What Shelley, Star Trek and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Have in Common: Humanism!!

I offer a very short post today on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of one of the few GREAT humanist television programmes.  Now, I will admit off the top, that I am a huge fan and always have been.  But until today, I am not sure I made the connection between Shelley and Star Trek.  But now I know what it is - both Shelley and Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry were humanists to the core. 

There is nice article on the subject of Star Trek's humanistic vision by the CEO of the British Humanist Association, Andrew Copson which can be found here. The BHA is a terrific organization that among other things sponsors a programme of annual lectures that explores humanism and humanist thought as expressed through literature and culture. The 2016 Darwin Day lecture, for example, was given by the redoubtable Jerry Coyne. Coyne, an indefatigable advocate for evolution and atheism, is also a fan of Shelley, and made these comments about him in a recent article:

Shelley could be seen as the first “New Atheist,” since he argued that the idea of God should be seen one that requires supporting evidence. The frontispiece of my book Faith Versus Fact starts with a quote from the 1813 edition of the pamphlet:

“God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi  [burden of proof] rests on the theist.”

One of the characteristics of “New Atheists”, as I see it, is their framing of religious “truths” as questions subject to empirical and rational examination (i.e., science construed broadly). Although Shelley wasn’t a scientist, I adopted him as an Honorary Scientist (and honorary New Atheist) for making the statement above.

Coyne has also spoken admiringly of and drawn attention to this blog, for which I am grateful. 

However, of more interest to readers here is the fact that the BHA annually includes the "Shelley Lecture" as part of the aforementioned series.  One of the speakers in this series was Rebecca Goldstein, recently awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal by President Obama for her work to popularise philosophy.  Goldstein spoke in Oxford in 2015 on "The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature".  I must confess that Shelley booster that I am, I was completely unaware of this series.  I think this is a symptom of the fragmentation of the Shelley community - a problem this site is designed to play a small part in remedying. 

If you like Shelley, I strongly recommend following the Association on Twitter: @BHAhumanists and @andrewcopson

But back to Star Trek.  There is a surprisingly strong connection to Shelley here. Shelley was one of the world's great humanists. His values find a surprising resonance in the themes and plots of the early years of Star Trek. Copson:

Roddenberry has a hopeful vision of the future: one in which mankind has united around shared human values, joined in a common endeavour to reach the stars, and happily left religion behind on the way. It’s a counsellor, not a chaplain that the Enterprise crew turn to when in need of guidance. Starship crews explore a cosmos that is full of beauty and wonder and they respond with awe and appreciation. This wonder does not overawe them, because ultimately the universe, and its billions of stars and planets, is a natural thing which the curious can know and understand. All the phenomena encountered within it are investigated rationally and, though they may at first seem inexplicable, are understood in the end as susceptible to naturalistic explanations.

I think that Shelley would love to imagine the world of the future conceived by Gene Roddenberry and in particular the quote in the image below:

Shelley was after all, the man who, translating Lucretius, wrote, “I tell of great matters, and I shall go on to free men's minds from the crippling bonds of superstition.”  However, were Shelley "beamed" to the present by Scotty, I think he would be very surprised to learn that "belief in the supernatural" was not already a thing of the past.  He would be shocked to see the humanist agenda in retreat -- not in the face of benign, religious belief systems, but rather radical, intolerant, orthodox fundamentalism of all varieties.  I think he would be profoundly unsettled by the realization that 200 years after the publication of Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound, a secular, humanistic society was still an imagined future that was the subject of science fiction. The "crippling bonds of superstition" bind us yet.

Which brings me to the great English social reformer, Henry Stephens Salt (1851-1939).  Salt was a great admirer of the real Percy Bysshe Shelley - the same Shelley that I am actively promoting through this website; the Shelley who, as I have written before, was first and foremost a skeptic, atheist, republican, revolutionary, philosophical anarchist, leveler, feminist and vegetarian.

As for Salt, here is what the the website devoted to him has to say,

Henry Stephens Salt was an English writer and social reformer whose work brought praise from the likes of Mahatma Gandhi. Whatever humanitarian cause Salt chose to write about he demonstrated great logic and wit to show the folly of those who opposed progress. His studies of Thoreau, Shelley and Jefferies remain highly respected even today, especially his Life of Henry David Thoreau. Salt's classic "Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress" is still in print, whilst "A Plea for Vegetarianism" is highly sought-after. His circle of friends included Ernest Bell, George Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter.

I have written extensively about the bifurcation of Shelley's reputation in "My Father's Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelley's" and I consider Salt to be a vital, inspirational forerunner of my work. In the opening chapter (titled, "Rival Views of Shelley") of his wonderful, and sadly ignored, book "Percy Bysshe Shelley" (London: Watts & Co, 1913) , Salt writes that

"...there can be no mistake whatever about the attitude Shelley took up...in the whole body of his writing toward the established system of society, which, as he avowed in one of his later letters, he wished to see, "overthrown from the foundations with all of its superstructure, maxims and forms." His principles are utterly subversive of all that orthodoxy holds most sacred, whether in ethics or in religion..." (Salt, 4)

And later:

"...Shelley was the poet-pioneer of the great democratic movement; he anticipated in his own character and aspirations, many of the revolutionary ideas now in process of development....his outlook...was in the main, an exceptionally shrewd one, inasmuch as all the chief principles which were essential to his creed are found to have increased enormously in importance during the years that have passed since his death. (Salt, 5)

Salt was reacting to the orthodox, sentimental Victorian view of Shelley which imagined him as "mere singer and sentimentalist."  This is a view of Shelley which sounds distressingly familiar in the 21st Century. I have written about it here.  Salt sought to restore Shelley's reputation as a "revolutionist". Sadly Salt, and others like him (George Bernard Shaw, for example), were swimming against the current and were drowned out by anti-Shelley, character assassination conducted by TS Eliot and his co-conspirators. It was only in the 1960s that Salt's vision of Shelley began slowly to return to the mainstream; it has yet to dominate our modern appreciation of Shelley - hence the need for a website such as this.

However, today is about Star Trek, and I found a surprisingly apt quote in Salt's opening chapter.  He wrote:

"Shelley was the poet-prophet of the great humanitarian revival; and...he sang of the future rather than of the present, and of a distant future rather than a near one..." (Salt, 7)

Well, I guess that puts Shelley in the same boat as the late, great Gene Roddenberry -- and wouldn't I love to be in that boat with the two of them!

Oh, and as for Buffy?  I did not forget!! Is there a connection? Yes there is: humanism. And if you think I am crazy, well I am not alone!! See Liam Whitton's wonderful celebration of Shelley's fellow humanist Joss Whedon here.

UPDATE: Hotel Register in Which Shelley Declared Himself to be an Atheist: FOUND

In the category of "hiding in plain sight," I can now offer a higher resolution copy of the Hotel de Villes de Londres' register.

