WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, GEORGE GORDON LORD BYRON, FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS, PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Walter Savage Landor possessed a powerful intellect deflected by few doubts. He is ice beside the turbulent spates and droughts of Coleridge. He saw clearly, even radically, in social terms, but never pretended to “vision.” To step from the quicksilver and quicksand of Coleridge into the calmed world of Landor is to move out of living dream and nightmare into a stable, artful or artificial world, in which a classical order displaces the shifting reality in which the poet lived. “Manners have changed, but hearts are yet / The same, and will be while they beat.”
The minor poet and man of literary fashion Aubrey de Vere called Landor “proud, not only of his style, but of the pains he took with it. That care, he said, should be only in part concealed; light touches of the chisel should remain on the marble.” His art does not conceal the fact that it is art, or that it is wrested from language and tradition. It displays skill. Limpidity contains even as it attests to the formal struggle. He is not unlike Ben Jonson among his predecessors, and Thom Gunn among his heirs. “What is it,” muses Coleridge, “that Mr Landor wants to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is he does not possess imagination in its highest form,—that of stamping il più nell’ uno.” Is Coleridge doing anything more than lamenting that Landor is not a Romantic? He’s right to say that in the poetry, “You have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness.” There is no sense of oeuvre, of a unified body of work, despite stylistic continuity from poem to poem and decade to decade of the poet’s work.
Landor is best known today for two or three lyrics and for Dickens’s genial caricature of him as Boythorn in Bleak House, where Mr. Jarndyce reflects, “There’s no simile for his lungs. Talking, laughing, or snoring, they make the beams of the house shake... But it is the inside of the man, the warm heart of the man, the passion of the man, the fresh blood of the man... that I speak of... His language is as sounding as his voice. He is always in extremes; perpetually in the superlative degree. In his condemnation he is all ferocity. You might suppose him to be an Ogre, from what he says; and I believe he has the reputation of one with some people.” The shorter poems, almost caustic in their reserve, seem the product of quite another sort of man; the long narratives entirely lack the vigor of the socially more taciturn and passionate Byron. Landor wore his Romanticism on his sleeve, reserving composure for his writing.
His large and once popular production of prose, Imaginary Conversations (1824, 1828, 1829), is now little read. His long poems, despite the enthusiasm of Southey, De Quincey, Shelley and others, are neglected. Posterity overlooks him, though a few of the best poets, Yeats, Pound and Robert Frost among them, steer by his lights. It is no wonder that he appealed to them. His is the most classical pen of his day: the remote past was ready and serviceable in the present. His radicalism has to do with roots, primarily Greek and Roman ones.
He was born at Ipsley Court, Warwickshire, in 1775. His mother was of an old family, his father a successful doctor. The fractious boy was withdrawn before being expelled from Rugby (before Dr. Arnold’s time), where he had excelled in classics and written fine Latin poems. He was rusticated from Trinity College, Oxford, where he had a reputation as a wild Jacobin. His active romantic life soon got under way and provided him with pretexts for poems. He prefigures Robert Graves, though he never had the challenge of a Laura Riding, or a White or a Dark Goddess. His libido did not require theory to justify its waywardness. It certainly did not seek out among its objects an intellectual equal.
He suppressed his first book, Poems (1795), in part for its simplistic and fashionable political enthusiasms. The first poem in the collection declares his settled literary passion for Sappho, Anacreon, Ovid and Catullus. They remain guides. Gebir: A Poem in Seven Books (1798, Latin translation by himself 1803) and Poetry by the Author of Gebir (1802) gained him the admiration of a few contemporaries but hardly a readership. In 1805 his father died and he came into the family estate. He made Southey’s acquaintance in Bristol in 1808. Later in life he met the leading writers of the day, but Southey remained his closest literary friend, even the Southey who sold out to journalism and whom Hazlitt regarded as a renegade.
He married in 1811 and spent much of the rest of his life in flight from this unfortunate match. Count Julian, an undramatic tragedy, appeared in 1812. In 1814 he left England for eighteen years, spending much of that time in Italy. The historical trilogy Andrea of Hungary, Giovana of Naples and Fra Rupert occupied him until around 1840. Publication of the two volumes of Hellenics (1846, 1847), The Italics (1848), The Last Fruit off an Old Tree (1853)—perhaps his best book—and his Heroic Idyls (1863), including Latin poems, complete his bulky, uneven output. A few fine poems appeared in this last book, notably “Ye who have toil’d,” which proves that his senility was not so complete as some critics suggest. He died in Florence in 1864. His long life may or may not have been largely happy, but there is intellectual and temperamental consistency in it, from his troubles at Rugby through his polemical activities on a larger social stage.
The poetry, too, has consistency. If we describe him as a neoclassicist, it is not to associate him with the Augustans but to distinguish essential parts of him from the Romantics. His intense, unquestioning commitment to poetry, his belief that the poet is by nature more alive than other men, his often careless and insensitive enthusiasms, set him among the Romantics. So does an occasional sentimentality, his emotive intent. Yet his program was distinct from theirs from the outset.
