University of Cape Town – ELL2015S

Peter Anderson

22 August 2015

‘Fooling a Child of the Revolution’:
The ingenious naiveté of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetical radicalism in his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’

“[Shelley] was … a writer who moved everywhere with a sense of ulterior motive, a sense of greater design, an acute feeling for the historical moment and an overwhelming consciousness of his duty as an artist in the immense and fiery process of social change of which he knew himself to be a part. Shelley’s lyrics were mere sparks in this comet’s trail”

– Richard Holmes in the Introduction to his essential biography Shelley: the Pursuit (1974: x)

“I go on until I am stopped, and I never am stopped.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley (Quoted in (Bloom, 1962: 277))

In a purely associative sense, Percy Bysshe Shelley was the ‘most sublime’ of the Romantic poets. That is to say, everything in his contracted oeuvre followed on from a sort of primordial revelation of the sublime aspect of the universe, to which he refers most lucidly in his 1816 ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. “[W]hereas Wordsworth and Keats derived [abstract ideas] from an accumulation of particular experiences, Shelley seems first to have formed his ideas and then to have interpreted experience through them.”1 It is our critical wager in this essay that this ‘native Platonism’ could not have resided quite as immanently within the soul of any poet before the French Revolution (and has subsequently reappeared in very few individuals, let alone poets, since). If Shelley could so vehemently defend his catch-phrase proclamation of poets being the world’s “unacknowledged legislators”, it is because he apparently took for granted the fact of his having been born into a world (in August 1792) that had only just been unprecedentedly changed by the force of mere words and the revolutionary ideas they signified.2 Yet, by the time he’d reached his creative maturity (with the composition of ‘Alastor’ in late 1815), the Napoleonic ‘world-spirit’ had been definitively quelled and the Restoration period of Royalist recriminations had set in with an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness for anyone still imbued with Jacobin sentiments. Harold Bloom may have a point in claiming that “[o]f all the Romantics, [Shelley] needs the closest reading, and a reading whose context ought to be found in traditions of poetry, and not in philosophy or politics”3, but a considered understanding of the preceding historic context which – given Shelley’s inarguable status as the most outgoing political poet of his time – forms the obverse side to his ‘visionary’ reputation is nigh-on indispensable to any incisive analysis of the work in question. And the ‘Hymn’ does not disappoint any reader in search of lasting profundities on each stratum of personal, political & metaphysical subjectivity.

On first looking into Shelley’s opus, one is struck by a certain similarity in phrasing between its first lines and that of, of all texts, The Communist Manifesto (1848).
To wit:

1. (Bowra, 1961: 103)
2. Namely those inherited slogans of the French Enlightenment’s philosophes:Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, of course.
3. (1962: 275)

“The awful shadow of some unseen Power/ Floats though unseen among us…” (1-2) and “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.”4

What connects them as introductions is not so much a shared subject but an implicit high Gothic form. In both we realize we are about to read a ghost story. And since “All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize [the latter] spectre”5 and “[The former ‘Power’s’] light alone [instead of the “[f]rail spells” (29) of Christian orthodoxy] … [g]ives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream” (32-6) we can perhaps, in both cases, label the “Spirit” in question ‘the Unholy Ghost’, which is to say, the very energy of rational secularism first unbound by the French Revolution.6 Shelley was first (in)famous in his own time, of course, for authoring and distributing to all the relevant authorities, at the age of 18 in his first year at Oxford, a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was understandably expelled. From this admirable beginning, Shelley’s philosophy only became more radical through his remaining decade, which makes the sincere religiosity of the ‘Hymn’ quite perplexing. The title is perhaps meant sardonically, but certainly not sarcastically. Even the notion of ‘Intellectual Beauty’7 is more allied to a meaning of spiritual ideals than the usual connotations of cogitative symmetry.8 This implicit confusion of ‘Mind/Intellect’ and ‘Spirit’ is, interestingly enough, reflected in the concurrent notion of ‘Geistes’ in the German Idealist philosophies of Kant and Hegel,9 indicating that the various European strains of Romanticism stemming from the French Revolution shared an ‘ecstatic’ belief in the foundational overlap of Reason and Intuition in the individual subject. We can see this state portrayed