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This has been available since 22 July on the Trinity College Library site (the "Trinity Library blog"). My original searches did not unearth this and I was forced to rely on the much poorer quality image that appeared here (the "Trinity College blog")  I have my friend Stathis Potamitis to thank for this discovery.  He is obviously more thorough than I am!! Therefore I offer my apologies to all of my readers.

The Trinity Library blog also fills in many of the gaps that were left out of the Trinity College blog. The page came to the Trinity College Library as part of a bequest by the granddaughter of Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes was a poet in his own right but is more widely known as a patron of writers.  Here is a portion of the Britannica entry:

"He published the pioneering Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848), secured a pension for Tennyson, made the American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson known in England, and was an early champion of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. He also formed a large library of erotic books that included the first serious collection of the works of the Marquis de Sade."

Several very rare Shelley editions were included in the bequest, and the page from the register was discovered pasted inside the front cover of Milnes' copy of Shelley's poem The Revolt of Islam.

The higher resolution image now puts us in the position of advancing some more refined conclusions.  Here is the relevant portion of the page:

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Here is what Trinity Library blog suggests:

"Underneath Shelley’s name is written ‘Mad. M. W. G.’ – Madame Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the future Mary Shelley – and a further name, now crossed out, was Claire Clairmont. It was very likely to have been Byron who underlined Shelley’s name along with ‘the fool’ in the Greek text, in order to vent his frustration at Shelley’s outrage, and who crossed out Claire Clairmont’s name. A later visitor cut this page out of the visitors’ book..."

Professor Wilson in the Trinity College blog adds:

“Lord Byron, no stranger to scandal, claimed to have struck out one of Shelley’s inscriptions. There are grounds to think that this is Byronic hyperbole and that it was Byron who in fact underlined, rather than struck out, Shelley’s name in the hotel register”.

This thesis originally appealed to me.  I liked the idea of Byron telling people that he had crossed out Shelley's name when in fact he had underlined it.  There is a deliciously Byronic aspect to this bit of chicanery.   But the more I think about this, the more I think it is inconsistent with his character.  I am therefore not sure how we arrive at the conclusion that Byron had anything to do with the underlining of Shelley's or crossing out of Claire's names - but more on this later.  There may, however, be details that have yet to be released by Trinity Library. 

With respect to the Greek portion of the entry, I turned to my old friend Stathis, a respected lawyer based in Athens.  Now, there are two distinct Greek entries.  The first is the famous and well known declaration by Shelley that he was an atheist.  We know know exactly what he wrote and in what order.  Says Stathis: "It is clear that what Shelley wrote is: “I am a lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist.”

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Now, it has also been suggested that Shelley's Greek is less than perfect.  Yet Stathis notes only that there is one spelling mistake (Shelley writes δημωκρατικός, with an ‘ω’ as opposed to the correct ‘o’) and that the Greek is missing its accents.

For Shelley scholarship the more interesting aspect of the register is the Greek quote that appears immediately beneath Shelley's entry.  In my last post, I proposed that the handwriting in each case appeared to be the same; allowing for the speculation that Shelley may have engaged in one of his classic ironic inversions.  But the higher resolution image from the Trinity Library post tells a different story.  Here is Stathis:

"...the Greek seems to be by two different hands – for example the α is different in the two parts, the quote has all the accents unlike the first one where only άθεος is accented, the θ is also different as is the final ς.  Shelley’s Greek includes a spelling mistake (δημωκρατικός, with an ‘ω’ as opposed to the correct ‘o’).  By contrast the Greek of the quote is perfect.  Interestingly, the word order is different from the original [Psalm 14.1]: “ο άφρων είπεν εν τη καρδία αυτού, ουκ έστιν θεός" as opposed to "Είπεν άφρων εν τη καρδία αυτού, ουκ έστι Θεός".  This would suggest someone who is familiar with both Greek and the Psalms (or possibly only the particular one) and is able to reproduce from memory, however with a slight change in the word order that still works well in Greek."

It is worth looking back to my previous post to remind ourselves what Psalm 14 is about.  There I wrote:

The opening words of Psalm 14:1 have for centuries been used by Christians to assail atheists; the “fool” of the line is assumed to be the atheist.  However, this is a mistake. The second half of the first verse goes on to say, “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” Again, the assumption is often made that “they” refers to the atheist.  But Psalm 14 2-3 goes on to make it clear that god looks down on all people as corrupt:

2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

The Hebrew word translated in the King James version as "fool" is nâbâl.  But this is an adjective that means "stupid and wicked". It comes from the root verb nâbêl, which means "to be foolish or morally wicked". Thus, I believe the connotation intended is less that the individual is a mere fool, and more that he has a defective moral character which is the result of his belief that god will not notice his bad behavior. The Psalm’s introductory note comments that ‘David describeth the corruption of a natural man. He convinceth the wicked by the light of their conscience. He glorieth in the salvation of God.”  The implication, then, is that all people are morally wicked and can only raise themselves up with the help of god. In a nutshell: “you are an idiot if you think you can do this by yourself.”

Based on the assumption that the handwriting was the same, I offered an interpretation:

Shelley was an astute reader of scripture. He has also become justly famous for his ironic inversions in which he seizes on old myths and employs them to obtain a radically different moral result. Here I could easily see Shelley using this quotation to accuse his enemies of moral perfidy. In effect saying, “You think you are better than me, but you are all, according to your own god, morally wicked.”

But it would seem that I am quite wrong.  Stathis also points us to the famous scholasticist, St Alselm:

"I noted before that the particular quote was used by Saint Anselm in his Proslogion as part of his famous ontological proof of the existence of God.  Anslem attempts a reduction ad absurdum of the denial of the existence of God.  His argument is that since God is a being of which something greater cannot be conceived, that means that it must not lack in any attribute that would make it less than perfect.  “Existence” is in Anselm’s view such an attribute, indeed a non-existent God would be less perfect than an existent God, therefore God must necessarily exist.  This “a priori” proof of the existence of God was criticized by many philosophers, including Hume and other empiricists, and that discussion must have been familiar to William Godwin and perhaps, through him, to Mary Shelley.  However, the Proslogion was written in Latin – it is not clear to me that quoting the Psalms in Greek should be seen as a reference to Saint Anselm’s argument (it would have been a clearer reference had the quote been in Anselm’s Latin)."

Shelley himself was intimately familiar with philosophical works of David Hume (though perhaps the interest indeed derived from Godwin), so I am not sure we need to assume it came to Shelley through Mary.  In any event, based on Stathis' analysis, it is clear I am wrong that Shelley made this entry and I think we must conclude that it was made by someone else. But who? As I noted previously, it is tempting to think it might have been Byron.  But the Greek is perfect and Byron's Greek was anything but perfect. It seems most likely then that someone familiar with the Psalms and St Anselm inserted the remark - someone offended by Shelley's assertion of atheism; but this hardly narrows it down as literally every educated English traveler of the day would have been familiar with both.