Gebir is a heroic poem and a political allegory in blank verse. It tells the story of two brothers. Gebir is prince and conqueror, his conquests stayed by love, his life destroyed by treachery. Tamar is a pastoral figure who wins the love of a sea nymph and is transported beyond the world of mortals. Gebir was not a poem expecting an audience. It confronts rather than invites readers; the challenge is accepted by few today. Superbly crafted, it is deliberate and cold in execution, the action slow, Miltonic, as of monumental figures in a land of heavy gravity. Milton deals with huge Christian themes on his large canvas; Landor projects the intimate dynamics of love and betrayal. Anthologists rescue choice passages but rarely the poem itself. Much later Landor addressed to reluctant readers his excellent “Apology for Gebir.”
Throughout his career he produced poems that related to it in form and theme, among them “Crysaor” and “The Phocaeans.” The plays and “scenes” and his historical trilogy share the large faults and local virtues of Gebir. Landor’s penchant for remote events to illuminate present social and political problems was artistically misjudged, imposing anachronism and distortion on subject matter. The neoclassicist resembles in some ways a late medieval allegorist adjusting a subject on a Procrustean bed. He commands long forms in intellectual rather than imaginative ways. Landor the poet is visible in certain passages, where he seems to congratulate himself on his ambitious enterprise.
Better to turn to the shorter poems and lyrics. They are remote, but in another way. In the Hellenics his classical imagination proves Greek rather than Roman, despite his skill in Latin versification and his debts to Ovid and Catullus. In “On Classick and Romantick” he writes,
Abstemious were the Greeks; they never strove
To look so fierce; their muses were sedate,
Never obstreperous: you heard no breath
Outside the flute; each sound ran clear within.
When he’s abstemious, his lyric and elegiac art achieves such distillation. He contains and generalizes his subject, whether landscape or images of human perfection or relationship. Measure, balance, fidelity and form are the classical qualities he pursues. Here is “Dirce”:
Stand close around, ye Stygian set,
With Dirce in one boat conveyed!
Or Charon, seeing, may forget
That he is old and she a shade.
This, by the author of Gebir: the contrast exemplifies the larger paradox of his imagination. Romantic and classicist, radical and conservative coexist, producing divergent voices. In a poem such as “Fiesolan Idyl” Landor writes with emancipated, guiltless sensuality, even sexuality. His style when it refines also intensifies. He is among the most quietly sensuous of English poets. Were our age not so unbuttoned, this part of his poetry would have a devoted readership. Unlike Burns, he never explores the senses for effect. They open into relationship.
In Hellenics the verse has some of the plainness of Catullus. The poems to Ianthe and Rose Aylmer are among the finest lyrics in the language. Landor was alive to diction, if not register, in his language. The short poems conform to a single plan and tone. It may not be the language people actually speak, but we instantly recognize it, just as Ben Jonson would have done. Such language does not date: secure within tradition, it is timeless, which means also that it is static. His passion ends in “a night of memories and of sighs.”
The Greek Anthology, with themes of love and the erosions of time, spoke intimately to him. His verse learns thrift from the short Greek poems. It can be as devastating in epigrammatic lampoon as in sustained lyrics. How can so few words carry so much moral weight, like an ant shouldering a boulder? His much anthologized “I strove with none” is an example: a biography in four lines, with a moral asperity that a lesser author would dissipate over several stanzas. The fact that Landor’s themes are age-old and commonplace does not render them less true. His forms, too, are traditional. His originality is in the fact that he uses them, and uses them so well, in the nineteenth century. One can be an “innovator,” as the American poet Robert Pinsky demonstrates in his account of Landor’s poetry, by reviving, adapting and developing traditional forms, quite as much as by invention. His program guarantees against excess, untruth, treacherous experiment. After all, “Thoughts when they’re weakest take the longest flights, / And tempt the wintry seas in darkest nights.”
Not least among Landor’s poems are those addressed to members of his family (for example, the excellent “To My Child Carlino”), to his friends (Wordsworth, Browning, Dickens and others) and to poets he admired but never met (Keats, Burns). They observe life and literature judiciously, they praise, celebrate, advise. To Browning he writes, as of himself:
There is delight in singing, though none hear
Beside the singer: and there is delight
In praising, though the praiser sit alone
And see the prais’d far off him, far above.
“Landor,” says Pinsky, “not only wrote well, but he also had a peculiar, extreme concern for the idea of writing well, and this concern modified every subject he touched.” He places Landor exactly: “Landor’s career seems especially pertinent to the definition of two kinds of poetry: poetry which emphasises the discovery of content”—as Wordsworth’s does—“and poetry which emphasises the discovery of tone.” If we probe a lyric by Landor, we may find that its effect is well in excess of its “content,” that the experience of it flees from analysis. It is not that the poems lack meaning, but the meaning is largely effect, a product of tone.
Landor has left his impression on other poets. Later in his century Swinburne and Hopkins read him attentively. Pound is his most eloquent modern champion. If Pound makes excessive claims for him, they have helped to generate new interest in a writer who brought into English poetry qualities—local rather than fundamental or formal—that were tonic in his time and remain so in ours.