4. (Marx & Engels, 2004: 2)
5. (ibid. italics mine.)
6. In this regard, the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s 1799 maxim that “The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters” can be invoked strangely pertinently.             7. In the Romantic philosophy, ‘Intellectual Beauty’ could perhaps be seen as an oxymoron comparable to that of ‘Human Nature’ for the Enlightenment’s, combining in one term as it does the ‘restrictive capacity’ of Reason with the “awful loveliness” (71) of the Natural world’s wildness.
8. “”Intellectual” in the title simply means “spiritual”, or “beyond the senses”” (Bloom, 1962: 283) and “Shelley here uses “intellectual beauty” to designate the beauty of things of the mind in contrast to those of nature.” (Cameron, 1974: 237)
9. The title of Hegel’s first great abstruse-to-say-the-least doorstop is indeed alternately translated as ‘The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit’ (1807).

explicitly in the ‘Hymn’s’ Fifth Stanza, wherein Shelley recollects the moment in early childhood (quite similar to that which Wordsworth depicts in his ‘Intimations of Immortality’) in which

“I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;                                                     I was not heard – I saw them not –
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing

…
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!” (53-60)

This signature moment of revelation – “[in which] the truth/ Of nature on [Shelley’s] passive youth/ Descended…” (78-80) – is thus shown as being simultaneously a complete dismissal of the superstitious and “vain endeavour” (28) of Religion and a revolutionary awakening to the traces of Intellectual Beauty “[in] every form containing [it].” (82) Therefore, the procedure of fidelity to the personal Event of the discovery of a perception of the sublime’s “unseen” presence in fact has much the same form as that of being born again into a creed, although, on this occasion, a universal one. “[T]ill [that moment] I had existed in an ideal world; now I found that in this universe of ours was enough to excite the interest of the heart, enough to employ the discussions of Reason”10. As such, Shelley is here representing on a confessional level the universal procedure engendered by the example of the French Revolution: an Idea of Pure Reason incarnated in the world itself could now demand the same devotion as God and could even take up the formal psychological space of a divinity.

The dual ontological/epistemological u-turn entwined here with the Event of the French Revolution is easy to understate. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in his channeling of Alain Badiou’s theoretical terms, is worth quoting at length to help us avoid that mistake:

10. Quoted from a letter to Shelley’s radical mentor and father-in-law William Godwin in (Cameron, 1974: 239)

“[T]ake French society in the late eighteenth century: the state of society, its strata, economic, political, ideological conflicts, and so on, are accessible to knowledge. However, no amount of Knowledge will enable us to predict or account for the properly unaccountable Event called the ‘French Revolution’. In this precise sense, the Event emergesex nihilo: if it cannot be accounted for in terms of the situation, this does not mean that it is simply an intervention from Outside or Beyond – it attaches itself precisely to the Void of every situation, to its inherent inconsistency and/or its excess.”11

Shelley essentially makes the same point a propos the basic gaps in Religion’s pretentions to dominion over Mystery:

“Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,                                                   Remain the records of their vain endeavor,
Frail spells – whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,                                                 From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.”
(27-31)

Reason thus discovers in the procession of reality what Religion cannot allow itself to admit: the noumenal world – the irrational dimension of spontaneous possibility – is inaccessible to our phenomenal understanding, and is, in fact, “dearer for its mystery.” (12) As Shelley depicts it, the presence of this “unseen Power” is not only not directly accessible; even its “awful shadow …/ Floats through unseen among us” (1-2) such that “[t]he splendor in Nature is due to this shadow but is not identical with it”12because then we would be able to notice it without the aid of the Imagination. Along with this insight comes an inevitable blowback on the particular socio-political authorities of the era as well as Authority in general. If the principle of our perceptual relationship to Reality (‘Intellectual Beauty’, Mind/Spirit etc.) is in itself inconsistent and incomplete, then no collective earthly power can exceed the faculty of, or hold a

