This section looks at Shelley’s earlier attempts at writing epic, romance, and quest‐poetry. In Queen Mab, printed in a limited edition in 1813, the young Shelley’s formidable intellect and ardour for reform are manifest. Among Shelley’s most influential poems for later readers, fear of prosecution led to the poem being printed in a small print‐run (250 copies) rather than published. Shelley seems to have distributed up to seventy copies himself, usually cutting out the evidence by which he could be identified as the author: the title‐page, colophon, and dedicatory poem to his first wife, Harriet Shelley.1 A pirated edition in 1821 led Shelley to write to Leigh Hunt, in the latter’s capacity as editor of The Examiner, to dismiss the poem as written in ‘a sufficiently intemperate spirit’ and as ‘perfectly worthless in point of literary composition’, and to half‐disclaim responsibility for ‘having divulged opinions hostile to existing sanctions, under the form, whatever it may be, which they assume in this poem’. But the very way in which the letter concludes, with a sudden, calculated flare of contempt for the ‘legal proceedings … instituted against the publisher’,2 suggests that there is a strong continuity between the young man blazing with anti‐establishment ideas who wrote the poem and the sadder, wiser, but still intransigent radical who looks back with a mixture of feelings, including covert pride, at his poem. George Bernard Shaw describes the poem as ‘the Chartists’ Bible’ in the light of the poem’s great influence over that movement in the 1830s and 1840s.3
The poem, written in nine cantos, recalls in its format eighteenth‐century long poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, also in nine sections. But Queen Mab overthrows rather than follows in the footsteps of its predecessors. The poem uses romance as the vehicle of a calculatedly ‘intemperate’ onslaught on current political and social ills, and imagines a millennial transformation.4 The influence of French Enlightenment thinkers and of Godwin is clear in the poem, yet, as Reiman and Fraistat point out, Shelley ‘resists as well as deploys his sources’ and he constructs what they rightly describe as ‘an original synthesis that constitutes the cosmopolitical and anti‐Christian revolutionary discourse’ of the poem.5 This discourse is highlighted in the poem’s accompanying ‘Notes’, long essays that imitate, in form, the extensive prose material provided in Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer and The Curse of Kehama, both poems that leave an impact on the rhythmic shape and irresistible driving force of Shelley’s work.6 The poem’s epigraphs promise polemic: Voltaire’s ‘ECRASEZ L’INFAME!’ (Crush the infamy!), Lucretius’ determination to free human beings from superstition, and Archimedes’ desire for a place to stand from where he could move the world. Yet Shelley first beguiles us with an account of the sleeping Ianthe visited by Queen Mab, the Fairy Queen, in her chariot. Queen Mab who sets about imparting visions of the present, past, and future to Ianthe, imagined as caught up in spirit by Queen Mab and taken on a journey; indeed, in its commitment to dream, vision, and a ‘magic car’ (or chariot), Queen Mab looks ahead to the voyage motif central to later poems, as in Prometheus Unbound 2.5. Moreover, its blend of feelings – ready to travel in imagination along ‘The gradual paths of an aspiring change’ (9.148), but setting that readiness against the awareness that a ‘pathless wilderness remains’ (9.144) – anticipates the double consciousness evident, say, at the end of the third act of Prometheus Unbound.
The first canto ends with an apostrophe to the ‘Spirit of Nature’ (1.264), present throughout creation, and a constant ideal in the poem in that it reproves the idea of a God made in any human likeness. Later, the ‘Spirit of Nature’ (3.214) is ‘the judge beneath whose nod / Man’s brief and frail authority / Is powerless as the wind / That passeth idly by’ (3.219–22): lines whose varied lengths coexist with an ‘authority’ partly purchased by the echo of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure 2.2.117–18 and partly by the calmly inexorable movement of the rhythm. Nature’s authority derives from the fact that it is an arena in which Necessity operates. In section 6, Shelley identifies the two in an appositional glissade: ‘Spirit of Nature! all‐sufficing Power, / Necessity! thou mother of the world!’ (6.197–8).