Byron is a different nature: he “discovers content.” He also discovers a range of tones. Yet he was not content with what he did. He wrote to his publisher, John Murray, in 1820: “All of us—Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, I—are all in the wrong... we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself... and that the present and next generations will finally be of this opinion... I took Moore’s poems and my own, and some others, and went over them side by side with Pope’s, and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been) and mortified at the ineffable distance in point of sense, harmony, effect, and even Imagination, passion and Invention, between the little Queen Anne’s Man, and us of the Lower Empire.” Byron as usual is direct and trenchant. He might have traced the decline in detail down a century, through Thomson’s labored nature, Cowper’s lax blank-verse Homer, Crabbe’s prosaic couplets. Had he done so he would have noted a specific gain—the development of distinctive human voices, individual tones. The loss, the change, for good or ill, was decisive. So decisive that for many readers today the bulk of the eighteenth century remains terra incognita. It demands an effort they are reluctant to make, an effort of construction; and it posits a social culture and a discipline that poets no longer value.
Notably absent from Byron’s list of poets is Coleridge, who remarked of Byron in Table Talk: “It seems to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron’s verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist in rerum naturâ?” There is a kind of legitimate depravity in Pope; he observes so skillfully the rules of the age that he takes command of them. Byron is depraved on his own terms, like Auden, who admires him, and with his “very great intellectual power” he makes great art of his waywardness, yet an art confined within its own borders. Pope’s is a social, “universal” voice; Byron in his mature poetry establishes intimate complicity with a sympathetic reader and leads each of us individually into his zones of depravity, like a schoolboy taking us behind a shed to show us something delicious but not altogether proper in the adult world. His wickedness is beguiling—and constraining. Coleridge laments the failure of Byron’s “art of versification,” yet he praises the Don Juan Lambro passages as “the best, that is, the most individual, thing in all I know of Lord B.’s works. The festal abandonment puts one in mind of Nicholas Poussin’s pictures.” His enticing “festal abandonment” is compared not to music or dance but to the most sensuous and suggestive work of a great graphic artist. Here we have a measure of the distance from Pope: Byron is interested in setting and in scene as presentation, not moral representation. He is less interested in abstract qualities, more in textures, scents, actualities.
We can acknowledge from the outset that there is a tawdry excess in much of Byron, a satirist’s knack of simplifying for effect, but only sporadic satirical consistency. “Byron knew and regretted the colossal vulgarity, which he shrouded by a cloak of aloof grandeur,” Robert Graves suggests. “It was a studious vulgarity: cosmetics and curl papers tended his elegant beauty; an ingenious, though synthetic, verse technique smoothed his cynical Spenserian stanzas. But he had unexpectedly come into a peerage and an estate while still ‘wee Georgie Gordon with the feetsies’—whom his hysterical and unladylike mother used to send limping round the corner from her cheap Aberdeen lodgings to buy two-penny-worth of ‘blue ruin’; and whom, at the age of nine, a nymphomaniac Calvinist housemaid had violently debauched.” “Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person,” Shelley wrote to the novelist (and poet) Thomas Love Peacock, “and, as such, is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as a hatter?”
Already, inevitably, the poet’s life obtrudes, the legend exaggerated but always with more fact in it than most legends contain. His is the British Romanticism that was exported to Europe where the Lake poets are all but unknown and Burns, Sir Walter Scott (as novelist) and Byron constitute our Romantic tradition. With Scott he shares narrative skills and a firm sense of audience and how to exploit it. With Burns he shares verbal directness—in poems such as “To Thomas More” and “So, we’ll go no more a’ roving”—and certain political sympathies: peer and plowman were in different centuries radicals. All three were sons of Scotland. “Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; / Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey,” Byron says. He has the alternative measure of his century.
He divides poetry readers into those who love and those who despise him. W. H. Auden, after describing the peculiar and extraordinary life, then scales him down, reassuring us, “He had no unusual emotional or intellectual vision, and his distinctive contribution to English poetry was to be, not the defiant thunder of a rebel angel, but the speaking voice of the tolerant man-about-town.” Ford doubted whether Byron had an intellect at all and knew he had no heart (a fact that doesn’t trouble Auden). The word “tolerant” is at least debatable in so thorough-going an egotist. Auden proposes Byron as a model for those young poets, presumably without vision, who wish to write with “speed, wit, and moral seriousness combined with lack of pulpit pomposity.” Ford disagrees: “To an Anglo Saxon concerned for his poetry and his language, both verse and language of Byron are odious.” He is repelled by the vulgarity—not the honest vulgarity of a writer like Burns, but a profound vulgarity of sensibility, a moral dishonesty that is part and parcel of Byron’s heartlessness. Byron is, certainly, tactless, but not wholly undiscriminating. His attacks on Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats are more than the effusions of prejudice, even if they are less than the fruit of cool judgment. He hated Southey’s change from radical to Tory: it condemned the older poet tout court. But Byron was too young to have experienced the euphoria and subsequent trauma of betrayal that was the French Revolution. His politics were not lived until he went to Greece to fight for freedom and died. Those of a Whig aristocrat, his politics were more the product of certain social aversions and personal pique than of pondered experience: politics from the outside. He chose Greece as his theater of political action, not Britain. His civic heart beat more vigorously abroad than at home.