11. (2008; 148)
12. (Bloom, 1962: 283)

monopoly on, the individual Will.13 In terms of English poetry, the extended consequences of the Revolution are best recalled by Hazlitt, naturally, in his ‘On the Living Poets’:

“ [Our poetical literature] wanted something to stir it up, and it found that something in the principles and events of the French Revolution. From the impulse it thus received, it rose at once from the most servile imitation and tamest common-place, to the utmost pitch of singularity and paradox. The change in the belles-lettres was as complete, and to many persons as startling, as the change in politics, with which it went hand in hand. There was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that was established was to be tolerated. … Every one did that which was good in his own eyes. The object was to reduce all things to an absolute level; and a singularly affected and outrageous simplicity prevailed…”14

Shelley did not live through this change – and his best poetry is definitely not ‘outrageously simple’ – but he benefited from it because he inherited its ideology of poetic and personal ‘singularity’ without intimately connecting his “Self-esteem” (37) as a radical to the extended contingent outcome of the Revolution itself, as did Wordsworth and Coleridge. As the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it: “The second generation of British Romantics [- that is, Byron, Keats and Shelley -] was the first thus to combine romanticism and active revolutionism: the disappointments of the French Revolution, unforgotten by most of their elders, paled beside the visible horrors of the capitalist transformation in their own countries.”15 The first of the dual Revolutions of the Romantic era thus served as a kind of instinctual backdrop for the second’s immanent clash of ingenious Individual and dehumanizing Society, and the infinite mutability of the self paled before the gross schizophrenia of the Restoration era’s socio-economic immorality. For Shelley, only ‘Intellectual Beauty’ held any promise of an eventual reconciliation between the one and the many.

13. Or, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, ‘If God is Dead, everything is permitted.’                14. (1967:639-40)
15. (1977: 323)

After such a relatively grand tour of the ‘Hymn’s contributive contexts, we must now belatedly return to the text itself and to how its very form is determined by Shelley’s almost courtly love relationship with the ideal of the sublime, presented here as ‘Intellectual Beauty’. Its indivisible importance to Shelley in all his grand pursuits is that he associates it with his personal capacity for Inspiration: “Poetry … is akin to “intellectual beauty”. Although Shelley never defined the creative source of poetry, he argued that it entailed forces beyond those of the individual poet’s mind.”16 However, the one definitive quality he applies to Intellectual Beauty in the ‘Hymn’ is its undependability – or “inconstant wing” (3) – and so likewise, as his muse, Intellectual Beauty only allows “[p]oetry or art [to be] created in or immediately after moments of visionary ascent to the eternal, and is [as such] an attempt to render such moments in words and images.”17One would perhaps think then that such a method would sanction only an elliptical work-habit, given that such inspiration is only “for some uncertain moments lent” (38) and the intervals are spent in mourning its departure. In fact the opposite is true, because “[this ‘visionary ascension’] is never complete. Words and images are only symbolic gestures pointing to something beyond.” And precisely in so far as this applies to Shelley, “[t]he only way [he discovered] to surmount the inherent limitations of language is to use of a lot of it all at once.”18 What this translates into in Shelley’s corpus is a uniquely superb and various productivity run through with ecstatically youthful moments of kaleidoscopic expression.19 He didn’t just write profusely across the genres of Drama, Political Philosophy, Criticism, Journalism and Poetry, but in his major verses never settled on a consistent formal expression, alternating from Dante’s terza rima in the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ to the ballad reportage of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and here the classic Ode form so as to strictly imitate the profession of religious devotion now subverted by a secular Idealist content. It is this basic mutability at the most intricate structural level of expression that is Shelley’s greatest debt to the French Revolution, because, as aforementioned by Hazlitt, the singular licence of expressible identity is the English inheritance of French political subjectivity.