Which brings us to the question of the underlining. Stathis offers this thought:

"The underlining of Shelley’s name seems to be repeated by the same hand under the words ‘ο άφρων’, “the fool”.  To me this suggests that whoever quoted from the Psalms wanted to make sure that people understood that “the fool” was Shelley."

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I find this a very attractive idea.  Now it also takes us back to Byron.  Byron himself asserted that he had tampered with at least one register.  And it is important to remember, as Shelley's biographer Bieri points out, that Shelley made a similar entry in possibly as many as four registers. This means that we may not be looking at the register in which Byron crossed out Shelley's name - perhaps he crossed it out somewhere else; perhaps for the first time in history we should give Byron the benefit of the doubt!  The Hotel de Villes de Londres was, however, the place to stay in Chamonix; if Byron was going to see one of Shelley's entries, it is most likely that he saw it there.  So let's allow ourselves some guesswork.

Byron and his friends arrive at the Hotel.  He looks for and finds Shelley's entry. It would be entirely within his character to play the devil and critique Shelley by underlining the word "the Fool" and then Shelley's name. But why would he cross out Claire's name? He had been made aware at that point that Claire carried his child.  Shelley has literally forced him to admit paternity and accept responsibility. But his admission was grudging and he made it clear from the very start that he would have nothing more to do with Claire. So why would he cross her name out? What possible motive would he have to protect her? The answer is unclear to me. But I welcome the speculation of others. And if Claire's name was not crossed out by Byron, by whom.....and when? Did Claire do it herself?

Postscript

My thanks to Stathis Potamitis for his careful and thoughtful assistance.  Stathis and I have known one another for decades. One of the hallmarks of our friendship is our spirited and perpetual dialogue about our favourite poets, his (Byron) and mine (Shelley).  Indeed I can thank him for rekindling my interest in Shelley which had lain dormant for many years.  It happened in a succession of debates at seaside tavernas in the Peloponese in the winter of 2013. You can find out more about Stathis here.

Hotel Register in Which Shelley Declared Himself to be an Atheist: FOUND

There is a supplementary post here. It contains additional information and a high resolution copy of the register.  The articles should be read together.

On 19 July 2016, the University of Cambridge made a startling and almost completely unheralded announcement.  They were in possession of a page from the register of a hotel in Chamonix: not just any page and not just any hotel. The hotel was the Hotel de Villes de Londres and the page in question was the one upon which Percy Bysshe Shelley had inscribed his famous declaration that he was an atheist, a lover of humanity and a democrat. Not a copy of it….THE page. No reproduction or copy of this page has ever, to my knowledge been made available to the public.  Evidence for what Shelley wrote was based almost exclusively on either eye witnesses, such as Southey and Byron, or mere hearsay.

I make the point in my article "Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat." What did Shelley Mean?" that Shelley’s declaration is exceedingly important to our understanding of his entire literary output. There I wrote,

“I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him.  They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.” 

Thus the discovery of this page is a rather momentous occasion; rather like finding a hitherto unknown, handwritten copy of the Gettysburgh Address.

My sources for this discovery are two-fold: an article in Cambridge News, dated 19 July 2016, and an undated blog post on the University of Cambridge website. Unfortunately, neither included a high resolution copy of the register.

But based on these sources here is what we know.  Cambridge News, quoting noted Shelley scholar, Professor Ross Wilson reports, “No-one knows by whom or why, but the leaf had been removed from the visitors' book by late summer 1825, three years after Shelley had drowned in the Bay of Spezia.” Cambridge News goes on to inform us that the page was "found pasted into Shelley's copy of his poem, “The Revolt of Islam”, which addresses revolutionary politics and the long history of the nineteenth century through an elaborate mythological narrative.”

There are obvious questions.  Who removed the page? When? How do we know it had disappeared in late summer of 1825? How did it find its way into Shelley’s own copy of the Revolt of Islam? Who had this copy? Where has it been and why is it only now this important artifact is noticed.  Has it be suppressed? overlooked? ignored? Tantalizing speculations are available to us.  Clearly the page which the University of Cambridge is in possession of has a provenance which requires a more fulsome exploration. It is to be found no where on line as of today. The most important question of all is this, until now has any scholar ever seen a copy of the register, or have they all been relying on hearsay? I believe we have to assume it is the latter case and that for the first time we are seeing the real thing. This will require everyone who has ever written anything about this incident to revise their opinions.

As I said, both sources included a low resolution image of the page which is difficult to read. I have reproduced it below. However, what we can see is fascinating.

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A low resolution copy of the page taken from the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres in Chamonix.

On the left hand side of the page we see Shelley’s familiar signature – I don’t know why, but I felt quite emotional seeing this. Below it are the initials of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin: “MWG”.  Beside their names we have their country and city of origin: London, England.

Interestingly, Shelley’s signature has been underlined twice – but by whom? Well, our biographies do tell us something about this.  For generations, biographers, relying on a claim made by Byron, have believed that Byron, upon encountering Shelley's entry some weeks later, scribbled out Shelley’s name. He claims to have done this to protect his friend’s reputation (Ellis, 115; and Bieri 342-343). Biographers have universally taken Byron at his word, one remarking that, “he [Byron] must have felt that Shelley was too young to understand fully what a red rag to a bull of English public opinion the word “atheist” would be, and how quickly news of its offensive presence would be spread…” (Ellis, 115). Personally I find that assertion ridiculous.  For his part, Holmes concludes, "Byron...immediately felt obliged to cross it out as indelibly as possible for Shelley's own protection." (Holmes, 342-3) Again, ridiculous. The Byron I know was hardly solicitous of the reputations of others and relished controversy. Well, we now have evidence that Byron’s story may well have been false.

What we see when we look at the register is that quite apart from scribbling Shelley’s name out, someone (and who else but Byron) underlined it not once but twice.  Professor Wilson would seems to agree:

“Lord Byron, no stranger to scandal, claimed to have struck out one of Shelley’s inscriptions. There are grounds to think that this is Byronic hyperbole and that it was Byron who in fact underlined, rather than struck out, Shelley’s name in the hotel register”.

Now many motives may be ascribed to this if we are to assume that the underlining is Byron’s.  One could conclude, charitably, that Byron delighted in his friend’s provocational action and sought to draw attention to it. On the other hand it could have been a crude attempt to compound what he might have viewed as Shelley’s indiscretion.  We can’t forget that for all of his bluster, Byron was anything but an atheist or even deist.  Given that fact that he appears to have lied about his action, the latter conclusion seems the more likely. There is something of an irony bound up in this. If in fact Byron did this to attract unwelcome attention to Shelley’s provocative statements, he actually would have played right into Shelley’s hand – for Shelley would have most likely thanked Byron for helping to draw attention to his declaration.

Under the column heading, “destination”, Shelley writes “L’Enfer”; both for himself and for Mary. We might find this amusing – but it was anything but in those days. For more on this see my article Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat." What did Shelley Mean?. 