He was possessive of Greece. When another popular poet of the time, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, wrote of Greece—her poems often accessed historical material, applying to it familiar sentimental templates—he attacked her. Her kind of vulgarity was an extreme form of his: child of a successful Irish merchant, not a peer, she looked up—and down—the social ladder and caught precisely the middle voice, without even a hint of dissent. Born in 1793, she married and had five sons, and was abandoned. Even so she wrote as if God were in His heaven. She wrote for a living and therefore wrote to sell. When William Rossetti pilloried her “cloying flow of right-minded perceptions of moral and material beauty,” he praised the very skills in packaging popular sentiment that made her such a best-seller. Byron’s “flow” was deliberately of “wrong-minded perceptions,” almost as deliberate as her establishment ventriloquism. Why mention her in the same breath as Byron? Because they both pursue, in different ways, parallel strategies in capturing readers, and establishing a market. Her development of the figure of long-suffering, pure, intelligent and sensitive woman helped determine Victorian stereotypes. The Hemans heroine and the Byronic hero are, in a sense, complementary figures—caricatures, simplifications for an audience hungry for simplification and easy uplift or ready entertainment. She remained a wholesome cultural-spiritual fixture well after her death in 1835, and throughout the Victorian age. If we could take Mrs. Hemans seriously—her most famous poem “The Homes of England” has been forever stolen from her by Noël Coward’s famous parody—we would have to read her in the light of her life quite as much as we do Byron.
For biography is a necessary concern when we approach Byron’s verse. His most original invention is the Byronic hero, and we must determine the degree to which this creature, his attitudes and gestures, correspond with Byron, and to what degree they amount to a persona, a consistent mask from behind which he enacts his views or discredits the views of others.
He was born with an ill-formed foot in London in 1788, son of a profligate Scottish aristocrat and officer and an emotionally volatile and unstable heiress. His parents separated in 1790, when Byron’s father had spent most of his wife’s fortune. The son idealized his absent father, a violent and—like his son—an egotistical man. He also suffered from a possessive and dubious Calvinist nanny who filled him with forebodings about damnation and indications of how best to make his way to hell.
He came obliquely into the family title in 1798, went to Harrow and then in 1805 to Trinity College, Cambridge. His disability made him aggressively eager to excel in anything that tested courage and prowess, and he was a man of enormous energy in love and other exercises. At Cambridge he published his first book, Fugitive Pieces (1806), and then republished it the next year in two revised, enlarged and retitled versions. Hardly a remarkable debut, it did not merit the contempt it received in 1808 in the Edinburgh Review. The attack was productive: in 1809 appeared Byron’s first substantial poem, his satire English Bards and Scots Reviewers, over a thousand lines of invective and justification, in which the poet assumes a superior tone belied by the length and the obvious rancor of his piece. He connects his name with those of Pope, his chief idol, and Dryden. In defending himself he attacks everyone else in sight, including Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The poem, a rhetorical essay, evinces scant justice either to his own work or to that of his contemporaries.
He left England and spent the next two years in Portugal, Spain, Greece and the Levant. He swam the Hellespont, addressing wry verses to Leander. And he started composing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a fictionalized account of his travels. The narrator is not the emphatic Byron known to his foes and friends, but the kind of man he liked to imagine himself to be: morose, enigmatic, bitter, dashing, cultured, with certain social ideals and an eye for the picturesque. If he were less nebulous he would be fascinating. He travels and reflects. More substantial than his reflections is the question: Why is he so gloomy? Byron was not quick to deny that Childe Harold and George Gordon were the same chap. Was this his darker side? Inspired by his nurse’s Calvinism, perhaps, or his love for his half sister? In fact the narrator isn’t Byron. He is an early manifestation of the Byronic hero. The poem struggles toward dramatic monologue. Lack of design, a chronicle progression, a unity depending entirely on the narrator, point toward the picaresque mode of Don Juan, his masterpiece.
He returned to England in 1811 to find his finances in disrepair. To repair them he wrote. Books One and Two of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage appeared in 1812. To his publisher’s delight Byron was “famous overnight,” outselling Murray’s other authors, who included Jane Austen, George Crabbe and George Borrow. Byron began to capitalize on his success, writing a series of verse narratives, popular adventure novellas. The Giaour (1813) went into eight editions in one year. There were The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, The Prisoner of Chillon and others. These works are poems by virtue of the fact that they are in efficient verse. They do not interpret experience but escape into adventure, with bold characterization (the heroes usually have a secret and undergo hardship), some violence and romance. Money and fame found him out. Fortunately there was more to him than verse adventurer, things beyond picaresque epic and satire, narrative and squib. He wrote lyrics, the visionary “The Dream,” elegies and plays. His best dramas—which are not his best work—are Cain (in particular), Manfred and Sardanapalus.
