The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form

To understand the force Shelley has exerted in our literary and political culture, we must first dispel the image of him, promoted by the ruling class of nineteenth-century Britain, as the author of fragile and ineffectual lyrics. The starting point of Ronald Tetreault’s analysis is the view of Yeats, who admired Shelley and described

Shelley was more an artist than he was either a philosopher or a politician; while philosophical and political issues are often material from which he makes his poetry, there are formal and final causes in his work that define him more precisely as a poet. A tireless experimenter with poetic form, Shelley throughout this career sought a rhetorical vehicle adequate to his vision. The major published lyrics of Shelley’s great Italian period are by no means art for art’s sake; they are poems artfully designed to make things happen, lyrics that employ speech to dramatize an unfolding process in the poet’s mind and to project that process outward toward an audience.

Shelley’s eventual adoption of dramatic form was the practical artistic consequence of his mythopoetic mode, the strategy by which he solved the creative problem of poetic narcissism, and the instrument with which he made his poetry into a social discourse. It is through the drama’s decentred form that Shelley finally legitimates his language of desire.

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