By Necessity, Shelley means, as he puts it in an accompanying Note, ‘that in no case could any event have happened otherwise than it did happen’ (262), a bleak doctrine in many ways, yet a source of hope for the young Shelley, because, as Kenneth Neill Cameron glosses the matter, it allowed him to suppose that change ‘took place in accordance with certain laws arising from the structural patterns of society’,7 much as change occurred in the physical world because of certain predetermining causes. Underpinning the doctrine, as Shelley would later see with near‐tragic clarity, is a hopeful fiction that change is driven by a dynamic of betterment. Here Shelley’s thought owes a debt to Godwin’s idea of perfectibility: ‘By perfectible’, writes Godwin in Political Justice, ‘it is not meant that [human beings are] capable of being brought to perfection. But the word seems sufficiently adapted to express the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement.’8
Such improvement finds an emblem in the poem’s sense of cosmic symmetry. The beauty of the heavens mirrors the possibility of an ameliorated earth. With its Coleridgean ‘fertile golden islands / Floating on a silver sea’ (2.34–5), it suggests, too, an ever‐present, ceaseless harmony that dwarfs human pride and serves as a model for the human condition.9 The Fairy teaches a lesson about the transience of human power: ‘Nile shall pursue his changeless way: / Those pyramids shall fall’ (2.128–9). However, the poem is often topical in its political denunciations: section 3 focuses on the iniquity of kingship, since ‘kings / And subjects, mutual foes, forever play / A losing game into each other’s hands, / Whose stakes are vice and misery’ (3.171–4). These lines illustrate the sharpness of the poem’s radical critique. Shelley objects to the unequal power relations embedded in monarchy by suggesting it amounts to a game where all lose, succumbing either to ‘vice’ or ‘misery’. This is a poetry with roots in Augustan practice, keenly tipping the foils of its abstractions with near‐satirical venom, yet it jettisons the heroic couplet in favour of a measure more suited to an epic, necessitarian sweep and viewpoint. Canto 4 is an onslaught on war; canto 5 on unjust economic distribution; canto 6 on the concept of an omnipotent God, ‘prototype of human misrule’ (6.105); canto 7 introduces the figure of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who tells a narrative that allows Shelley to mock the vengefulness of the Christian God (as he sees it); cantos 8 and 9 imagine a redeemed earth in which human beings, no longer eaters of meat, live in a ‘paradise of peace’ (8.238).
Queen Mab is the matrix from which Shelley’s more complex later poems will emerge. It is already a considerable achievement, balancing hopes for ‘the omnipotence of mind’ (8.236) and pressing material concerns, and justifying its subtitle ‘A Philosophical Poem’ through the series of long essays mentioned above. They address topics of vital concern for any hope of social amelioration: subjects covered, often with long quotations from different thinkers such as Holbach, Godwin, Condorcet, and Joseph Ritson, include cosmology with anti‐Christian inflections, as when Shelley asserts that ‘The works of his fingers have borne witness against him’ (240); the horror of war; the injustice of wealth arrangements – ‘There is no real wealth’, writes Shelley, ‘but the labour of man’ (248); the hypocrisy of the marriage institution; the nature of Necessity and the folly of believing in ‘a creative Deity’, though ‘The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe’ (263) escapes Shelley’s censure as he, in effect, reprints The Necessity of Atheism with minor alterations; and the horrors of meat‐eating (where Shelley – again with minor alterations – reprints his 1813 pamphlet A Vindication of Natural Diet). It is a work that has been dismissed as juvenilia, but to our own age, confronted by crises of various hues, it will often seem prescient and ponderable.
Alastor (1816), in part, represents a turn inwards, a movement away from the French philosophes. Its presiding spirit is the poetry of Wordsworth; its epigraph, a far cry from Voltaire crushing infamy, quotes Augustine on the desire for love. That desire leads Shelley to the delineation of ‘the figure of the poet’, to borrow Judith Chernaik’s phrase.10 And here Shelley can be seen less as retreating from the public sphere than exploring the poet’s troubled relationship with that sphere; how do political ideals relate to the impulse to idealize which serves as an erotic energy in the poetry, too? And how do these energies relate to the impulse to explore the world? As Neil Fraistat notes, we should not ‘forget that this apparently “inward” and “private” poem encompasses three continents geographically, as well as the history of Western civilization’.11
The focus, however, is on individual consciousness. In fact, the poem contains two poet‐figures: in Earl Wasserman’s terms, a Narrator and a Visionary.12 The Narrator tells the story of the Visionary’s longing for and vivid dream of an ideal soulmate, his inability to find her in this world, and his subsequent death in the lap of a natural world he loves but which will not requite his needs. The Narrator is so intimate with the Visionary’s feelings that he seems, on occasions, to blur into him, and yet the poem’s hypnotic, dream‐like power to induce suspension of disbelief has much to do with the Visionary’s inaccessibility to complete understanding.