Following in his father’s footsteps, he married an heiress in 1815. He left her the next year for reasons never satisfactorily explained, after the birth of a daughter. There was a scandal and the poet responded to what he took to be social hypocrisy. He left England for Italy and never returned. But his writing continued to prosper his publisher and him. The third and fourth books of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816, 1818) were successful. The Lament of Tasso, rather less so, was a dramatic monologue spoken by Tasso to his beloved, in prison. In a similar spirit he later put words about Italian independence into the mouth of Dante. In 1818 he began the first five of the sixteen books of the unfinished Don Juan and, as if to warm up for that task, composed Beppo. He became friendly with the Shelleys and in 1822 joined with Leigh Hunt—Skimpole in Dickens’s Bleak House—and Hunt’s brother to produce The Liberal, a periodical that ran for four issues and carried his most famous attack on Southey and his most effective personal satire, The Vision of Judgment. In 1824 he joined the Greek army in the struggle for independence from the Turks. He died of a fever in Missolonghi the same year.
Byron hated “sentimental and sensibilitous” people. His dismissal of Keats is only the most damaging aspect of this hatred, which became an assertive, sometimes aggressive expression of virility in his work, masking his sexual ambivalences. Everywhere we sense an impetuous, unresting nature, a personal amorality of a sort that became more common, if less macho and exuberant, later in the century: “The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain.” The spirit of Lord Rochester lives, not only in Byron’s moral outlook but in the way he stresses “Nothing,” and echoes Ecclesiastes in “Vanity of vanities.” The chief difference between the two peers is intellectual. Rochester had ideas and developed them; Byron had opinions and prejudices that, as Auden suggests, were commonplace, certainly not “unusual,” and expressed them vehemently.
Among the shorter poems, some of the passionate “Hebrew Melodies” excel as lyrics with, at times, balladic power. There are passages in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that anthologists cannot resist—for example, “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean” from Canto IV. Those entrusted with selecting from Byron face a difficult choice. Swinburne includes big chunks; Arnold, principally purple passages. Swinburne chooses for sonority and extension, Arnold for shape and content. Swinburne is just to the poet: Byron’s effects are cumulative. Arnold is just to the poetry, refining a sharper formal intelligence out of the formal extension of the work. Local felicities become lyrical, but divorced from their narrative context they lose the poet’s intent.
Byron conceived both Beppo and Don Juan after reading a pseudo-Romantic Arthurian poem by John Hookham Frere, a collaborator of Murray’s in the Quarterly Review. He borrowed Frere’s ottava rima—he had used it before, but never in satirical spirit—and his poetic plan was to have no plan, to write an open-ended, picaresque work, reminiscent in some ways of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In Beppo Byron mastered the measure; in Don Juan he mastered a digressive manner. He chose for his mise-en-scène nothing less than the entire world.
Don Juan, the great Italian poet Eugenio Montale says, is Byron’s only readable poem. It records six major and several lesser adventures of the hero, a passive man whom circumstances and women draw into love and risk. Adventure begins in the boudoir of Donna Julia in Spain, and includes cannibalism in an open boat, and the famous love affair with Haidée, the high point of Byron’s art. The amusing scenes in Turkey, where Juan is sold into slavery and encounters the sexually voracious Sultana Gulbayes (“Christian, canst thou love?”) give way to the Russian court and Catherine II’s colorfully original sexual inclinations. The poem does not end: it is discontinued, in the midst of Juan’s diplomatic mission to England, where three ladies pursue him. Amid satire and frivolity are passages of impassioned writing, especially in the third canto, where Byron writes “The Isles of Greece,” declaring his commitment to Greek liberty.
The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persian’s grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
It rises to passion, but ends with a vision, not of popular freedom, but of a hero.
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
Our virgins dance beneath the shade—
I see their glorious black eyes shine;
But gazing on each glowing maid,
My own the burning tear-drop laves,
To think such breasts must suckle slaves.
Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
There, swan-like, let me sing and die:
A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine—
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!
The Don Juan narrator is his artistic triumph, a voice urbane and amusing, of a droll cynic who can speak with tact and delicacy, as in the Haidée episode, but is also capable of virulence, good humor, mischief, bathos and vulgarity. Byron deflates many portentous stanzas with an absurd rhyme, the silliest including “Euxine” / “pukes in” and “intellectual” / “hen-pecked you all.” The narrator can talk on any subject; he indulges digression more and more as the poem proceeds, and responds in whatever way a subject requires. He is responsible for the poem’s limitations as well. What Landor wrote of Byron’s work as a whole touches Don Juan particularly. Byron “possesses the soul of poetry, which is energy; but he wants that ideal beauty which is the sublimer emanation, I will not say of the real, for this is the more real of the two, but of that which is ordinarily subject to the senses.” In short, he provides progression without unity. Each incident stands isolated from the one before. There are parallels and contrasts, but as often as not they’re accidental. Picaresque writing tends to forget one adventure as soon as another begins.
