Shelley criticism and class notes Flashcards
Who wrote ‘Language and form’?
Jerrold E. Hogle
When and with what does Shelley justify his craft?
With ‘A Defence of Poetry’ in 1821.
- Poetry begins when the most primitive person uses transfers their perception of an object into a verbalised image, using language and gesture.
- Poetry is just metaphor. Transfer.
- Shelley can then make deliberate poetry, transforming language as we know it, re-envisioning of the world.
How does Shelley define POETIC language?
“Vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unap- prehended relations of things”.
It makes us see things in terms of others not yet connected to them.
Why does Shelley come to believe that true civilisation depends on the constant renewal of language by the poetry with which it began?
- Language, poetry, and revolution are connected to each other. (Central to his worldview).
- If new poets do not arise to create fresh associations between things, language will die.
- “If no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations” by which a culture understands itself, he fears, “language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse”
How is Shelley’s sense of language as transformative itself transformed?
- He begins seeing language as vehicle for meaning and purpose, that the value of any composition should be judged by the ideas behind it; comes to see language as itself meaningful, and that it is wrong to make didactic poetry.
- ‘The Necessity of Atheism’: “all poetical beauty ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral—that metaphorical language ought to be a pleasing vehicle for useful and momentous instruction”.
- ‘Defence’: a poet “would do ill” to “embody his own conceptions” in his works.
How did his initial literalism fight tyranny?
- Assigning names to arbitrary ideas is the oppressive myth; it creates ‘God’.
- Words for the young Shelley should only name mental ideas, the coalesced memories of repeated perceptions (the signifieds of language’s visible signifiers, to use the terms of Ferdinand de Saussure).
- An unknown cause animating what we keep perceiving should not be named ‘God’ because of a wish of the ‘fancy’ to believe in something like a great soul; it should instead be termed ‘the existing power of existence’ because no cause beyond that can be inferred from perceived effects.
- To use signs to claim an egocentrically fashioned Godhead is to employ personification to project a ‘tyrannic majesty’ on ‘the throne of infinitude’ (L I.100–1). This is the oppressive myth, in Shelley’s eyes, that justifies the reigning cultural orthodoxy of monarchy, hierarchy, and Church-enforced absolutes, all constructed as earthly versions of a cosmic Chain of Being that supposedly descends from an Almighty, the locus of ultimate meaning and power.
How did his initial literalism come to seem itself tyrannical?
- We can transform signifiers ourselves.
- In ‘On Life’ he writes that we lose the apprehension of life, as fluid early perceptions are replaced by codified social norms.
- What we take to be familiar objects are actually rigidified signs that come to suggest “one thought which shall lead to a train of thoughts”.
- We forget the empirical fact that nothing exists but as it is perceived, which means our perception of a thing can change what it is.
- Literalism restricts the liberty of the mind to transform signifiers, and hence their signifieds, into the as yet “unapprehended relations” that poetry can help us conceive.
- We believe things to be fixed objects which are just ideas.
- We can escape from that trap by realising that most distinctions in words (including ‘subject’ and ‘object’) are no more than “grammatical devices” in language and its constructions.
How does Shelley come to see LANGUAGE in general?
- Inherently transformable. (Along with the perceptions it helps to form).
- Revolutionary thinking and poetic language, thoughts and words, perpetually interact with one another for the betterment of humankind
How does Shelley’s change in opinion of language reflect in his use of it?
- By ‘The Triumph of Life’, his language has become widely associative, meaning he has achieved metaphorical freedom from signs.
- ‘Alastor’ and ‘The Triumph of Life’, two narrative poems composed years apart, offer sceptical theoretical statements on the nature of poetic language.
- Shelley’s literary language appears to move from the relatively loose (Miltonic blank verse in ‘Alastor’) to the amazingly tight (Dantean terza rima in ‘The Triumph’), but really becomes more mobile, disruptive, and widely associative, ultimately achieving the metaphorical freedom he values in his efforts to dissipate our ‘education of error’.
What is Shelley’s definition of love?
A ‘going out of our own nature’, reached by expanding the circumference of imagination by replenishing it with ever new delights.
Leaving the self “awakens and enlarges the mind [of all participants] by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought”
How does Shelley change the meaning of the words ‘one’, and ‘unity’?
- It changes from signifying God or the eternal universe to meaning in itself discontinuity and disruption, by naming the poets as “one great mind” writing “one great poem” in the “eternal, the infinite, and the one”, and they are changing language and its meanings.
- All poems achieving a mutation in thought and words become “episodes to that great poem”, that has been built up since the beginning of the world by all true poets, “like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind”.
- The mature Shelley writes that it is by enacting the process of transformation and revolution, not by attaining some fixed sense of an eternal Unity, that the poet “participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one”.
- He thus exemplifies the disruption of older language he advocates, by using the ‘floating’ capacity of signifiers to shift these particular words from their previous contexts.
- The Platonic and orthodox Christian conceptions of ‘the One’, the ‘eternal, the infinite and the one’, now name a continuity of discontinuities, the ongoing disruption of settled forms of language into new analogies. Thus poets are the “authors of revolutions in opinion” because they keep reopening the “permanent analogy of things”
What is the “life of truth” across time, for Shelley?
The continuous reopening of the of “the permanent analogy of things” in language.
What is the journey of Shelley’s perception of language?
- From being anchored strictly to its user’s ideas, to enacting an ongoing, ever-turning interplay between past and present thoughts of poetic minds.
“It is said that mind produces motion … it might as well have been said that motion produces mind” (On Life)
The poetic transformation of language is an eternal, albeit ever-changing, force traversing every individual and era.
