits. The intellectual Beauty
of his Hymn is absolutely the same thing as the Liberty of his Ode,
the 'Great Spirit' of Love that he invokes to bring freedom to Naples,
the One which in Adonaïs he contrasts with the Many, the Spirit of
Nature of Queen Mab, and the Vision of Alastor and Epipsychidion.
The skylark of the famous stanzas is free from our sorrows, not because
it is below them, but because, as an embodiment of that perfection, it
knows the rapture of love without its satiety, and understands death as
we cannot. The voice of the mountain, if a whole nation could hear it
with the poet's ear, would 'repeal large codes of fraud and woe'; it is
the same voice as the reformer's and the martyr's. And in the far-off
day when the 'plastic stress' of this power has mastered the last
resistance and is all in all, outward nature, which now suffers with
man, will be redeemed with him, and man, in becoming politically free,
will become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then, poetry, as the
world now is, must be one of the voices of this power, or one tone of
its voice. To use the language so dear to Shelley, it is the revelation
of those eternal ideas which lie behind the many-coloured, ever-shifting
veil that we call reality or life. Or rather, it is one such revelation
among many.

When we turn to the Defence of Poetry we meet substantially the same
view. There is indeed a certain change; for Shelley is now
philosophising and writing prose, and he wishes not to sing from the
mid-sky, but, for a while at least, to argue with his friend on the
earth. Hence at first we hear nothing of that perfect power at the heart
of things, and poetry is considered as a creation rather than a
revelation. But for Shelley, we soon discover, this would be a false
antithesis. The poet creates, but this creation is no mere fancy of his;
it represents 'those forms which are common to universal nature and
existence,' and 'a poem is the very image of life expressed in its
eternal truth.' We notice, further, that the more voluntary and
conscious work of invention and execution is regarded as quite
subordinate in the creative process. In that process the mind, obedient
to an influence which it does not understand and cannot control, is
driven to produce images of perfection which rather form themselves in
it than are formed by it. The greatest stress is laid on this influence
or inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin of the whole
process lies in certain exceptional moments when visitations of thought
and feeling, elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but always
arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, reach the soul; that these
are, as it were, the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our
own; and that the province of the poet is to arrest these apparitions,
to veil them in language, to colour every other form he touches with
their evanescent hues, and so to 'redeem from decay the visitations of
the divinity in man.'

Even more decided is the emphasis laid on the unity of all the forms in
which the 'divinity' or ideal power thus attests its presence. Indeed,
throughout a large part of the essay, that 'Poetry' which Shelley is
defending is something very much wider than poetry in the usual sense.
The enemy he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its influence
steadily decline as civilisation advances, and that they are giving
place, and ought to give place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility.
His answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been, is, and
always will be, the prime source of everything that has intrinsic value
in life. Reasoning, he declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon
the products of imagination. Further, he holds that the predominance of
mere reasoning and mere utility has become in great part an evil; for
while it has accumulated masses of material goods and moral truths, we
distribute the goods iniquitously and fail to apply the truths, because,
for want of imagination, we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not
feel what we know. The 'Poetry' which he defends, therefore, is the
whole creative imagination with all its products. And these include not
merely literature in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied
to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts; and, finally,
all actions, inventions, institutions, and even ideas and moral
dispositions, which imagination brings into being in its effort to
satisfy the longing for perfection. Painters and musicians are poets.
Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is
much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented
the arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed, as
sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And
every one, Shelley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined
virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For
all these things come from imagination.

Shelley's exposition of this, which is probably the most original part
of his theory, is not very clear; but, if I understand his meaning, that
which he takes to happen in all these cases might be thus described. The
imagination--that is to say, the soul imagining--has before it, or feels
within it, something which, answering perfectly to its nature, fills it
with delight and with a desire to realise what delights it. This
something, for the sake of brevity, we may call an idea, so long as we
remember that it need not be distinctly imagined and that it is always
accompanied by emotion. The reason why such ideas delight the imagining
soul is that they are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own
perfection--of itself become perfect--in one aspect or another. These
aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life
and outward existence; and so the idea may be that of the perfect
harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of the perfect union of soul
with soul (love), or of the perfect order of certain social relations
or forces (a law or institution), or of the perfect adjustment of
intellectual elements (a truth); and so on. The formation and expression
of any such idea is thus the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while
at the same time (as we must add, to complete Shelley's thought) any
such idea is a gleam or apparition of the perfect Intellectual Beauty.

