Form, History, and the Politics of Lyric in Shelley's "ode to the west Wind"

Abstract

Form, History, and the Politics of Lyric in Shelley's "ode to the west Wind" Eric Tyler Powell "In considering the political events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to consider them as already historical. This is difficult." –Percy Bysshe Shelley1 Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" has been simultaneously one of the most influential and controversial lyric poems in the English-language canon. It has often been taken as paradigmatic, not only of Shelley's "genius" and value as a poet, but of Romanticism and of lyric poetry as a genre.2 This reception history is coextensive with what M. H. Abrams called a "reorientation" of criticism—originating with the Romantics—inverting the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres inherited from Aristotle and elevating lyric poetry as the most essentially poetic of genres.3 In recent years, this reorientation has been powerfully and usefully reconsidered through the lens of historical poetics, in particular, the concepts of "lyricization" and "lyric reading," introduced by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, through which the invention of the lyric as genre in the nineteenth century came to replace a variety of poetic forms and social functions.4 Shelley has continued to figure prominently in critical debates surrounding theories of lyric poetry, much as he figured prominently in such debates in his own time, and among the modernists and New Critics. The concept of lyric reading, I argue, is a powerful tool to reconsider Shelley's famous ode. The protocol of lyric reading is well-known: there is a speaker of the poem, who should not be confused with the poet; the dramatic situation of the speech act must be gleaned as context for interpretation and analysis; the poem itself should be the focus of interpretation, without considering the biography or intentions of the poet; historical context is only relevant insofar as it is "in" the poem itself. This conception of the lyric as a [End Page 723] single genre, with a defined set of rules for reading, hand in hand with expressivist theories of Romanticism, have led to a neglect of Shelley's own historical poetics as developed in his late works—in poetry and critical prose—and of the formal complexity of the "Ode to the West Wind" in particular.5 Foregrounding Shelley's historical poetics—the view that poetic forms have historical specificity and varying social functions as part of diverse cultures of circulation—is part of the burden of this essay. Part of what makes Shelley's Ode an interesting case for historical poetics, aside from its status as an exemplar of lyric, is that the poem is concerned with its own circulation. As an ultraradical in an era of extreme political reaction and censorship, Shelley was forced from the very start of his career as an author to consider questions of publication, circulation, and the materiality of text.6 The question of circulation is also central to contemporary debates about the lyric genre and historical poetics. As Jackson and Prins write: If nineteenth-century thinking about poetry sought to distinguish a transcendent version of lyric from contemporary cultures of circulation, and at the same time imagined an ideal (and perhaps impossible) new culture of circulation, the twentieth-century criticism that inherited these ambitions for the lyric tended to embrace it not as an ideal to be aspired toward but as the given poetic genre already in circulation.7 Both Jackson and Prins and Abrams point to John Stuart Mill's essay on "Two Kinds of Poetry" as a watershed in this reorientation of criticism toward the lyric genre. Mill's examples of his two kinds of poetry in the essay are Wordsworth (the poet of culture) and Shelley (the poet of nature), and Shelley is the "most striking example ever known of the poetic temperament," that is, the lyric poet.8 Readings of poems and poets have their own historical specificity, and the case of Shelley is no exception: few canonical poets have had their stock rise and fall as rapidly and dramatically. The modernists and New Critics, the historical moment in which Jackson and Prins locate the codification of lyric...