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From: "The Literary Labyrinth", by M. S. Scarpa
P. B. Shelley
Timeline
was born in
went
to study at
expelled
from
married Harriet Westbrook
published Queen Mab
parted with his wife and left
the future author of Frankenstein
wrote Alastor
spent some time in
suicide of Harriet
married Mary Godwin
wrote The Revolt of Islam, a revolutionary poem
definitely left
wrote Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud
published Prometheus Unbound, Tbe Sensitive t
Epipsychidion, a poem dedicated to Emilia Viviani
Adonais, an elegy written on the death of Keats
A Defence of Poetry
published
in July he died in the
Major influences: Radicalism and Neo‑Platonism
When Shelley
was a young man, the idealistic drive of French Revolution towards equality had
already been exhausted and had been succeeded by a nationalistic wave both in
It was partly because he had nourished his mind on the readings of famous Radicals, partly because he passionately felt the need for justice and partly because he resented the gloomy atmosphere of the political social and moral conventionalism of his times, that he found himself siding with the most extreme ideas of his times.
William Godwin (1756‑1838), the jacobin philosopher, became his master. Like him he believed that man is perfectible, that his life ‑ moral and intellectual ‑ can be improved by the light of reason, that in a near future men will
live together in peace and love without class distinctions, once existing institutions have been reformed or abolished.
It was under
Godwin's influence that he wrote his earliest works, the first of which, The Necessity of Atheism, caused him to
be expelled from
This major influence, however mitigated in the course of time by others, remains fundamental in understanding Shelley's attitude to his times and to mankind. It is implicit in the Ode to the West Wind where be invokes the violence of the wind to emancipate mankind, the 'unawakened earth', from tyranny and regenerate it in view of the advent of a new society. It was, however, in his longer "philosophical ' poems like Prometheus Unbound that he gave life to his thoughts in a poetic world of characters and symbols.
The second major influence was Neo‑Platonisrn, which permeated all his great works, including Prometheus Unbound.
From Plato he derived his at once mystical and intellectual belief in a society ruled by ethics and wisdom. From him he also absorbed the idea of reality as an illusory and deceitful image of the true reality of eternity (see the poems: Adonais,
Epipsychidiòn, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty), and of an idealistic pantheism, i.e. the aspiration of the individual life to return to the Whole, the One.
If divine immanence illuminates matter, it is love and sympathy that create the intimate fusion between that matter ‑ nature ‑ and the human mind
Poetry and the Poet
Shelley's belief in the nature and function of ‑ poetry is mainly contained in his essay Defence of Poetry which appeared in 1821. It consists of an exalted defence of poetry as the expression of the imagination.
The poets are those human beings who have a greater degree of imagination, by which they can give shape to artistic representation.
As beautv is a form of the essential truth, poets are considered to have not only invented the arts ‑ but promoted order and holiness and therefore the advent of civil society. As he wrote in Defence of Poetry poets are 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.
But poets can also see beyond the immediate reality and in this way they are prophets and can suggest reform. In the Ode to the West Wind, the poet's task is to help mankind along the way to freedom and regeneration while his urgency towards action is symbolised by the wind with its energy an merciless destruction of what is old and decadent.
Nature
Though Shelley's apprehension of the natural world passes through the appreciation of its beauty, or sometimes its fearsomeness, caught by the senses, it is with the most intellectual part of himself that he aspires to an identification with nature. So the nature he describes is the beautiful veil that hides the eternal truth of the One.
Shelley's approach to nature is, however, also instrumental providing him with the images and symbols for the creation of his myths and cosmic schemes. In these myths the natural elements, such as the clouds, the west wind, the skylark, the moon, are both endowed with physical existence and are symbols of his poetic cosmogony.
Finally nature is the privileged refuge from the disappoimment and injustice of the ordinary world and the interlocutor of his melancholy dreams and of his indomitable hopes.
Style
Shelley's reputation, the lowest among the Romantic poets's, has suffered from a change in taste that occurred in the first decades of our century under the influence of T. S. Eliot's poetry and literary criticism. To the XX century critics' eyes, Shelley's main defect is that of being a 'lyrical' poet, (if by lyrical we mean the immediate, unelaborate expression of an individual emotion). With many remarkable exceptions, Shelley's poems are mainly lyrical while his less successful poetry is characterized by a vague emotionality which does not find a precise object or by an excess of self‑pity, as you may have noticed in stanza 4 of Ode to the West Wind.
When, however, he finds a precise image or imagery which conveys either an idea or an emotion, his poems combine the charm of sincere pathos wíth the vividness of image taken from nature and becomes representative of an age which marked the revaluation of both sentiment and nature.
His best achievements are connected with the symbolism with which he conveyed ideas almost beyond the reach of language, while his rather exclamatory style is at its best in the liquid quality of the sounds and in the choice of regular and traditional metres and rhyme schemes.
between tradition and innovation
The strange paradox of Shelley's work is that it is scarcely valued by contemporary critics just for being more characteristically Romantic than that of other poets. That depends on the changes of taste but also on real drawbacks in the author's output. Shelley's intellectual formation belonged to the previous century but to that intellectual trend in the century that was critical of society and of its current ideas. lf he looked back to the rationalists of the English Enlightenment, like Godwin, and even shaped some of their ideas in verse the language he used was characterised by vagueness, an excess of sentimentality and a general lack of discipline that were to become typical of the worst among the Romantic or post Romantic minor poets. When in his maturity he abandoned his radical ideas and moved from the the mechanistic idea of the universe to a more imaginative philosophy, Shelley was in line with the choices of the other contemporary poets. Also his political beliefs , centred on a utopia in which no tyranny or laws exist, remind one of Blake's visionary belief in a new mankind.
But Shelley's chief literary merit is to be found in the impulse he gave to lyrical poetry as the expression of a highly
individualised volce. When he succeeded in finding a symbolic image for his emotíons, he was innovating (in the XVIII century images were purely ornamental), and also preparing the way to the subsequent development of modern lyrical poetry.
In conclusion, Shelley the man had his roots in eighteenth century materialism and radicalism; Shelley the poet was instead perfectly in tune with the cult of sentiment and with a certain verbal rhetoric which were the opposite of' anything in fashion a few decades before.
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