From the outset tone proves a problem. “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ’Tis that I may not weep...” Yet there is little in the poem for tears. Serious subjects are seriously treated—the question of Greek freedom, for example. Byron calls the poem “Epic Satire,” but comedy more than satire fills it, no firm perspective is established, no consistent target assaulted. Wellington and the court come in for effective direct attack at various points; critics find other correspondences. But Byron switches political satire on and off as the spirit moves him. He abandons the formal singularity of his master Pope. He laughs at his manipulation of language more often than he chastises particular evils. In scope, the epic includes Europe, Africa and Asia Minor in the action. But it’s epic without gods. It has elements of satire, but satire without firm design.
The theme of Don Juan is reversal or transformation—metamorphosis—in language and action, a movement from what seems to what is. At the outset, Juan’s parents appear as paragons of beauty and virtue. Each is undermined with telling details, until we know Donna Inez to be a doting hypocrite (based on Byron’s mother). Every possible relationship is thwarted, every remote fear actualized. The moral of the poem, if it has one, seems to be the need to break down self-deception: Byron betrays us, too, time after time, as Sterne does, in what we desire from the narrative.
We lose interest in the story after the first five books and concentrate on sexual, alimentary and travel images, on incident and digression, and finally on the narrator himself. He takes over from his hero, reminisces, cajoles, jests. The poem becomes journal more than narrative; the increasing casualness of the author after the relative narrative wholeness of the early books underlies the absence of overall conception. Don Juan loses momentum in proportion as the narrator plays with our expectations. His cleverness becomes mannerism, repetitious and willful. “My tendency is to philosophise / On most things, from a tyrant to a tree.”
Byron’s creative life divides into two periods: 1805–17 (before Beppo) and 1817–24 (after Beppo). When he discovered a new use for ottava rima he found his vehicle. He could write “moral satire” without a morality of his own. He became a judge working, as it were, without laws, attacking hypocrisy but not from a perspective of self-knowledge or higher knowledge. The savvy tone invites our complicity and stands in for deeper integrity. The language is efficient without delicacy or “effeminacy.” In Don Juan the narrator becomes almost indistinguishable from Byron himself. What was it Graves said? “I pair Byron and Nero as the two most dangerously talented bounders of all time.”
W. H. Auden distrusted Percy Bysshe Shelley almost as much as he loved Byron. In the course of a review of Herbert Read’s book on Shelley he declares: “I cannot believe... that any artist can be good who is not more than a bit of a reporting journalist... To the journalist the first thing of importance is subject... In literature I expect plenty of news... Abstractions which are not the latest flowers of a richly experienced and mature mind are empty and their expression devoid of poetic value.” The young Auden speaks from a settled prejudice common to his generation and the ones before and after. Graves declares: “Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret... When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: ‘The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,’ he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with old man’s beard. He is not aware of the veteran bees whirring their frayed wings or sucking rank honey from the dusty yellow blossoms of the ivy.”
He is right in one respect: Keats is not Shelley. But Shelley does things that Keats never attempted. He does things no other English poet has achieved. Perhaps he is, as Graves suggests, a spiritual hermaphrodite. Perhaps his philosophy is, in some respects, off the wall, though not so zany as Blake’s. Yet when William Carlos Williams was in his last illness he asked Robert Lowell, “Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?” When Williams was a boy Shelley was the poet. He was that for a reason that Williams understood, utterly different though their aesthetics were.
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.
Perhaps he heard the wonderful vocalic modulations, so mechanically imitated by Swinburne, or the effortlessness of the rhyming, or the intellectual delicacy and complexity of thought that underpins even his most conventionally Platonic images.
“Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats,” wrote Matthew Arnold, “have left admirable works; far more solid and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But their works have this defect—they do not belong to that which is the main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply modern ideas to life.” So much the better, we might think. But Arnold continues, “They constitute, therefore, minor currents,” and so, he claims, does the work of their followers. By contrast, Shelley and Byron will be remembered “long after the inadequacy of their actual work is clearly recognised, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature; their names will be greater than their writings.” The last part of Arnold’s prophecy has come true for Byron. If Shelley is not quite so effective a name to conjure with, if his biography and beliefs—in free love, revolution and so on—are less celebrated, it is because Shelley had a better mind, capable of exploring ideas as well as expressing memorable opinions. He did not pay court to an audience. He did not pose at the heart of his best poems. There is no equivalent to the Byronic hero in Shelley. He was a poet first and last, and if a man of vision, a man of specifically poetic vision. He is, as C. H. Sisson has said, “The last English poet to write as a gentleman.” What blurs his work are in fact the “modern ideas” Arnold attributes to him, ideas that are no longer modern and no longer apply; and a conscious distance from what Arnold means by “life.”
Shelley’s roots in specific landscape and community are as shallow as Byron’s were. Perhaps we should say that the aristocratic milieu into which he was born could not contain him. It did provide him with a voice, but at heart he is a disciple of Goethe, a European. The Mediterranean irresistibly called to him. He learned from classical philosophy and literature, Italian and Spanish culture. Dante was his master and he translated some of the Divine Comedy. He translated passages of Homer, Euripides, Virgil, Cavalcanti, Calderón and Goethe.
