Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence New Relations

by O'Neill, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780198833697
• ISBN10: 0198833695
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2019-05-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Through attuned close readings, this volume brings out the imaginative and formal brilliance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writing as it explores his involvement in processes of dialogue and influence. Shelley recognizes that poetic individuality is the reward of connectedness with other writers and cultural influences. 'A great Poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight', he writes, 'and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight' (A Defence of Poetry). He is among the major Romantic poetic exponents and theorists of influence, because of his passionately intelligent commitment to the onward dissemination of ideas and feelings, and to the unpredictable ways in which poets position themselves and are culturally positioned between past and future.

The book has a tripartite structure. The first three chapters seek to illuminate his response to representative texts, figures, and themes that constitute the triple pillars of his cultural inheritance: the classical world (Plato); Renaissance poetry (Spenser and Milton); Christianity and, in particular, the concept of deity and the Bible. The second and major section of the book explores Shelley's relations and affinities with, as well as differences from, his immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Hazlitt and Lamb; Wordsworth; Coleridge; Southey; Byron; Keats (including the influence of Dante on Shelley's elegy for his fellow Romantic) and the great painter J. M. W. Turner, with whom he is often linked. The third section considers Shelley's reception by later nineteenth-century writers, figures influenced by and responding to Shelley including Beddoes, Hemans, Landon, Tennyson, and Swinburne. A coda discusses the body of critical work on Shelley produced by A. C. Bradley, a figure who stands at the threshold of twentieth-century thinking about Shelley.

Author Biography

Michael O'Neill, Professor of English, Durham University

Michael O'Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. He has been Head of Department for two three-year periods and a Director of the University's Institute of Advanced Study. His research has concentrated on questions of literary achievement and on literary dialogue and influence. He has published widely on Romantic poetry, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley, and on an array of Victorian and twentieth- and twenty-first century poets. He co-founded and co-edited Poetry Durham from 1982 to 1994. He has received many awards for his criticism and poetry, including Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America for 2019.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Emulating Plato: Shelley as Translator and Prose Poet
2. 'The Right Scale of that Balance': Shelley, Spenser, Milton
3. 'A Double Face of False and True': Poetry and Religion in Shelley
4. Shelley, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Revolutionary Imagination
5. 'A Kind of an Excuse': Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited
6. The Gleam of Those Words': Shelley and Coleridge
7. Shelley and Southey Reconsidered
8. 'The Fixed and the Fluid': Identity in Shelley and Byron
9. Narrative and Play: Shelley's The Witch of Atlas and Byron's Beppo
10. 'The End and Aim of Poesy': Shelley and Keats in Dialogue
11. Turning to Dante: Shelley's Adonais Reconsidered
12. 'The Inmost Spirit of Light': Shelley and Turner
13. Shelley, Beddoes, Death, and Reputation
14. 'Materials for Imagination': Shelleyan Traces in Felicia Hemans's Later Poetry
15. 'Beautiful but Ideal': Intertextual Relations between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon
16. The Wheels of Being: Shelley and Tennyson
17. 'Stars Caught in My Branches': Shelley and Swinburne
Coda: A. C. Bradley's Views of Shelley
Bibliography