We then come to the heart of the matter, his famous declaration of atheism. Until I looked at the register, I, like everyone else, assumed that the only words he wrote were the Greek words for “atheist”, “democrat’ and “lover of humanity”.  The ordering of these words is different in almost every version.  Holmes for example use this formulation: "Democrat, Philanthropist, Atheist" (Holmes, 342); PMS Dawson uses this one: "I am a philanthropist, utter democrat, and an atheist." (Dawson, 54).  Until we can see a better copy of the Cambridge document, it is difficult to tell who is right. And I think it actually matters.

Bieri notes that Shelley’s entry occasioned caustic rejoinders from fellow travelers, including one who wrote in Greek that Shelley was a “fool”. I doubt Bieri ever saw the original register – based on what we have just learned from Cambridge; if he did, he does not say so. And his footnotes for this assertion point us to articles by Gavin de Beer (1958) and Timothy Webb (1984); neither of whom saw the original register either – everyone relying on contemporary third party reports – in law we call this “hearsay” evidence. Both of these article are unavailable online.

Not knowing Greek, I forwarded the Cambridge document to my friend Stathis Potamitis, a distinguished lawyer in Athens. Stathis reported:

“There is a passage in quotation marks which is a line from a Psalm (14:1) “o άφρων είπεν εν τη καρδία αυτού ουκ έστιν θεός”. This I recognized because it was used by St. Anselm in his ontological proof of the existence of God.  It means ‘the fool said in his heart there is no god’. There are three words (the third one is very long and may be more than one that are linked) that precede the quotation, but I can only make out one of them: “φιλάνθρωπος», which literally means he who loves humans, but is usually translated as charitable.” 

It is the quotation that interests me.  Bieri, relying on de Beer and Webb, jumped to the conclusion that these words were added by someone else and were an attack on Shelley.  No one that I am aware of has ever ascribed these words to Shelley himself. However, while I am not handwriting expert, my untutored eye tells me that whoever wrote the first three words included the quotation. I would welcome the thoughts of scholars who have spent more time with Shelley’s handwriting than I have. If this is true it adds an exciting dimension to this incident.

I can understand why people would jump to the conclusion that these were not Shelley’s words.  The opening lines of Psalm 14:1 have for centuries been used by Christians to assail atheists; the “fool” of the line is assumed to be the atheist.  However, this is a mistake. The second half of the first verse goes on to say, “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” Again, the assumption is often made that “they” refers to the atheist.  But Palm 14 2-3 goes on to make it clear that god looks down on all people as corrupt:

2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

The Hebrew word translated in the King James version as "fool" is nâbâl.  But this is an adjective that means "stupid and wicked". It comes from the root verb nâbêl, which means "to be foolish or morally wicked". Thus, I believe the connotation intended is less that the individual is a mere fool, and more that he has a defective moral character which is the result of his belief that god will not notice his bad behavior. The Psalm’s introductory note comments that ‘David describeth the corruption of a natural man. He convinceth the wicked by the light of their conscience. He glorieth in the salvation of God.”  The implication, then, is that all people are morally wicked and can only raise themselves up with the help of god. In a nutshell: “you are an idiot if you think you can do this by yourself.”

Shelley was an astute reader of scripture. He has also become justly famous for his ironic inversions in which he seizes on old myths and employs them to obtain a radically different moral result. Here I could easily see Shelley using this quotation to accuse his enemies of moral perfidy. In effect saying, “You think you are better than me, but you are all, according to your own god, morally wicked.”

Much of what I have written is, of course speculation. But my desire is to get the discussion started and focused on earthing the facts. When the University of Cambridge makes a better copy available and when they tell us more of the provenance of the page, we will be much further down the road.  Look for updates here.

One last note.  while Shelley's name is not crossed out, someone's is.  If you look below Shelley's name and Mary's initials, you will see that a name has been heavily over-scored.  Could this be Claire? If so, who crossed her name out, and why?

References

Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley; A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (2008). Print. 

Dawson, P.M.S.  The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Print.

Ellis, David. Byron in Geneva, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,( 2011) Print

Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit Weidenfield. London: and Nicolson, 1974). Print.

Shelleyana!! My Father's Shelley, Part Two

"Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, "Remain thou, thou art so beautiful'."

Letter to John Gisborne, 18 June 1822. The Letters of Shelley, II 435-6

We all know what happened 16 days later; the past, the present and the future were indeed obliterated.

It is the anniversary of Shelley's death today [this article was written on July 8th 2017], and I thought the best way to observe this sad occasion was to turn again to the enormous impact Shelley on me and my dad's life - though we had radically different ideas about exactly who Shelley was. The "different" Shelleys were the subject of my essay, My Father's Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys." I want to further explore this theme by digging into a photographic album I discovered among my father's effects after he died. It is a slim volume entitled "Shelleyana". I think we will find much to reflect upon, and Shelley may perhaps seem less remote and more immediate.

My father's interest in Shelley must have started very early for reasons that will emerge quickly.  And that fact that it did so inevitably leads my to conclude that his mother, Edith Wills, must have had something to do with it.  She had an absolutely incalculable effect on his life.  One of the reasons I know this is that shortly before his death I came into possession of hundreds of letters that he had written to her.  She appears to have kept almost all of them. There is a generous sprinkling of those she wrote to him, but he does not appear to have been as concerned for posterity as she was.

My father was born in 1916 in Montreal, Canada. Very early in life he exhibited an aptitude for, and an interest in, the arts.  This came from his mother, and not his father.  He assiduously studied music and was good enough that he was in a position at one point to chose a career as a professional pianist.  But he abandoned this for the stage. In his late teens he was active in the Montreal theatrical community.  Then he did something truly extraordinary. In 1936, at age 18 he boarded a ocean liner and sailed for England to pursue an acting career.

While he did not appear to have set the acting word on fire, he did seem to progress his career until the Second World War ruined his dreams as it did those of almost everyone else on the planet.

The cover of my father's Shelley "scrap book".

While in England he also took the time to pursue a passion of his: Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know this because I have an unusual little scrap book which I found on his shelf with the rest of his Shelley materials. It is a bit shabby now, but he appears to have spent considerable effort to put it together - beginning in 1937.

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"Shelleyana"

Now the term "Shelleyana" is an interesting term in and of itself, and I have been unable to find any "official" definition for it.  It is used to refer to collections of materials that pertain to Shelley and his circle. It is clearly a coined term and I can think of no other example of it. There is an affectionate overtone; it strikes one as diminutive. It is even a little cloying.  All of which is entirely in keeping with the manner in which Shelley was viewed by a large segment of the literate intelligentsia in the 19th century. I wrote about this in my article, "Shelley in the 21st Century."

