Jon Kerr's Tuesday Verse
Selections of Shelley’s Poetry & Prose
Tuesday Verse is a new feature of The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley that brings you close to his poetry and, occasionally, prose. Each Tuesday we will deliver to you a poem or excerpt of a poem which Romantic scholar Jon Kerr will offer some brief thoughts about. Jon will also pair the offering with an image that may offer some context. We welcome suggestions for future posts as well as your own ideas about what you think Shelley is trying to accomplish with his verse. Enjoy!!
Jon is a recently graduated from the University of Toronto with his PhD in English literature with a specialization in the Romantics. He is currently at Mount Alison University in New Brunswick, Canada on a post doc fellowship.
P.B. Shelley, “To the Lord Chancellor”
As American’s go to the polls today in a series of epochal mid-term elections, Shelley’s To the Lord Chancellor seems a more than appropriate choice for our Tuesday Verse selection. As Timothy Webb once noted, politics was perhaps the consuming passion of Shelley’s life. On the 6 November 1819, right around the time he might have been writing this poem, Shelley wrote to his friends the Gisbornes saying, “I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey across the great sandy desert of Politics; not, you may imagine, without the hope of finding some enchanted paradise.” Shelley was what was known as a perfectibilist, someone who believed in the perfectibility of humans. He even developed a sophisticated political and social theory to compliment this belief. This does NOT mean Shelley was a utopian - he emphatically was not. But he did believe in the gradual evolution of the human species toward something like perfection.