Page 152 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Unit 14: Ode to the West Wind by PB Shelley

Critics such as Matthew Arnold endeavoured to rewrite Shelley’s legacy to make him seem a Notes
lyricist and a dilettante who had no serious intellectual position and whose longer poems
were not worth study. Matthew Arnold famously described Shelley as a “beautiful and ineffectual
angel”. This position contrasted strongly with the judgement of the previous generation who
knew Shelley as a sceptic and radical.
Many of Shelley’s works remained unpublished or little known after his death, with longer
pieces such as A Philosophical View of Reform existing only in manuscript till the 1920s. This
contributed to the Victorian idea of him as a minor lyricist. With the inception of formal
literary studies in the early twentieth century and the slow rediscovery and re-evaluation of
his oeuvre by scholars such as KN Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Harold Bloom, the modern
idea of Shelley could not be more different.
Paul Foot, in his Red Shelley, has documented the pivotal role Shelley’s works—especially
Queen Mab—have played in the genesis of British radicalism. Although Shelley’s works were
banned from respectable Victorian households, his political writings were pirated by men
such as Richard Carlile who regularly went to jail for printing “seditious and blasphemous
libel” (i.e. material proscribed by the government), and these cheap pirate editions reached
hundreds of activists and workers throughout the nineteenth century.
In other countries such as India, Shelley’s works both in the original and in translation have
influenced poets such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. A pirated copy of Prometheus
Unbound dated 1835 is said to have been seized in that year by customs at Bombay.
The 1970s and 1980s Thames Television sitcom Shelley made many references to the poet.

Paul Johnson, in his book Intellectuals, describes Shelley in a chapter titled “Shelley or the
Heartlessness of Ideas “. In the book Johnson describes Shelley as a moral-less person, who
by borrowing money which he did not intend to return, and by seducing young innocent
women who fell for him, destroyed the lives of everybody with whom he had interacted,
including himself. However, while reading the book one should keep in mind Johnson’s conservative
and religious agenda.

In 2005 the University of Delaware Press published an extensive two-volume biography by
James Bieri. In 2008 the Johns Hopkins University Press published Bieri’s 856-page one-volume
biography, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography.
The rediscovery in mid-2006 of Shelley’s long-lost “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of
Things”, as noted above and in footnote 6 below, has not been followed up by the works being
published or being made generally available on the internet or anywhere else. At present
(November 2009), its whereabouts are not generally known. An analysis of the poem by the
only person known to have examined the whole work appeared in the Times Literary Supplement:
HR Woudhuysen, “Shelley’s Fantastic Prank”, 12 July 2006.
In 2007, John Lauritsen published his book The Man Who Wrote “Frankenstein” in which he
argued that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s contributions to the novel were much more extensive than
had previously been assumed. It has been known and not disputed that Shelley wrote the
Preface—although uncredited—and that he contributed at least 4,000–5,000 words to the novel.
Lauritsen sought to show that Shelley was the primary author of the novel.

In 2008, Percy Bysshe Shelley was credited as the co-author of “Frankenstein” by Charles E.
Robinson in a new edition of the novel entitled The Original Frankenstein published by the
Bodleian Library in Oxford and by Random House in the US. Charles E. Robinson determined
that Percy Bysshe Shelley was the co-author of the novel: “He made very significant changes
in words, themes and style. The book should now be credited as ‘by Mary Shelley with Percy
Shelley’.

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