The Essential Shelley

by G David Schwartz

conclusion

Shelley essentially forced Mary Wollstonecraft, daughter of William Goodwin, to change her last name to Shelley. This was essentially to the good inasmuch as Wollstonecraft would have been a miserable name to pronounce every time someone wanted to refer to the author of Frankenstein.

As is well known, Mary wrote her novel when, spending a rainy day indoors at their retreat at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, she was challenged to a writing contest by Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr Polidori. It is interesting that the three men were each accomplished authors.

Like Shelley, Lord Byron was a successful poet, and Polidori had written numerous articles on athetosis and gynecomastia, one of which — “The Unnecessity of Athetosis” — won him the scorn of Percy Shelley. Nevertheless, it was Mary Shelley whose novel is remembered and cherished; the novels of the men being consigned to the silence of oblivion.

As a result of the affair with Mary, if one might call it that, Shelley is essentially known as the poet who seduced Mary by sending her verse. Although we have determined that nothing in Percy Shelley’s life is fit for humor, this incident, from Mary’s side, was hilarious because the man she was attached to when Shelley came along was a mail carrier. It is possible that he himself delivered the notorious letters containing the poems.

Identifying Shelley as primarily a seducer, however, is due to at least two reasons. The first reason is that Mary was the type of woman who was given to ironic thoughts that would incline her to leave her drab surroundings and boring family life to take up with a dramatic poet of flair and excitement.

Indeed, a case can be made that she pursued him, albeit by stealth, in silent admiration, and beguiling him by purposively reading his poems. She had no legitimate right to catch his eye and compel him to succumb to her beauty. She had no right to force him into catching and being caught by her stunning eyes. I am not claiming the fault lies with her. I am simply saying theirs was an odd kind of seduction.

It is also true, in the second place, as I know from personal experience, that verses simply do not seduce. However throbbing the rhythm, however pulsating the meter, however erotically cadenced the rhyme, heart-pounding the words, fascinating the imagery, pugilistic the purpose, poems do nothing more than rhyme. Often they do not even do that.

We ought to consider Mary’s background:

Fanny Godwin was Mary’s stepsister by way of a previous liaison.
Mrs. Goodwin — William’s wife, also known as Mrs. Wollstonecraft — had with “a friend.”
Another sister, Jane Godwin or Claire Clairmont, depending on how she chose to sign her checks, was Mrs. Godwin’s daughter by a former marriage to Mr. Clairmont (who was, we might assume, not her friend).
Claire contributed a niece to Mary and Fanny by way of a poem (or so she claimed!) tendered by Lord Byron who, we assume, needed time away from writing his failed novel. There is even rumored to have been a sister the others referred to as the discolored sheep of the family.
Mary’s mother lectured on women’s rights while her father wrote large tomes on free love, anarchism, and collected notes for his unpublished dictionary of dirty words from all foreign languages.

Given this background, it is not surprising that Mary herself was angelic, innocent, naive, and practical. Certain unscrupulous investigators have suggested this was not entirely so. Cole Porter, for example, wrote “It ain’t necessarily so.” Porter, however, has been dismissed by literary scholars as “probably the greatest lyricist who ever lived.”

My primary claim is that the essential Shelley is fundamentally maligned when he is, in principle, characterized essentially as a seducer. The misfortune continues to this day! Ask anyone to name a seducer. They will name several of their neighbors, numerous politicians and other mythical figures and, inevitably and essentially, Percy Shelley.

Ask anyone to name a poet. They may name a lonely child they knew in school, a spinster, Bob Dylan, a love-sick, hound-faced young man, perhaps grudgingly admitting that they, too, have “tampered with elegance and infinity.” Some few may struggle over the mispronunciation of Yeats, Keats, Borges, Tennyson, Juvenal, Heinrich Heine, or Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Ask these very same people who have just listed every poet they could possibly remember to name a poet who was a slime-eyed, rancid-breathed, demon-jaded, lust-intoxicated seducer. They will irretrievably and eloquently say “What’s his first name, Shelley.” Shelley was, according to phantom opinion, essentially a seducer.

Shelley, if we believe certain arrogant mobsters who feign to know how to use a pen, married merry Mary with the promise that he would be true. This is foolish for two reasons, one logical and the other persuasive. The logical reason is that Mary knew he was leaving his wife as, indeed, he had left her upon occasion for Cornelia Turner. Now he was leaving both Harriet and Cornelia to marry merry Mary.