Byron and Shelley are part of a dynamic surface of English poetry, a “major current” that more or less flowed away, their language and sentiments so successful that they have been trivialized. To read them now, we must cross that trivializing barrier. If we do, we recognize in Shelley the greater poet. Both men, who became friends, share, beyond class and opinions, certain formative experiences. But there are basic differences in their poetic programs. Shelley’s political and philosophical formulations result from positive thought and desire rather than reaction. In aesthetic terms Byron is frumpily old-fashioned; Shelley advances the art of English poetry by an original approach to language and an original—if fanciful—view of poetic vocation and character.
He was born in 1792 at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, the family seat. His father was a baronet. He attended Eton, where he concentrated on scientific studies. He was already writing, and reading the fashionable literature of the time. In 1810 he went to University College, Oxford. There he read Godwin’s Political Justice, which fired his imagination. The next year he was sent down for writing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. In the same year he married the sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, whom he left after three years. She drowned herself in the Serpentine, Hyde Park, in 1816.
Shelley entered upon a correspondence with Godwin and carried his radicalism into a wider arena in 1811. Southey influenced the verse of Queen Mab, though when Shelley met Southey, the older poet’s conservatism repelled him. He admired and befriended Leigh Hunt for his more or less consistent liberal outspokenness. More fruitful was his friendship with Thomas Love Peacock. In 1821 he answered Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry with his well-known Defence of Poetry, a quintessential Romantic document in which the centrality of the poetic vocation is affirmed in Platonizing terms that have much in common with Sir Philip Sidney’s, though Shelley’s claims for poetry are less circumscribed.
In 1814 he called at Godwin’s house and met Mary, Godwin’s daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, and they eloped to the Continent. In 1816, Harriet’s suicide having left him a widower, they were married. She as much as her father inspired him. Alastor: or The Spirit of Solitude was composed in 1815–16. He describes this Miltonic poem “as allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind,” namely, “a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius”—a projection of Shelley himself—“led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe.” So much for the impact of Harriet’s suicide. The “Preface” is a catalogue of abstractions. The poem is better than the description. It ends when Alastor, frustrated in his search for the embodiment of the ideal, “descends to an untimely grave.” It is a Platonist’s Prelude, floating free of the informing world and existing in an eloquent void. To this period also belongs the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”
In 1816 the Shelleys were with Byron on the Continent, and returning made the acquaintance of Keats. Keats and Shelley became friendly rivals. Shelley wrote The Revolt of Islam (1817) in “competition” with Endymion. He left England again in 1818, disaffected with a social world he saw in part through the eyes of the embittered Byron, in part through his own political disillusion. He translated Plato’s Symposium and steeped himself in Greek literature. In 1819 he wrote Prometheus Unbound, a masterwork of prosody and construction. He allegorizes liberty of imagination in Prometheus and develops his philosophy of endurance and creation:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
He composed his Shakespearean play The Cenci around this time, a piece more dramatically successful than the Elizabethanizing plays by his contemporaries: it can actually be made to work on stage.
His first year of sustained creation was 1819. In response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, out of which the trade union movement was born, he composed The Mask of Anarchy, passionately addressing an imagined constituency and adopting a plain, forceful form of address. The soaring poet here hovers near to the actual earth and its events, delivering a direct and suasive statement about political fear and violence:
I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him.
The corrupt oppressors are simply and vividly drawn, as in a cruel caricature. This is less satire than polemical allegory. Hope addresses the oppressed in lines that float free of context, becoming effective slogans:
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few!”
This is not the language of ballad. Ballad was beyond the aristocrat populist. He can write directly, but on his own terms, which are—in his view—universal. Ballad is rooted in the tribal and rural; this poem addresses an urban populace, a proletariat. The narrative is not documentary but symbolic. Abstractions moralize action, which is itself translated into abstract form. The allegory is clear, provoked by specific incidents: even if we did not know the occasion, it would be effective in its urgency of utterance and its unambiguous solidarity.
Personal loss occasioned his celebrated “Ode to the West Wind.” Both his children by Mary died, he was homesick for England and politically disappointed. “To a Skylark” and “The Cloud” belong to this reflective period, and “The Sensitive Plant” and “Letter to Maria Gisborne” followed. Toward the end of 1819 Shelley met Sophia Stacey, for whom he wrote “The Indian Serenade” (“I arise from dreams of thee”), “To Sophia” (“Thou art fair, and few are fairer”) and other poems. To a later love, Emilia Viviana, he wrote Epipsychidion (1821). It was fortunate that Mary had her own life and concerns.
Unlike Byron, Shelley valued Keats (“a rival who will far surpass me”) and invited him to Italy. Keats declined, though he made his final journey to Rome with Joseph Severn later in the year. Upon Keats’s death (“Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!”) Shelley composed “Adonais,” his greatest elegy—some say it is more about Shelley than Keats, as “Lycidas” is more about Milton than Edward King, or “In Memoriam” more about Tennyson than Arthur Hallam—but it is perhaps his best poem. The tonal modulations he achieves are magnificent:
He will awake no more, oh never more!—
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place...