Shelley’s Preface seems torn about his poem’s meaning. His stance seems coolly detached, as he professes to offer a poem that is ‘allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind’ (5), yet the Preface is at once sympathetic towards the Visionary and critical of him for a ‘self‐centred seclusion’ that ‘was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin’ (5). The poem itself seems for the most part to abandon such ambivalence towards the Visionary; only in equivocal lines about the Visionary spurning the ‘choicest gifts’ (205) sent by ‘The spirit of sweet human love’ (203) does a flicker of explicit criticism enter the poem. At the same time, many of the finest passages – the Narrator’s invocation of nature, the Visionary’s dream of a ‘veiled maid’ (151), the aftermath of his dream, his apostrophe to a swan, and final extinction in accord with the waning light of the moon – induce the reader to ask questions. Is the Narrator fearful of or violent towards the ‘Mother of this unfathomable world’ (18)? Is the Visionary’s dream wholly delusory, or are we right to feel that such idealizing is not merely rejected by the poem? The eliciting of such questions is central to Shelley’s poems which irresistibly supply a poetic experience and demand that the reader grapple with its meaning while refusing to offer a clear gloss that would mean the experience can be easily categorized. The dream of the ‘veiled maid’ is fascinating in this context:
He dreamed a veiled maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many‐coloured woof and shifting hues. (151–7)
The lines display Shelley’s unusually nuanced poetic art. The poem’s dream takes on a seemingly non‐illusory reality; a dream of likeness, it refuses to be interpreted merely as a projection of sameness. What the poet hears as ‘the voice of his own soul / Heard in the calm of thought’ appears to be spoken from beyond as well as from within him. The voice possesses a ‘music’; it holds ‘his inmost sense suspended in its web’, where ‘inmost sense’ means both his inmost capacity for apprehension and something close to his ultimate meaning. For the poet’s subsequent awakening, disenchantment, and relentlessly driven pursuit to exercise the power over the reader that they do, it is vital for Shelley’s hypnotic rhythms and diction to encourage a suspension of disbelief in the veiled maiden’s otherness.
Alastor has an ambivalent attitude towards Wordsworth, as does the volume of which it is the title poem. ‘To Wordsworth’ is a sonnet that turns Wordsworth’s tropes of loss against him as it laments the poet’s alleged turning away from ‘Songs consecrate to truth and liberty’ (12). Wordsworth’s long poem The Excursion (1814) left Shelley and Mary Godwin ‘disappointed’; as the latter has it in a journal entry: ‘He is a slave.’13 The poem can be read as recommending the dousing of revolutionary ardour in the cooling streams of rural retreat. And yet the Solitary is a major influence on Shelley’s portrait of the Visionary, as are the rhythms, imagery, and phrasing of Wordsworth’s poetry more generally: the Preface ends with a quotation from Book 1 of The Excursion – ‘The good die first, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, / Burn to the socket’ (6; Shelley replaces Wordsworth’s ‘they’ with ‘those’) – which may be aimed at Wordsworth’s supposed falling away from the radical sympathies of his youth. But, as it concludes with an elegiac refusal of elegy, Alastor calls for support on the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (‘It is a woe “too deep for tears”’, 713). If the poem’s attitude to Wordsworth is finally and finely mixed, so, too, is its view of solitude. Solitude may have its dangers, but the poetry’s fascination with the condition makes it difficult to see Shelley as simply writing a moral tale warning about the dangers of isolation. Rather, Shelley suggests that in isolation begins an ardent quest for ideals which can leave the spirit tragically unsatisfied.
Laon and Cythna, a long poem in twelve cantos of Spenserian stanzas, was first published in December 1817. Because of its hostility towards Christian ideas of God (for Shelley, too often conceived of as an anthropomorphized tyranny, invoked in support of repressive political systems) and because of its accommodating attitude towards a sexual relationship between the hero and heroine who are brother and sister, the poem roused fears in its publishers, the Olliers, that it would face prosecution, and it was released in an expurgated version in January 1818 as The Revolt of Islam. The poem is above all a reimagining of the French Revolution, as Shelley’s energetic sketch of his poem’s contents in his Preface makes clear; he lists, among the poem’s elements, for example, after the depiction of ‘the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind’, a consequent ‘awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom’ (113). In turn, following the intervention of foreign powers, there is what Shelley calls ‘the temporary triumph of oppression, that secure earnest of its final and inevitable fall’ (114).