The persuasive reason, on the other hand, derives from every mother who ever lived, including Shelley’s own, yours, mine, and each of our neighbor’s mothers when she said, “No good has ever come from a poet.” Goethe put is thusly: “Buffoons and poets are near related.” Goethe, of course, was a great poet.

While one as sensitive and as ecstatic as Shelley might truthfully say “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” the majority view was expressed when Thomas Babington Macaulay said, “Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can ever enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.” In defense of Shelley, we might claim he might well have been mightily mad. I am convinced he was mad about Mary.

We do not know if Shelley ever became angry at Mary. Their life together was too short, as Shelley’s life ran aground too early. We do know he was crazy about her. We do not know if he understood these feelings he had for her. We do know he wrote quite a bit about feelings and emotions. We do not know everything about his emotions and sentiments. If we did, given my proclivity for factual and complete reporting, this paper would be less a literary study than a psychological analysis, less a defense than a poem, less historical and more revisionist.

Shelley has been thought to merit the scorn and derision cast his way by certain swine because of an unfortunate and unsightly stain of human nature. Those who cast aspersions on Shelley, however, do so less because he was a great poet of whom they are jealous than for a less noble reason. They do so because Shelley was casual, i.e. successful.

Again, we might consider Mary’s own expensive tastes. Despite the fact that Percy Shelley was a pauper, Mary expected or at least deserved, the very best rubies and diamond hands might steal, elegant evening wear and wool socks. Her tastes were exquisite in art, bedecklement, and illicit men.

III

Mark Twain did not say, nevertheless it is true (see Appendix: “Things Mark Twain Did Not Say Which Nevertheless Are True”), that Shelley was right to sacrifice Harriet to the pursuit of his Muse. Mark Twain did not say this, of course, because he did not believe it. Had Shelley not

reached for and found happiness with Mary, he may have been a successful insurance salesman, may have eventually worked himself up to ownership of a car dealership (if he had lived sufficiently long), or he may been adopted by some rich patron who did not know a whit about what was or was not poetry.

Without Mary, his gift may have languished, his art atrophied. Dr) Polidori may have had to cease working on his unstoppable novel and written texts entitled, “On Aero-otitis Media Caused by Hyper-Inactivity,” or “Metastasis Hydrocephalus In Extreme Cases Where the Patient Becomes a Mycosis,” or the like. Luckily, Polidori was permitted to continue working on his monstrous novel due to Shelley’s love-affair (this is a technical term, not a descriptive one) with Mary.

The reason Mark Twain did not note this truth was because he, an author himself, was busy convincing his own wife that he was true to her. Twain blames Cordelia and Mary for seducing Shelley! Of all the foolishness! The blame ought to be placed precisely where it lay: on the Muse.

One really ought to learn more about poets before condemning them. It is tritefully easy to condemn that which one does not understand. What is not easy, as any poet will tell you, is to share your every thought with the hydra-headed demon. Cry-babies, kvetches and critics do not know the wiles and wherefores of such demons. They only know themselves and their “easy” universe. What is not easy is to share your head with eternity and oblivion.

The only escape is through fascination with another. Marriage, of course, when successful, is the binding of two souls. In this manner the wife or husband becomes as obvious and repulsive as oneself. The reason is that the spouse is the self. Hence, the search for the resonance to eternity occurs in those infinitely other eyes, that omnipotently other smile, the omniscient other beauty, her immutable other being. Blessed be the name of the Lord; she is the truth of the panther.

A famous literary critic has assessed Shelley’s writings as fundamentally willing to sacrifice metrical, technical, symmetrical smoothness for the most fit thought. Of course, this critic may have intended to say that Shelley’s writings evidence such a concern, but his assertion that the writings have a consciousness, or living intention is certainly incorrect.

What is important is that the poet was essentially concerned not with technique but with fitness. If so, one essential way he was to pursue his Muse was to keep his body in shape. We should not be surprised, then, to note how often women — both real and imaginary, and occasionally both — appear as the personification of poetic power in Shelley’s most inspired verses. One thinks of Asia in “Prometheus Unbound,” Urania in “Adonis,” Iris in “The Triumph of Life,” and Elaineburgersipe in his series of panther poems.

If Shelley is to be blamed for anything, then the only legitimate criticism might be that he did not write Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, nor the Bible. Borges, of course, would disagree.

Shelley is to be praised, on the other hand, for living well above the interests of common men. Whereas they are concerned with money grubbing, earning a living, living their lives, seducing women silently and by stealth, spending vast amounts of money on their upkeep or welfare, practicing every form of selfishness, screaming at sporting events of a violent nature (such as golf), and reading jokes in Readers Digest for purposes of obtaining a world view, Shelley was essentially different. His concern was to leave behind a body of cherished work once his real body decayed.

