Songs consecrate to truth and liberty - Shelley's first book of poems

Another bicentennial landmark: Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (1816) by Percy Bysshe Shelley, his first book of poems, although hardly his first book.  His first good book; his first great poems; at the time, barely noticed, badly reviewed and completely misunderstood.

I had not read the book as such until a few minutes ago.  I had trusted the editors of my selected Shelley, the Norton Critical Edition Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, which includes the 700-line “Alastor” and the lyrics “Stanzas. – April, 1814,” “Mutability,” and “To Wordsworth.”  I don’t like Shelley that much.  Before writing this note, though, why not glance at a facsimile of the original, and thus I discover that two of the poems, including the only other long one, are chunks of Queen Mab (1813), reworked, but still, I've read it, one is a worthless political poem about Napoleon, and the whole thing could easily be published in forty pages – so just read it – which I did.

Thus I discover “Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante,” a translation that I would have assumed was an imitation, a parody, if I didn’t know otherwise:

Guido, I would that Lappo, thou, and I,
Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly
With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend,
And that no change, nor any evil chance,
Should mar our joyous voyage…

Dante then wishes that their lady friends were also with them on the magic ship.  It is the emphasis on the “magic ship” that is perfectly Shelleyan – Rossetti’s version sounds totally different – the great dream of the Shelley whose great non-intellectual hobby was folding paper boats, setting them aflame, and launching them onto Italian lakes.  Plus, I know, the irony, the lines are about what eventually killed him.

I didn’t notice anything else this good in the book, but I just read it, so who knows what I missed.

“Alastor” is about a poet – The Poet – who rejects real beauty for ideal beauty, a real woman for a dream girl, community for solitude, and likely a number of other oppositions, and it kills him.  As Shelley writes in his Preface,

He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception.  Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.

I enjoy the poem mostly for its wild landscapes, the scenes of the poet’s fruitless search:

The waves arose.  Higher and higher still
Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest’s scourge
Like serpents struggling in a vulture’s grasp.

“To Wordsworth” is a sonnet as literary criticism, or maybe just literary complaint, one we have all expressed in less poetic form at some point.  You used to be so great – how sad that your new book (in this case, The Excursion (1814)), the one other people are saying is so good, stinks so badly.

In honored poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, -
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

Although Shelley’s case reminds me that there are other ways to cease to be, and other ways to grieve for a poet.

He was astonished to find how sweet a thing was poetry - Trollope characters read

Should I write about the books in The Eustace Diamonds.  Whenever I can, I write about the books.  They are so much fun.  Even a shortage of books is fun:

“There isn't anything for you to do.  There are Miss Edgeworth's novels down-stairs, and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in my bed-room.  I don't subscribe to Mudie's, because when I asked for ‘Adam Bede,’ they always sent me the ‘Bandit Chief.”  (Ch. 34)

John Sutherland did the notes in the Penguin edition I read.  He tells me that the lending library would substitute books if it thought your request was unsuitable, so the shocking Adam Bede is replaced by The Bandit Chief; or Lords of Orsino. A Romance (1818).  The poor heroine, Lucy Morris, not the pathological liar but the novel’s more traditional heroine, is being punished for the sins of her fiancée here by being forced to live with a woman who has only four books.  If I thought summaries of novels were of much value I would explain why.

Lucy has her own book, too, Proverbial Philosophy by Martin Tupper, a poem in three volumes with a “theme of self-help.”  What a dreadful thing to be stuck with.  I would have Pride and Prejudice and Castle Rackrent memorized by the time I left that house.  In her previous house, this character had “catalogued the library” (Ch. 3) for fun, so that is who she is.

Most of the reading in the novel is done by the false heroine, the actual protagonist, the “dishonest, lying, evil-minded harpy” (Ch. 11) Lizzie Greystock, Lady Eustace who in a bold break from novelistic tradition is not led to her ruin by over-indulgence in novels but by her love of poetry, especially Romantic poetry, in particular Byron and Shelley.

“Ah,” she would say to herself in her moments of solitude, “if I had a Corsair of my own, how I would sit on watch for my lover's boat by the sea-shore!”  And she believed it of herself, that she could do so.  (Ch. 5)

She means this Corsair, the Byronic Corsair from The Corsair (1814), the one with a “forehead high and pale” and “sable curls in wild profusion.”

The comic high point of the thing is the three page scene in Chapter 21 in which Lady Eustace reads Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813), sacred text of the radical Chartists, en plain air.  “Her darling ‘Queen Mab’ must be read without the coarse, inappropriate, everyday surroundings of a drawing-room…”  But the bench is too uncomfortable and “there were some snails which discomposed her.”  Finally, she makes it through the first stanza, “eight or nine lines,” which are so magnificent that she memorizes them.  She never progresses a line farther with Queen Mab:

As she grew older, however, she quickly became wiser, and was aware that in learning one passage of a poem it is expedient to select one in the middle, or at the end.  The world is so cruelly observant now-a-days, that even men and women who have not themselves read their "Queen Mab" will know from what part of the poem a morsel is extracted, and will not give you credit for a page beyond that from which your passage comes.