Many people who held Shelley in high esteem had collections of "Shelleyana".  These might be relics, or they might be first editions, or they might be rare or unusual books about him or those he was close to. For example, here is an article from the New York Times in 1922 extolling a particular collection of Shelleyana which was available to the public on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death.

My father always referred to his collection of books on Shelley as his "Shelleyana".  And as suits the reverential, almost hagiographic overtone, which the term connotes, his scrap book begins with not one, but THREE portraits of the poet - each accorded its own page.

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Amelia Curran's 1819 portrait of Shelley which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery

This is the most famous, even iconic, of the portraits.  Shelley sat for Curran in Rome on May 7 and 8 in 1819. Curran was known to Shelley and Mary and they had last encountered her in Godwin's home in 1818.  Crucially, this painting was NOT finished in his life time, and must be considered to be an extremely unreliable likeness.  Shelley's biographer, James Bieri notes, "It has become the misleading image by which so many have misperceived Shelley." We know that neither Mary nor Shelley liked it - nor did his friends.  The history of this painting and its effect on the way in which Shelley came to be regarded can not be underestimated, but this is not the time and place for such a discussion. Suffice to say that it played directly into the hands of those Victorians who preferred to imagine Shelley as a child-like, almost androgynous being - this is the "castrated" Shelley (in Engles' famous phrase). The man in this painting is NOT my Shelley - but it was most decidedly my father's Shelley.

Here is the second:

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A crayon portrait based on the painting by George Clint

Well, what can you say?  Here Shelley has lost almost all of his masculine characteristics and the ethereal being the Victorians (and my father) so came to adore is born. We are getting very close Mathew Arnold's vision of Shelley as "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain".  Clint's portrait was painted in 1829 years after his death, and is known to be a composite of Curran's painting and a sketch by Shelley's friend, Edward Williams.

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Sketch by Edward Ellerker Williams, Pisa, 27 November 1821

Curran's painting was repainted several times and each time, Shelley become less recognizable, more child-like, more androgynous, more ethereal. I believe these images of Shelley played a central role in the re-invention and distortion of his reputation.  For example, here is Francis Thompson (one of his Victorian idolators) writing in 1889:

“Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of Nature, playmate of her elemental daughters; "pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind; bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag to crag of inaccessible fancies; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending and descending it;--he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and sealed with the unshatterable seal of doom, and cast down deep below the rolling tides of Time.” - Francis Thompson, "Shelley", 1889

The story of the incalculable damage that these stylized images wrought, divorced as they were from reality, has yet to be properly told. But I think it is fair to say that had no portraits of Shelley ever existed, we might see him in a very different light today.  I think that portraits like these fed a particular vision of Shelley that my father fed off.  Looking into the eyes of these three Shelleys, it is difficult to see the revolutionary, the philosophical anarchist, the atheist that he was.

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Postcard purchased at the Bodleian by my father, July 1937

On the next page we find, not unsurprisingly, a postcard my dad purchased in July, 1937 in Oxford at the Bodleian. It displays certain Shelley "relics".  These are: (1) the copy of Sophocles allegedly taken from Shelley's hand after his body washed ashore; (2) locks of Shelley's and Mary's hair; (3) a portrait of him as a boy; (4) his baby's rattle; and (5) his pocket watch and seals.

The idea that Shelley was found with that book in his hand is a story we owe to one of the most notorious liars in history, Edward Trelawny who for his entire life trafficked in stories derived from his association with Shelley and Byron - two men, both dead, who could not contradict his lies. There are certain element of his biography of Shelley which we can take at face value, but they are few and far between.  But stories like that, when the become "relics" and part of "Shelleyana" feed myths. My dad was always fond of Trelawny - and Trelawny did my father the ultimate disfavour of serving up a vision of Shelley that was almost completely divorced from reality.

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Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial, University College, Oxford. Commissioned in 1891.

Next up, entirely predictably, is one of the great abominations in the canon of Shelleyana - the famous (or infamous) Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford. The history of this hardly bears repeating. It was so routinely disfigured and disrespected by young Oxford students that today it is actually encased in a cage. It was Shelley's daughter-in-law who perpetrated this imaginative, shambolic disaster.  Paul Foot absolutely shreds this statue in his speech, "The Revolutionary Shelley"

Not content with this, she went further and commissioned Henry Weeks to reinvent Shelley as Christ and Mary as, well, another Mary. The resulting statute was, according to my father, refused by Westminister on the grounds of his atheism - if this anecdote is in any way true, I rather doubt his atheism had anything to do with it; more likely it was the monstrously poor taste in which the statue was executed. You be the judge:

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Henry Weeks, Shelley Memorial, Christchurch Priory, Bournemouth, England

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Shelley's birthplace, "Field Place", Horsham, Sussex.

It is now that the scrapbook becomes more interesting, for it becomes clear that my 19 year old father was engaged on a sort of pilgrimage, following in the footsteps of Shelley. The preceding pages feature postcards clearly acquired on a visit to Oxford in July of 1937; a visit clearly focused almost exclusively on Shelley.  However, the previous year, and almost immediately upon his arrival in England, he traveled to Shelley's birthplace where he took a sequence of poorly composed but magical photographs:

There are thousands of beautiful pictures of Field Place; these are awful. But that is not the point. These photographs have a haunting, poignant, other-worldly quality. They were taken by an 18 year old boy who was enthralled by his hero, Shelley. And they take us back in time almost a century.  He kept a very detailed diary of those years, and his thoughts and reflections in this pilgrimage are memorable and touching.

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The graves of Mary, Mary Wollestonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Florence Shelley and the latter's wife, Jane Shelley

Dad also visited the graves of Mary, Mary Wollestonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Florence Shelley and the latter's wife, Jane Shelley.  As he notes, "They are all in one plot of ground (barely sufficient for five people to die down)....One stone does for all." Interestingly, Mary had refused Trelawny's offer of the plot he had reserved for himself beside Shelley's grave in Rome. I have always found that curious, though none of Shelley's biographers offer any thoughts on this.  Had she not refused, it would have been she and not Trelawny who is buried beside Shelley.  This is, I think, a great loss; for more than one reason.

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The home in Marlow in 1937

Prior to visiting Oxford in July of 1937, my father also dropped by Marlow to visit Shelley's home in that location. The pictures are somewhat clearer and he records the inscription above the dwelling which includes the line "...and was here visited by Lord Byron."

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Lechlade, Gloucestershire, 1936

One of my father's favourite poems by Shelley was "Lechlade:A Summer-Evening Churchyard" so, of course he went there in 1936.  In a chemist shop owned by a man named Davis, he was informed that according to local legend, Shelley had strolled through a particular path in the town composing the poem. The top photograph shows this path, the bottom, the neighbouring cathedral. 

We now come to one of the more significant fabrications of literary history. The cremation of Shelley. Here is the painting by Louis Edward Fournier;

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Louis Edward Fournier, "The Burning of Shelley", 1889.

