Weekly Response

I’d like to take apart Shelley’s response to Coleridge’s review in the Prometheus Unbound preface because it clarifies how Shelley wants to view poetic process and tradition. He first summarizes the issue as “the degree in which the study of contemporary writings may have tinged my composition,” a flattering interpretation, given that Coleridge calls him “an unsparing imitator,” (1093). This immediately establishes Shelley’s divergent moral outlook on “mimicry,” which he believes innate to the poetic art (ibid). The poetic geniuses work within forms that are “the endowment of the age in which they live,” making the art and its intellectual movements a collective experience (ibid). This collectivity is reflected in his historical characterization of English literary traditions. Shelley’s period-oriented summary sounds very like other triumphalist progressive nineteenth-century histories: “we owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion,” (ibid). To parse this sentence: “we,” the current collective, are indebted not to the writers in the golden age of “our” literature, but to “that fervid awakening of the public mind.” The responsible party is oddly given a passive role in Shelley’s sentence, further dodging problems of causation and authorship. The “public mind” fuses all the English into a single operating entity, a generalization that attributes some unifying intellectual feature to the people in that period. This “spirit of the age” concept, common to other nineteenth-century philosophies may have influence Shelley’s conviction that authors are ‘products of their time.’

It interests me that he emphasizes the conditions under which one writes and thinks to such a degree:

“the circumstances which awaken [capability] to action perpetually change. If England were divided into forty republics, each equal in population and extent to Athens, there is no reason to suppose but that, under institutions not more perfect than those of Athens, each would produce philosophers and poets equal to those who… have never been surpassed,” (ibid).

This statement again fails to fully elucidate the cause for genius work, implying in a quasi-scientific manner that if all the variables remain unchanged, tests should produce consistent results. He does not flesh out fully why these particular institutions encouraged such enduring work. Are there discernable characteristics inherent to the republican system or to city-state diversity that foster great thinkers? Shelley had an overt aversion to his contemporary institutions, so he could have planted this as social criticism. After all, “the great writers of our own age are… forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition,” (ibid). Writers thus have an unusual awareness about the world in which they live, particularly its social aspects. Although Shelley says it is “a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform,” it could still be argued that he finds change to be a writer’s duty (1094). He references contemporaries who will enact these mass periodical changes, “restoring” the “equilibrium between institutions and opinions,” (1093). Yet the individual is only a portion of “the cloud of mind” that “is discharging its collected lightning,” functioning as one brain and one action (ibid). Further, the successful poetic device is not new, but “has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them,” exactly what Prometheus Unbound attempts to accomplish by reworking a classical source-text (1093-1094). Although I am willing to accept the argument that the poet’s mind is reflective, “modified… by every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness,” I am unsatisfied by his silence about how and why circumstances affect the writer so supremely (1094). In a writing culture that worships individuals, process, and craft, it is difficult for me to accept a model that characterizes writers as passive vehicles impressed by their environment.