16. (Cameron, 1974: 237)
17. (Perkins, 1967: 955)
18. (ibid.)
19. Such that Wordsworth – who had very little else at all to say about him – commented that “Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style” (Quoted in the Introduction to (Barcus, 1975:2))

Thus, we must do a final reading of the poem as it may apply to the afterlife of the Revolution itself. For the intellectuals of the world in 1789 the fall of the Bastille did appear to signal such a ‘visitation’ of a “Spirit of BEAUTY” (13) in France. Shelley does not overstate the utopian optimism of the zeitgeist in expressing that

Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. (39-41)

But from his perspective beside Lake Geneva in 1816, his concern is most taken by the fact of this promise’s inexplicable dissolution:

“… where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,                                                                        This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?” (15-7)

Living in post-Evental times, both personally and politically, he is forced to console himself by evincing the benefits of his vantage point of hindsight:

“The day becomes more solemn and serene                                                                         When noon is past – there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,                                                                  As if it could not be, as if it had not been! (73-7)

It is only as a result of the twinned coming and departure of the moment of greatest energy – the noon, the summer, the Revolution – that the environment of its aftermath can be observed with an appreciative eye, and perhaps there is an abiding beauty in such surroundings because the very faculties with which we can sense it have been left to us by the Change. Thus the Revolution does remain but only in the memory of its unprecedented perception. In short, the world is not as it once was because we have changed our relationship to it. And, given that Shelley’s metaphors are implicitly cyclical, this relationship is simply bound to change again.

One could ultimately reduce the conceit of this essay to the pithy conviction that Shelley’s philosophical and poetical muses were one and the same. Although this is not a particularly revolutionary blanket statement, when applied to such a text as the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ it delineates an entire series of intriguing meanings from what may have previously appeared as a purposefully abstract, and therefore vague, Ode to uncategorizable intuitions. As it is, we can now see in the poem a lament for the disappearance of egalitarian politics in Europe, a childhood memoir of secular awakening through the perception of the Ideal in Nature, and an idiosyncratic prayer to the Real of inexpressible spiritual experience, as well as all of these entangled together in an instinctually webbed meditation on the Sublime, under the banner title of ‘Intellectual Beauty’. The aesthetic appreciation thus created within us is perhaps best articulated by Sir Maurice Bowra in the closing meditation on Shelley in his classic lecture series The Romantic Imagination: “His triumph is that … through the enchantment which his poetry sets on us, we are able to explore regions of which he is the discoverer and almost the only denizen, and to know in his company the delights of a condition in which the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy is healed and the pallid abstractions of analytical thought take on the glow and the glory of visible things.”20

Word Count: 2321

20. (1961:125)

Reference List:

Barcus, James E. 1975. ‘Introduction’ to Shelley: The Critical Heritage. Ed. J.E. Barcus. Routledge & Kegan Paul: London and Boston.

Bloom, Harold. 1962. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Faber and Faber: London.

Bowra, Sir Maurice. 1961. The Romantic Imagination. Oxford University Press: London.

Cameron, Kenneth Neill. 1974. Shelley: The Golden Years. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Engels, F. and Marx. K. 2004. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Books: London. Hazlitt, William. 1967. ‘On the Living Poets’, included in English Romantic Writers

[pgs. 632-43]. Ed. D. Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.: New York.

Hobsbawm, E.J. 1977. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. Abacus: London.

Holmes, Richard. 1974. Shelley: the Pursuit. Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London.

Perkins, David. 1967. ‘Introduction’ to Percy Bysshe Shelley in English Romantic Writers [pgs. 951-8]. Ed. D. Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.: New York.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2008. The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso Books: London.