It is not for me to debunk the many myths created by one of history's great liars, Edward John Trelawny (Bieri does an excellent job in his biography of Shelley). Shelley was indeed cremated by the bay of Lerici.  The body had washed ashore after 10 days rotting in the ocean.  It was thrown into a shallow grave and covered with lime.  It was only over a month later that permission was finally received to exhume the body and cremate it - and what they found was horrific - the body was "badly mutilated, decomposed and destroyed." Mary was NOT at the burning and Byron refused to witness it himself. This painting, like so many of the other signal components of the Shelley myth, was hagiographic in tone and divorced from reality. But to an impressionable 19 year old Canadian on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Shelley, it was as good as gold.

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Upper right, Keats' tomb. Lower left, Trelawny, lower right, Shelley, Photographs 1950

The Second World War then stole almost 10 years from my father's life, as it did for so many millions more.  He was lucky to be demobilized quickly and lucky again to find employment quickly. He became a journalist and rose very quickly to become the most famous Canadian broadcaster of his era. I will tell THIS story elsewhere. In 1950 he secured an extraordinary assignment.  Tour the world and send stories back to Canadians eager to learn about strange an exotic locales.  One of the places he went was Rome and it will surprise no one reading this that he made a beeline to the Protestant Cemetery and Shelley's grave.

The photographs are poorly composed and either under or over exposed.  But again, they have an intensity, a nostalgia and a haunting quality which are undeniable. So many things strike me.  why did my father have his picture taken at Keats' grave and not Shelley's? He had very little time for Keats. Why only a picture of the tombstone itself? I have been in the Cemetery. It is an extraordinary lace and it must have been even more extraordinary in 1950 when the world was literally bereft of tourists.  The photograph of Shelley's grave, in many formats, graced our home through out my life.  My father curiously never had it properly framed or preserved - and the negatives are long lost.  But I treasure these images, the more so for their faded character, there soiled nature and their shop-worn corners.

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Larry Henderson at Casa Magni, Lerici, Italy, September 1986

My father was a thorough man, and in 1986, as a vigorous 70 year old he made his way to the Bay of Lerici to visit the site of Shelley's death and his last domicile, the Casa Magni. Anna Mercer has made her own pilgrimage to Lerici, and her wonderful story, "In the Footsteps of the Shelleys" can be found here.   He can be seen here, in one of his very typical poses, in front of Shelley's last home.

From his first pilgrimage in 1936, to his last 50 years later in 1986, my father was devoted to the man and the poet he perceived Shelley to be.  While we could never find any common ground in our mutual appreciations for Shelley, which I wrote about in "My Father's Shelley: A Tale of Two Shelleys", I have come to realize that in his passion for Shelley, I am my father's son (and perhaps my grandmother's grandson!). I do not know if my father's and grandmother's love for this man will descend to another generation of Hendersons, but if it does not and if it ends here, it has be a truly memorable run. And were Shelley alive to have witnessed all this, as a man who believed that the world could indeed be changed one person at a time, I am hope he would be well and truly satisfied.

THE WIND has swept from the wide atmosphere
  Each vapor that obscured the sunset’s ray;
And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair
  In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day.
Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,        
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
 
They breathe their spells toward the departing day,
  Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,
  Responding to the charm with its own mystery.        
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.
 
Thou too, aerial pile, whose pinnacles
  Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells,        
  Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,
Around whose lessening and invisible height
Gather among the stars the clouds of night.
 
The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres;
  And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,        
Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,
  Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around;
And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,
Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.
 
Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild        
  And terrorless as this serenest night;
Here could I hope, like some inquiring child
  Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned at sea, 8 July 1822.

"Death is mild and terrrorless as this serenest night."

My Father's Shelley; a Tale of Two Shelleys

When I was very little, my father, dissatisfied with the state of my education, decided that he would offer Sunday evening lectures in his library.  And so each Sunday, at exactly the time Bonanza was on, my brother and I would be herded into the library, moaning and complaining.  A chalk board was produced.  And the entire history of the Greek and Roman world played out, slowly, labouriously, on that chalk board over the ensuing years...or at least it seemed like years. 

In addition to ancient history, recent poetry was assigned for memorization. When I say recent, I mean poetry from the 18th and 19th centuries.  To this day, I have a little volume of around 20 poems that he gave to me – all specially selected.  It was quite a cross-section.

We would actually be QUIZZED on poetry and history!!  As if school wasn't bad enough. There were, however, incentives.  I think we got 50 cents for every poem we could successfully recite.  I recently found a little postcard that he sent home from one of his travels.  It ended with a gentle admonition to make sure I had something new memorized for him upon his return.  I discovered one of the quizzes years after his death.  Have a look...how well would a 10-12 year old do today? -- how well would a university student do?!

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Now as much as this grated on me when i was young, it did engender in me a love for classical culture and poetry.  It also led to some amusing disagreements over the years.  My father was deeply aggrieved, for example, that I failed to enshrine Pope's translation of the Iliad as the only translation worth having.  On one visit to our home, he stood at my bookshelves gazing with open dismay on my collection of translations of the Iliad - at that time well over a dozen.  He thought this was perverse.  My wife ventured the thought that it must be wonderful to see a seed that he had planted grow to such fruition - but he was having none of it; I had sinned against Pope, the God of the Iliad. Weeks later, the issue was still occupying his thoughts. At a lunch with my brother, agitated, he put down his knife and fork and asked my brother what was wrong with me.  Alexander Pope had been good enough for him (and by extension the entire world), why did I feel the need to venture afield and embrace these other pretenders: "Ross, what is wrong with Alexander Pope?" he lamented in his highly theatrical voice. What indeed?!

Later in life he also came down firmly on the side of the Greeks.  Once, my brother gave him a book on the emperor Diocletian.  Dad promptly returned the book unread, bitterly remarking upon Ross' and my putative adherence to Roman civilization - "The Romans," he remarked dismissively, "were nothing but bully-boys." But I digress.

As I grew up, like most boys, I actively sought out things to like and do that distanced me from my father.  For example, I spent most of my high school years studying maths – a subject matter as alien to my father as any subject on earth.  Then I went to University to be a geologist.  Disaster.  I finally dropped out and worked for a year or so, only to return to University where I ended up studying English Literature.  I am not sure what it was that led me to Shelley.  But something did…. perhaps the awful shadow of some unseen power.  I went deeper and deeper: first an undergraduate thesis and then an MA thesis (undertaken under the supervision of that great Shelley scholar, Milton Wilson).  I even started out on a PhD before I came to my senses. 

Anyway, to the point.  In those days, when one’s thesis was completed, they would bind up a couple of copies for you.  Now by this point in my life, I have to confess, somewhat ruefully, that my father and I were barely on speaking terms.  Nonetheless, like most young men, I still craved his approval.  So, thesis in hand, I traveled to the family homestead to see my parents.  Burning a hole in my briefcase was a copy of my thesis: “Prometheus Unbound and the Problem of Opposites.” (Hopefully soon to be published in this space!)