One can hear in that last clause a tone of the hopeful necessitarianism present in Queen Mab. But this poem’s concern is as much with ‘the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence’ as it is with millennial triumph. The poem’s emphasis is on the minds and hearts of the kindred revolutionary spirits, Laon and Cythna. Their relationship is a model for the love which, in his Preface’s penultimate paragraph, Shelley says ‘is celebrated every where as the sole law which should govern the moral world’ (120). Their capacity to shape ideals of communal love bears witness to Shelley’s conviction that the tide of reaction against revolutionary hope has now turned, and that ‘those who now live have survived an age of despair’ (114). His analysis of how defeated hopes led to such ‘an age of despair’ is masterly in its insights into the psychology of political disappointment, ‘a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair’ (115).
But the poem continually displays the defeat of collective action as well as its often inspiring successes. The opening canto rehearses, in the allegorical form of a witnessed flight between a snake and eagle, a struggle between forces of liberty and power, one that takes place ‘When the last hope of tramped France had failed / Like a brief dream of unremaining glory’ (1–2). That the eagle stands for power and the snake for liberty typifies the poem’s affronts to conventional expectations. Shelley retells the Book of Genesis as a power struggle won by Evil: ‘The darkness lingering o’er the dawn of things, / Was Evil’s breath and life: this made him strong / To soar aloft with overshadowing wings; / And the great Spirit of Good did creep among / The nations of mankind’ (1.28.244–8). Shelley continually stages such ideological reversal through clashing and dynamic remodellings.
Yet Laon and Cythna refuses to turn merely into a narrative of realized fantasy, in which revolutionary virtue earns easy triumphs, even as it is deeply preoccupied with fantasy – with the ways in which inner mental life links with collective political action. Laon’s narrative of his development leads into his account of how he unsuccessfully fought against the tyrant’s military forces; his delirious nightmares when imprisoned are among the most vivid passages in the poem, as are the sections in Cythna’s inset narrative of her dreams (which turns out to be true) of having given birth and losing her child after she has been captured and taken to be the tyrant Othman’s concubine, one of ‘the thralls / Of the cold tyrant’s cruel lust’ (7.4.28–9). Dreams, fantasies, visions: all are the stuff, for Shelley, out of which historical reimaginings can be made.
There is much in the poem that reflects Shelley’s revolutionary hopes, with great emphasis being laid on the inspiring effect of a radical oratory that appeals to people’s best instincts and desire, as in Laon’s speeches in canto 2 or Cythna’s in canto 8. Often the writing has the fluent intensity of this stanza from canto 9, a stanza which begins mid‐sentence, following on from an ‘As’ (9.3.26) clause at the end of the previous stanza:
So from that cry over the boundless hills,
Sudden was caught one universal sound,
Like a volcano’s voice, whose thunder fills
Remotest skies,—such glorious madness found
A path thro’ human hearts with stream which drowned
Its struggling fears and cares, dark Custom’s brood,
They know not whence it came, but felt around
A wide contagion poured—they called aloud
On Liberty—that name lived on the sunny flood. (9.4.28–36)
The abstractions – Custom and Liberty – are caught up in the ‘glorious madness’ described and enacted in the language with its enjambments ‘boundlessly’ moving across line‐endings, volcanic imagery, and rapturous imagery of agency and receptivity. Keats will rework in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in his lines about Ruth Shelley’s image of finding ‘A path thro’ human hearts’, suggesting his responsiveness to the power of Shelley’s evocation of the communicative process, always a central concern in the work of this radical poet.
But ‘struggling cares and fears’, overcome momentarily in this stanza, and a sense of ultimate ignorance about the mind and the universe (joyously transfigured though it is) in ‘know not whence they came’, are also productive poetic presences in Laon and Cythna. There is a good deal in the poem that expresses Shelley’s political fears and philosophical uncertainties. If he hopes that the relationship between Laon and Cythna will inspire a more general conversion to love, the poem reads in part like the account of an erotic love affair, one founded on shared political ideals, that is affectingly private. After being burned at the stake, the hero and heroine retreat to the Temple of the Spirit which has been first introduced in the opening canto. This conception speaks volumes about Shelley’s need to locate abiding value in some realm immune from the shocks of historical circumstance, which can as easily restore the tyrant as topple him from his throne. For all its optimism and millennial imaginings, then, Laon and Cythna is a narrative poem whose convolutions and intricacies mirror the difficulty of translating hope‐filled ideals into political practice.