His real body, meanwhile, was loaned out in a fit of poetic reverie in order to collect data which went into his false body. His real body eventually did decay. His false body sits in lotus-toed sublimation upon my library shelves, and the shelves of libraries around the world.

Poetically an anarchist, religiously a revolutionary, a vegetarian who believed in free love no matter what the cost, Shelley courageously erupted into sublime verse. In none of these instances can Shelley be compared to the genuinely corrupt A.E. Housman, Alfred Tennyson, or T.S. Eliot.

Alas, irony will always win. Ironies are the limber expression of fate’s iron necessity. Two years after their final separation, Harriet Shelley drowned herself. As a so-called Romantic poet, Shelley should have become so distraught that he became a suicide himself. The fact that he did not is medical evidence that his days as a sensitive poet were waning. Proof of my contention is derived from God’s final earthly act upon his soul. Shelley himself drowned.

On July 8, 1822, in the Gulf of Spezzia, the boat upon which he was a passenger collided with another. The poetic hands of the waves claimed the live of the poet and all witnesses to his last words. Occasionally I lay awake at night wondering whose name he might have called out in those final moments. At other times, I fall into a fitful sleep from which nothing can wake me. As Maddalo said to Julian, “If you can’t swim, / Beware of Providence.” Thus the balance of levity and fatality.

As another example of the slippery, slimy sweat of rigid irony: the poem Shelley was working on at the time of his death was entitled “The Triumph of Life.” Although left a fragment (still, more than Shelley left of himself), the poem is ironic because, in spite of its title, line 544 asks, “Then what is life?” Broken off at line 547, the reader is left with the raw impression that Shelley was just on the verge of answering the question when, alas, he died.

In “Adonis,” Shelley wrote about “a pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift.” “Pard,” of course, means panther. Perhaps this is the same creature who he refers to as the “Pilgrim of Eternity.” Perhaps both are the woman he called “Mary Shelley.” Percy Shelley has gone on to become a paw of our culture, a growl within our lives. He has left us touched by the whiskers of the two, three, four or five women for whom he felt intense emotions.

Shelley lived monetarily far above his means. He lived physically in the very midst of this means. Emotionally, he was not mean; intellectually he did mean everything he said, and quite a bit of what he did not have time to say.

Of Shelley one might say he was essentially born a poet, but he died an inept sailor.

Shelley was essentially a poet, a philosopher, an idler, a womanizer, a hard worker, a craftsman, a saint, a paper boat sailor, a sinner, essayist, and scoundrel. He was essentially many things rolled up into one. The one thing he was essentially rolled up into was the one thing we essentially call Percy Bysshe Shelley.

* * *

APPENDIX:
“Things Mark Twain Did Not Say Which Nevertheless Are True.”

By necessity, this appendix must be very much shorter than I originally intended. I can only list random samples because, upon investigation, the quantity of such statements are very much more numerous than one would initially believe. This may be the result of Mark Twain’s not having lived himself long enough to write everything which must be written. I do not know. In any event, here is a selection of true things which Mark Twain did not say.

“It is a bad plan that cannot be changed.” — Publius Syrus
“True science teaches, above all, to doubt, and to be ignorant.” — Miguel de Unamuno
“Nature’s sacred rites are veiled in mysteria figurarum so that she may not need to appear herself even to initiates. Only eminent men of superior intellect gain revelation of her truths. The others must satisfy their desire for worship in ritual drama which prevents her secret from becoming trite.” — Macrobius
“Only the poets can truly write of liberty, that sweet, exhilarant thing.... Every sin of my life seems truly expiated. My society has judged; no punishment is due.” — Scott Turow.
“We seldom laugh without a crime.” — Thomas Wilson
“...the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts.”
— Walter Pater
“Fame is something
Which must be won;
Honor only something
Which must not be lost.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
“O, panther’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.” — III Henry VI, I.iv
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.”
— John Keats
“I’ll make thee glorious by my pen,
And famous by my sword.”
— James Graham, Marquis of Montrose
“Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost: unless we restrain it we destroy ourselves.” — Bernard Shaw
“Mothers of large families, who claim to common sense,
Will find a panther well repay the trouble and expense.”
— Hilaire Belloc
Bev or Beverly is a woman not a Newman and a Bev and not a Thompson.