Again, we are in Chapter 21 – yes, I read the novel.  Trollope rubs in the joke at the beginning of the next chapter, noting that Lady Eustace had meant to finally read The Faerie Queene at this time, but due to distractions reads even less of it than the Shelley poem, instead wasting her time with novels.

My title is from the first chapter; the theme runs through the entire book.  Trollope always does the same thing, I always think, but I am always in some ways wrong.

The Best Books of 1813 - who am I kidding, the Best Book - I cannot prate in puling strain

“Frosty Morning” by J. M. W. Turner, courtesy of Tate Britain.  Turner liked it so much he never sold it, for which I do not blame him.  It was completed in 1813, a sparse year for surviving literature.

Only one lasting novel, for example, but what an example.  Pride and Prejudice has become an inescapable book, even a best-selling book.  I wish I could remember where I read that – you have to add all of the different editions together to get it onto the bestseller list, but then Jane Austen would be side by side with James Patterson.

It was not always so.  Pride and Prejudice was never anything like a forgotten book, but it was not so gigantic until recently, surprisingly recently.  I turn to my favorite problematic but simple tool for quantifying status, the MLA International Bibliography, a database of articles, monographs, etc. reaching back to 1947, where I count 505 articles, etc. with a Pride and Prejudice tag.  The distribution by decade, roughly:

1947-1973: 13
1974-1983: 32
1984-1993: 112
1994-2003: 116
2004-2013: 232

In other words, a full 45% of the academic articles, etc. about Pride and Prejudice have been published within the last ten years!  That is amazing.  Austen was not always so ubiquitous.

My guess would have been that the 1980s Austen revival was owed to feminist criticism, and perhaps that was the first spark, but a glance through the article titles from the 1980s suggests that all kinds of approaches were making good use of Pride and Prejudice.  It is such a rich text.

1813 was an important year for English poetry.  Percy Shelley’s first major work, the allegorical radical fairy poem “Queen Mab,” was published to no interest; a decade later it had become a central text for English laboring-class reformers and revolutionaries, a story almost as surprising as the long, slow rise of Pride and Prejudice.  I am afraid, or perhaps happy to say, the contents of the poem itself have slipped from my memory.

Lord Byron had hit the jackpot in 1812 with the first parts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he followed in 1813 with two long Orientalist romances mostly in rhyming couplets, The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale and The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale, both immensely popular, both pretty silly, and both quite a lot of fun for readers who enjoy the poetry (if not, they are unreadable).  It is all just an excuse for Byron to show off his gift:

‘The cold in clime are cold in blood,
    Their love can scarce deserve the name;
But mine was like the lava flood
    That boils in Ætna’s breast of flame.
I cannot prate in puling strain
Of ladye-love, and beauty’s chain:
If changing cheek, and scorching vein,
Lips taught to writhe, but not complain,
If bursting heart, and madd’ning brain,
And daring deed, and vengeful steel,
And all that I have felt, and feel,
Betoken love –  that love was mine,
And shown by many a bitter sign.’  (“The Giaour,” 1099-1111)

In some sense I have still only come up with a single book for 1813.  What was going on in literature outside of England?  I do not know.  A number of European countries were understandably preoccupied.  Spain was being destroyed in the Peninsular War, yet Francisco Goya was creating the etchings that make up The Disasters of War and paintings like The Madhouse (none of these have firm dates).

It seems I often turn to Goya in these Best of 181X posts.  Well, of course.

Best Books of the Year - 1818

1818 was one of the greatest literary years of the 19th century. It saw the publication of two Jane Austen novels, Persuasion and, sadly, Northanger Abbey (sad, of course, because it was only published as a result of Austen's death). Walter Scott published The Heart of Midlothian, one of his best books. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a novel so rich in ideas that I forgive its infelicities. Finally, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey, which is not what it sounds like.

Meanwhile, Byron, Keats, and P. Shelley were all in peak form. Byron published the Venetian adultery comedy Beppo, not a favorite of mine but enjoyable for its light touch. Keats published the long, mythical Endymion, very far from a favorite. For P. Shelley, it was a highly productive year, but for most of us only one poem will really matter: "Ozymandias."

It's funny how central Percy Shelley is here. Besides his wife's book, Byron and Keats and Peacock were close friends, and Shelley is even the central character of Nightmare Abbey, a tiny little novel-like thing that should be read more:

"When Scythrop [that's Shelley] grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head: having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonized Latin." (Ch. 1)

So that's five novels with some life today. Two (Persuasion and Frankenstein) are among the best of the century. Two, by coincidence, are Gothic parodies with "Abbey" in the title; one of these is sadly neglected. And major work by three great poets. This did not happen most years. Note that if magazines back then published "Best Books of the Year" lists, the only one I'm sure would make the lists is Walter Scott's.

This has all been awfully British. What else was going on? In America and pre-Romantic France I will go ahead and say, confidently, nothing. In the German principalities, there was quite a lot, although Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann seem to be between books this year. Either one may have been, and probably was, publishing in journals. Giacomo Leopardi was writing his Cantos and essays at this time, I am sure, but I have never sorted out his confusing chronology.

Still, there aren't that many years in the 19th century which contain five still-read novels from all of Europe, so I don't fell too bad about ending my researches here.

Nevertheless, I put an engraving of Francisco Goya's 1818 The Giant up top, just to make the year a little less British.