He was in his library.  After spending sometime in the kitchen with my mum, I screwed up my nerve and knocked on the door. He called me in.  As always, we had to stand at the door waiting for him to finish whatever thought it was that he was in the midst of jotting down.  He was ALWAYS writing, furiously, on a clipboard.  Finally, after what seemed an eternity, he looked up and said hello. 

I explained what I was doing.  I presented him with the thesis.  And then something truly surreal happened; something that seared itself into my memory.  Without really looking at it, he smiled absently, congratulated me and turned to walk toward his library shelves with my thesis.  He casually remarked over his shoulder, “Thank you, Gra, I shall put it with the rest of my Shelleyana.” 

Time slowed to a stop. I remember struggling to understand what that could mean.  But my gaze followed his hands, up, up, up to the higher shelves.  And there it was…sweet mother of god…maybe 10 linear FEET of books on Shelley. 

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Approximately 1/3 of my father's "Shelleyana". Most of these books are first editions.

I did not realize at the time, but this collection also happened to include a first edition of “The Revolt of Islam” and the four volume 1839 Collected Works that Mary put out.  I kid you not. In fact, it turned out that almost everything up there on those shelves was a first edition of some sort. It was like an Aladdin’s cave specially built for Shelley scholars.  People like ME…people like…oh my god…my DAD!! Click on the image to see the slide show:

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Inscription to my brother in Hutchinson's Collected Works of Shelley

Now in retrospect, none of this should have really been a big surprise.  For starters, my brother’s middle name is Shelley (I am not sure he appreciated the choice as a boy).  Dad had given him a copy Hutchinson's "The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley" (a gorgeous single volume, with gilt edged paper and blue calf skin binding) in 1956...AT AGE ONE!!  It bore an inscription to my brother: 'The secret strength of things / Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome / Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!.'

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My markups to Hutchinson's "Poetical Works of Shelley" -- given to my brother at age 1.

I knew this because it was this volume I had used throughout my entire course of Shelley studies.

And then, finally there was that other piece of evidence: there had been a Shelley poem in that little black volume I was given when I was around 10.  As it turned out, Shelley was my father’s favourite poet.  The man I barely spoke to, the man I had spent most of my life distancing myself from, was -- just like me -- devoted to Percy Bysshe Shelley. This was a sobering and disquieting revelation. As I reflect back on this, what I wonder is this: was it THAT poem? Was it Shelley's poem, the one he gave me to memorize, that planted the seed which flowered so many years later?

Well, before we get to that, I am afraid to say that it actually gets weirder.  As I stood there, my jaw working, no sounds coming out of my mouth, he turned back to me and asked me what I meant by the “Problem of Opposites.”  He asked if this was a reference to Jung, by any chance.  By this time I knew where this is going -- there was an inevitability to it; there was an inexorable fate at work.  He then gestured vaguely across the room at another shelf load of books.  Yes, that’s right: The Complete Works of C.G. Jung.  He asked if I would like to borrow any of them if I was continuing my studies on Jung and Shelley.

Because, of COURSE, that is EXACTLY what I had spent the better part of four years doing - applying Jungian theory to the study of Shelley's poetry.

I should point out that my approach to Shelley was so arcane and unique that my thesis supervisor, Milton Wilson, had a hard time drumming up professors to quiz me. It was niche to say the least.  Yet somehow I had stumbled onto a course of study that duplicated two of my father's keenest interests.

Retreating from the library in some bemusement, I walked into the kitchen and my poor mother looked at me in dismay.  “You look awful,” she said, “You look like you just saw a ghost. What happened in there?” Good question.

I can laugh about all of this now.  But then?  Not so much.  I was young and desperate to be different. 

As I sat at the kitchen table trying to sort through my emotions, I thought, “Well, at least, I now have something to talk to him about”.  And so a desultory communication began.  But this too soon turned into almost open warfare.  My father’s Shelley, as I VERY quickly discovered, was very different from mine. He loved the lyric poet.  He loved the Victorian version. He loved Mary’s sanitized version.  In a weird way he bought into Mathew Arnold's caricature of Shelley (“a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating his wings in a luminous void in vain.”) – and loved him the more for it.  He hated the idea that Shelley was a revolutionary.  I have an article coming on the truly remarkable evolution of Shelley's reputation - it is unlike almost another poet in history. Well, my father loved the Victorian version of Shelley, the version which led Engles to remark:

"Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of [his] readers in the proletariat; the bourgeouise own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today”

I once gave him a copy of Foot’s “The Red Shelley”.  This was not well received.  He hated the idea that Shelley was anything but the child-like construct of Francis Thompson:

“Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of Nature, playmate of her elemental daughters; "pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind; bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag to crag of inaccessible fancies; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending and descending it;--he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and sealed with the unshatterable seal of doom, and cast down deep below the rolling tides of Time.”

We had heated arguments about this.

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My father's marginalia in Santayana's short monograph on Shelley. "not a communist." Almost every statement Santayana makes on this page is completely incorrect,

As recently as a few months back, I was browsing through his library (he has been dead these past 9 years, but I have kept most of the library together – it is a reflection of his vast and complex mind).  I pulled a slim volume from the Shelley shelves; one I had not looked at before.  It was George Santayana’s short monograph on Shelley,  "Shelley: Or the Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles".  My father was a fierce marker-up of books – another thing he seems to have bequeathed to me. I like flipping through his books to see what he underlined and what his comments were.  I often get into arguments with his comments, writing my own in beside his.  Anyway, half way through the essay, in one of the margins, were the words , “NOT A COMMUNIST” in a bold, firm, triumphant hand. 

Now, my father was a big time anti-communist; he spent most of his life fighting the cold war and then refighting it after it was over.  One of his great fears was that Shelley was some sort of communist!  And of course, this EXACTLY what the communists thought he was! Marx:

"The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism."

But there, for my father, in the calming words of the great George Santayana, was solace and respite: no, Shelley was NOT a communist.  Phew. 

There can never be a resolution between these two visions of Shelley.  My father's Shelley was a Shelley built on false foundations, willful misreadings and wishful thinking. He, and others like him, created a mythical version, so far removed from the historical Shelley that it is scarcely believable. The way in which this awful perversion of history took place is concisely covered in Michael Gamer's article, “Shelley Incinerated.” (The Wordsworth Circle 39.1/2 (2008): 23-26.) I intend to canvas the issues more fully at a future date.

It saddens me that our two Shelleys were separated by an unbridgeable chasm. But I have to always remember that my Shelley could never have come to life had not my father, in a very different time and place, conceived his own Shelley, and fallen in love with him and endeavoured to convey that passion to his children.

But how about that poem? The poem that may have planted the seed of which I was utterly unaware.  What exactly was the Shelley poem in that little binder he had given to me at age 9 or 10? I know it by heart to this very day.  It was this:.

Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains,--
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;--
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
The Earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.

II.
Then Alpheus bold,
On his glacier cold,
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks—with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
And the black south wind
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below.
And the beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent’s sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph’s flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.

III.
'Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!'
The loud Ocean heard,
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The Earth’s white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam;
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream:—
Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind,--
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

IV.
Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearled thrones;
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light;
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest’s night:--
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the Ocean’s foam,
And up through the rifts
Of the mountain clifts
They passed to their Dorian home.

V.
And now from their fountains
In Enna’s mountains,
Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;--
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
When they love but live no more.

Well chosen, Dad, well chosen; and thank you for this great gift (thanks also for not giving ME the middle name, Shelley!).

Shelley in the 21st Century

Shelley in the 21st Century

Most writing on Shelley seems frustratingly designed for scholarly audiences and much of it is almost unreadable by anyone outside a university setting.  Most of the books and articles written between 1980 and around 2005 are written in a scholarly style that limits readership to a handful of people: esoteric, jargon-filled, arcane and at times pompous.

This is a pity because many of these books contain extremely important insights that would help the lay reader to better understand Shelley’s intent in writing a poem like Prometheus Unbound. For my part, I hope to write about Shelley in a manner that is straightforward and accessible.

Evidence of the extent of the problem abounds today.  When the Guardian published a recently discovered, highly charged, political poem by Shelley, the reactions in the comments section were telling.  The Guardian readership is literate and engaged, yet the vast majority of the hundreds of comments which were posted suggested that even a literate audience had a very poor understanding of who Shelley was and what his philosophical and political preoccupations were.  Here is a representative sampling of how readers reacted to the poem:

Maybe Corbyn ought to quote this Shelley stuff at [ Parliamentary Question Period].

If Jeremy Corbyn needed a script, he need not look any more.

Kind of like Tsipras and Corbyn, but with balls.

Corbyn during next [Parliamentary Question Period]: "I’ve had a poem sent to me by Shelley which I would like to read to the house"

Young, keen and well afire - good for him. Every era, every minute, every place needs such a cutting flame.

Anti-war, Anti-colonialism, Anti-slavery, Anti-state-oppression. I've just read it, and it's brilliant. I wonder why it disappeared?

Revolutionary socialist with the guts to stand outside his privileged class, expose its oppressive nature & champion workers.

Had no idea he was so radical..wow...RESPECT!

Interesting to read his critique of contemporary British imperialism within the poem. I've tended to largely miss Percy Shelley's work before, will have to have a proper look at it.

At a recent seminar I attended at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Patricia Matthew commented that many of her students were surprised to learn that there was a Shelley other than Mary, his wife and author of Frankenstein.  A nephew of mine in fourth year at a distinguished Canadian university thought I was talking about Mary when it was mentioned that I was engaged in research on Shelley.

And when Shelley IS taught in university, it is usually his more anodyne, less political poetry that is offered to students. As recently as 1973, Kathleen Raine in Penguin’s “Poet to Poet” series omitted important poems such as Laon and Cythna as well as most of his overtly political output – and she does so with gusto and states explicitly, “without regret”. In the most widely available edition of his poetry, the editor, Isabel Quigley, cheerfully notes, "No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety" and goes on to suggest wrongly that Shelley was a more than anything else a platonist. With friends like this, who needs enemies! The current Norton Anthology includes this extraordinarily unrepresentative sampling of Shelley’s poetry:

from A Defense of Poetry; from Preface to Prometheus Unbound; A Dirge; Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude; Worlds on Worlds; The World's Great Age; O World, O Life, O Time; Song of Apollo; To Jane. The Invitation; The Triumph of Life; Stanzas Written in Dejection; To Jane. The Invitation; To — [Music, when soft voices die].

Editors often consign sophisticated political tracts such as Queen Mab to the category of “juvenilia” with the predictable result. This is all nothing short of criminal.

Shelley, to the extent he enters a casual, non-academic conversation at all, enters shorn of almost everything for which he stood. The reasons for this are varied and complex but what Michael Gamer refers to as the “Shelley Myth” and what Paul Foot in his thrilling book, Red Shelley, more tartly refers to as the “castration of Shelley” is a fact that anyone who cares about Shelley must accept.  I think of it as the “hallmarkification” of his reputation.  Most people encounter snippets of Shelley on greeting cards one of the most common being: “There is a harmony in Autumn, and a lustre in its sky”

That this has happened represents a great loss to modern culture and society because if ever there was a poet speaking to our time, it is Shelley. Shelley was first and foremost a skeptic, a skeptic who was also an atheist, republican, revolutionary, philosophical anarchist, leveler, feminist and vegetarian (he also happened to write some rather fine poetry and essays!). The issues which preoccupied him, for example vast disparities in wealth, have if anything become exacerbated with the passage of time. Wealth today is concentrating in fewer hands than at almost any time in history.  Far from the influence of religion receding, its icy grip has been strengthened, and where it grows in power so too do tyrannical and oppressive regimes. The man who, translating Lucretius avowed that: “I tell of great matters, and I shall go on to free men's minds from the crippling bonds of superstition” would be absolutely appalled at this development. Shelley believed that “…the delusions of Christianity are fatal to genius and originality; they omit thought.”

Paul Foot, one of the 20th century’s great socialists had this to say in summing up Shelley’s life:

“Shelley was not dull. His poems reverberate with energy and excitement. He decked the grand ideas which inspired him in language which enriches them and sharpen communication with the people who can put them into effect. That is why he was loved and treasured by the chartists workers, the socialist propagandists of the 1890s, the suffragists and feminists of the first 20 years of the 20th century and that is why socialists, radicals and feminists of every hue should read Shelley today – read him, learn him by heart and teach him to their children. If Shelley’s great revolutionary poetry – all those glaciers, and winds and volcanoes – can get to work on the imagination of the hundreds of thousands of people who have had enough of our rotten society and of the racialism and corruption off which it feeds; if that poetry can inspire them to write and talk with a new energy, a new confidence and a new splendour, then there is no telling what will happen. Certainly the police will have to be sent for.”

Engles, commenting on the importance of Shelley’s thought to the 19th century wrote that “Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of [his] readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today.” And Marx himself offered this idea:

"The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand and love them rejoice that Byron died at 36, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at 29, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism."

My goal is to try to restore this man to at least a few modern readers. Shelley has the power to enthrall, thrill and inspire – to change our world. Our institutions need to teach him in a radically different way. The reactions of the lay readers of the Guardian demonstrate the power of his ideas. Perhaps this individual said it best:

"Maybe a copy of this poem ought to be nailed to the door of the Palace of Westminster in the same way Luther nailed his '95 theses' to the door of a church in Wittenberg…….our political class needs a Reformation just as much as the Catholic Church did……"

It is time to bring him back – we need him; tyrannies, be they of the mind or the world are implacable foes.