I choose this particular title of the hidden power or divinity in order
to point out (what the reader is left to observe for himself) that the
imaginative idea is always regarded by Shelley as beautiful. It is, for
example, desirable for itself and not merely as a means to a further
result; and it has the formal characters of beauty. For, as will have
been noticed in the instances given, it is always the image of an order,
or harmony, or unity in variety, of the elements concerned. Shelley
sometimes even speaks of their 'rhythm.' For example, he uses this word
in reference to an action; and I quote the passage because, though it
occurs at some distance from the exposition of his main view, it
illustrates it well. He is saying that the true poetry of Rome, unlike
that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems. 'The true poetry
of Rome lived in its institutions: for whatever of beautiful, true and
majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which
creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus; the death
of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their god-like state, of
the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with
Hannibal after the battle of Cannæ'--these he describes as 'a rhythm and
order in the shows of life,' an order not arranged with a view to
utility or outward result, but due to the imagination, which, 'beholding
the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own
idea.'


2.

If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the
poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls?
Not essentially in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry,
but in the kind of expression he gives to them. In so far as he is a
poet, his medium of expression, of course, is not virtue, or action, or
law; poetry is one of the acts. And, again, it differs from the rest,
because its particular vehicle is language. We have now to see,
therefore, what Shelley has to say of the form of poetry, and especially
of poetic language.

First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of
artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also
the most plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being
simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination;
whereas any more material medium has a nature of its own, and relations
to other things in the material world, and this nature and these
relations intervene between the artist's conception and his expression
of it in the medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that
Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as
compared with other arts. He forgets (if I may interpose a word of
criticism) that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain
advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the
inferiority which he notices. He would also have found it difficult to
show that language, on its physical side, is any more a product of
imagination than stone or pigments. And his idea that the medium in the
other arts is an obstacle intervening between conception and expression
is, to say the least, one-sided. A sculptor, painter, or musician, would
probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium that enable
him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the
vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not from
the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical. It is true, no
doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is
also true of language.

But to resume. Language, Shelley goes on to say, receives in poetry a
peculiar form. As it represents in its meaning a perfection which is
always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound,
is an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not
the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning.
For Shelley, however, this measured language is not of necessity
metrical. The order or measure may remain at the stage which it reaches
in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose language,
Shelley declares, is the most intense it is possible to conceive. It may
again advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient,
popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing much action.
But he will not have any new great poet tied down to it. It is not
essential, while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere accident of
poetry that its language is measured, nor does a delight in this measure
mean little. As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is
always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of
thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less
indispensable than their meaning to the communication of the influence
of poetry. 'Hence,' says Shelley, 'the vanity of translation: it were as
wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal
principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one
language into another the creations of a poet.' Strong words to come
from the translator of the Hymn to Mercury and of Agathon's speech in
the Symposium! And is not all that Shelley says of the difference
between measured and unrhythmical language applicable, at least in some
degree, to the difference between metrical and merely measured language?
Could he really have supposed that metre is no more than a
'convenience,' which contributes nothing of any account to the influence
of poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather point out how
surprising, at first sight, and how significant, is Shelley's insistence
on the importance of measure or rhythm. No one could assert more
absolutely than he the identity of the general substance of poetry with
that of moral life and action, of the other arts, and of the higher
kinds of philosophy. And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the
emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it)
is indispensable to the effect of poetry.

Shelley, however, nowhere considers this element more at length. He has
no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He
never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover. We
hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a
passage of Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he ramped
through the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower. When in his
letters he refers to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions
particular lines or