Shelley and the Retentive Memory

Abstract

This essay approaches the familiar subject of memory in Shelley through examining his exceptional gift for retentive memorization, a gift not unique to him, but also conspicuously possessed by Byron. A few instances, mostly taken from the Shelley circle and the poet Henry Kirke White, demonstrate the encouragement given to the development of a retentive memory during the Romantic period, and the admiration that it attracted, but also the apprehensiveness lest it become an end in itself. Examples follow of memory feats performed by Byron and Shelley independently and interactively, focusing on the effect upon Shelley’s political poetry of 1819 of hearing Byron read the early part of Don Juan to him in the autumn of 1818, including portions that Shelley could not have reread in the interval. The question arises: did Shelley worry that his memory was a burden, tempting him into unwitting plagiarism? His draft revisions indicate that he sometimes might have done.