Shelley referred to it as “the least imperfect of my compositions.” It is one of the clearest expressions of his Platonism, outshining his determinedly philosophical The Witch of Atlas because it has an actual occasion and engages the poet’s whole sensibility in each of its fifty-five stanzas. The fifty-second stanza declares:
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!—Rome’s azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
When the Greek war of independence began, Shelley wrote Hellas (1821). His later poems are increasingly occasional in character. He satirizes Wordsworth in “Peter Bell the Third,” a long and eventually doleful jest against Wordsworth’s subject matter and manner. In 1822 some of his finest lyrics, including “O, world! O, life! O, time!” and “When the Lamp is Shattered,” appeared. He worked on the unfinished Triumph of Life and joined Byron and Hunt in planning The Liberal. In July, sailing to Lerici, Shelley drowned when his boat, the Don Juan, foundered in bad weather. He was thirty.
Had he not died, what direction would his work have taken? He had moved toward a clearer structure in his poems, a more direct relationship between imaginative concerns and the world his imagination was constrained to occupy. The power of specific impulses already motivated the mature poems; the more specific, earthbound image might have followed. Had he returned to England, his politics might have evolved at home rather than among the less pressing, less intractable crises of other people.
Might have... The most memorable characterization of Shelley’s work is Arnold’s: “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating his wings in a luminous void in vain.” George Santayana defended him: “Shelley really has a great subject matter: what ought to be; and... he has a real humanity—though it is a humanity in the seed, humanity in its internal principle, rather than in those deformed expressions of it which can flourish in the world.” This is as much as to say, with Arnold, that the angel beats its wings not in the world but in a luminous void. It sees “what ought to be” but has no strategy for bringing the ideal into being. Leavis writes, “Shelley, at his best and worst, offers the emotion in itself, unattached, in the void.” T. S. Eliot found he could read Shelley when he was fifteen, but not later on, for Shelley’s ideas required assent or dissent, belief or disbelief.
Shelley draws some of his figures from his early scientific studies. Edmund Blunden tells us that “many of the poet’s strangest and most seemingly superficial figures are his presentations of scientific fact as it was accepted in his day.” This is interesting but not helpful to a modern reader. More to the point, he shows how recurring figures in the long poems—few are without eagles, serpents, sunrises, storms—do not possess consistent value. Now a specific man is an eagle, now the eagle embodies a vision or idea. One thing is certain: Shelley’s eagle is never an eagle. And he uses certain adjectives time after time not to clarify the sense but to impart a tone, a coloring.
He has, if not two voices, two processes. The one urges on into the void, with large statements whose applicability eludes us. Here the poet is—as the Defence portrays him—“unacknowledged legislator of mankind,” also unelected and without constituency. The other process tends to particularize emotion: love poems, elegies, statements of disappointment and resignation. Often the abstracting technique is at work, but the poems have a determined effect, as in “Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples” or “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills.” Between these two processes a crucial difference exists: the first constructs, the second interprets, experience. Shelley’s most popular poems are in the latter category. He sees himself as a moral, not a didactic writer, seeking to “awaken” and “enlarge” the mind, and this he does best through experience, not through projection.
F. R. Leavis attacks. The poet requires a suspension not of disbelief but of critical intelligence. His figurative language is at fault; there is “a general tendency of the images to forget the status of the metaphor or simile that introduced them and to assume an autonomy and a right to propagate, so that we lose in confused generations and perspectives the perception or thought that was the ostensible raison d’être of imagery.” When Leavis speaks of Shelley’s “weak grasp upon the actual,” we demur. Several poems come to mind in which the actual is recognizably rendered: “Music, when soft voices die,” “Ozymandias,” “Sonnet: England in 1819,” “Lines to an Indian Air,” passages in Prometheus Unbound, “Song to the Men of England”:
Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?
It depends on what we understand by “actual.” Shelley proves that an idea can be as actual and poetically viable as an image: what matters is its realization. Certainly metaphor generates metaphor in his verse, a poem can speed away from its occasion. Often this is part of technique, creative disorientation in order to release ideas from the trammels of what is. Static images work against this process; hence image and metaphor are interrelated but not related outward to specific points in the world, which would distort the Platonic reality of his ideas. Emancipated from the actual, his language is a self-referring structure. Swinburne, without Shelley’s serious philosophical sanction, carries this strategy beyond sense.
Shelley rejects a rationalist tradition of normative and conventional art. He stresses emotional fluency, the mystical source of poetry (the dying coal); he believes in the centrality of the poet. Such views have not been popular in England since the First World War, though they have retained or gained currency in other anglophone lands. That poetry is “not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind,” that there is no “necessary connection” between it and “consciousness or will”—such views can cause offense if taken seriously. We do well to distrust Shelley. But within the vast realm of his poetry, plays and prose exist, apart from masterpieces to be valued, lessons to be learned, even if only by reaction. His imaginative strategies cannot be borrowed, any more than Milton’s can, but they remain in a deep sense exemplary. A young poet keen to attract a popular audience can ask Byron for a master class. A serious and questing poet will recognize in Shelley a more challenging mentor, and one who will give only private instruction.