Percy Shelley and Cultural Confidence
The Blip Report for Sunday, April 9th 2023
Percy Shelley and Cultural Confidence
So, last Sunday, David Gosselin was telling us the story of Solon and his constitution for Athens that he wrote as a poem, and he also told us a bit about Percy Shelley and his ‘Defence of Poetry’. A more in-depth look at this can be found in David’s essay, ‘Poetry, Art and Civilization Today: Reflections on Shelley's A Defence of Poetry’.
So for today, I just wanted to spend a few minutes looking at Percy Shelley.
Now, the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, has an interesting connection to America, that I’d like to point out.
His grandfather, Bysshe Shelley, was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1731, and lived for a while in the United States, before his parents moved back to England. Many years later, in 1806, he would become Sir Bysshe Shelley, the Baronet of Castle Goring. Sir Bysshe Shelley’s son (Percy’s father), Timothy Shelley, was an elected member of Parliament for West Sussex when Percy was born in 1792.
And although Percy may have stood to inherit his grandfather’s baronetcy and perhaps his father’s seat in parliament, nonetheless, Percy’s views concerning the republican experiment in the United States can be seen in his poem “Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century” (1817).
Percy’s poem of a revolution in ideas was suppressed by the publishers and had to be revised, by removing 27 cancelled pages and adding a new title “The Revolt of Islam” which had nothing to do with Islam, but the tyrant was modelled upon an Ottoman Sultan, with no resemblance to a British monarch ;) ;) in order to pass the censors.
This is an excerpt from Percy’s poem ‘The Revolt of Islam’, canto xi, where Laon is speaking of a land where Freedom and Truth are worshipped, of the power in Wisdom’s fullest flow; of an eagle floating moveless, when Earth is wrapped in gloom; of murdered Europe where proud lords, in rage or fear, drive people from their wasted homes. Laon is offering to surrender himself to the Sultan’s police, in order to allow his beloved Cythna to escape … to America.
“… There is a People mighty in its youth,
A land beyond the Oceans of the West,
Where, though with rudest rites, Freedom and Truth
Are worshipped; from a glorious Mother’s breast,
Who, since high Athens fell, among the rest
Sate like the Queen of Nations, but in woe,
By inbred monsters outraged and oppressed,
Turns to her chainless child for succour now,
It draws the milk of Power in Wisdom’s fullest flow.
That land is like an Eagle, whose young gaze
Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume
Floats moveless on the storm, and in the blaze
Of sunrise gleams when Earth is wrapped in gloom;
An epitaph of glory for the tomb
Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made,
Great People! as the sands shalt thou become;
Thy growth is swift as morn, when night must fade;
The multitudinous Earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.
Yes, in the desert there is built a home
For Freedom. Genius is made strong to rear
The monuments of man beneath the dome
Of a new Heaven; myriads assemble there,
Whom the proud lords of man, in rage or fear,
Drive from their wasted homes: the boon I pray
Is this – that Cythna shall be convoyed there –
Nay, start not at the name – America! …”
It should be noted that Percy wrote this defence of America, a few years after the ending of the War of 1812, between the United Kingdom and the United States! Maybe that was one of the reasons why he wanted to leave town in such a hurry.
Now, I want to show that not only was Percy Shelley a republican, by showing his support for the idea of the republic in America, but that he was also a republican by showing his understanding and agreement with Plato’s ‘Republic’.
Percy’s friend and fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg speaks about their early years together at Oxford, in his book ‘The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, that
“… It seems laughable, but it is true, that our knowledge of Plato was derived solely from Dacier's translation of a few of the dialogues, and from an English version of that French translation; we had never attempted a single sentence in the Greek. Since that time, however, I believe, few of our countrymen have read the golden works of that majestic philosopher in the original language more frequently and more carefully than ourselves; and few, if any, with more profit than Shelley. Although the source, whence flowed our earliest taste of the divine philosophy, was scanty and turbid, the draught was not the less grateful to our lips: our zeal in some measure atoned for our poverty. Shelley was never weary of reading, or of listening to me whilst I read, passages from the dialogues contained in this collection, and especially from the ‘Phaedo’, and he was vehemently excited by the striking doctrines which Socrates unfolds.”
Percy Shelley would solve this problem by learning the Greek language, as well as the Italian language.
In 1818, the same year that the Platonic republican Percy Shelley re-wrote ‘The Revolt of Islam’, he left England, never to return, and he travelled to Italy where he entered into an amazingly productive period of his writing – many of his best poems (To a Skylark & Ode to the West Wind), and of his political ideas - the play ‘Swellfoot the Tyrant’ and the poems ‘The Witch of Atlas’, and ‘Mask of Anarchy’ – known for its idea of non-violence (as often quoted by Mahatma Gandhi), and also ‘Peter Bell the Third’ that criticized William Wordsworth and made fun of Immanuel Kant, and where there is a wonderfully insightful stanza that reads:
“Hell is a city much like London –
A populous and a smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity.”
He also wrote a play ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (as an attempt to finish the trilogy of Aeschylus, where we only have the surviving first part – ‘Prometheus Bound’), and he also did his own translations of two of Plato’s dialogues, the ‘Ion’ and the ‘Symposium’, and then continuing in that creative burst, he wrote an essay ‘In Defence of Poetry’ in 1821, one year before he died.
He also translated a few ‘fragments’ from Plato’s ‘Republic’, and the fragment that I like best is
“And first, we must improve upon the composers of fabulous histories in verse [stories], to compose them according to the rules of moral beauty”.
So, according to Shelley (and Plato), our stories must NOT be composed for the lust of entertainment (like it is done by most of us baby-boomers who are seeking instant gratification in our propitiation of the rules-based-order), but instead, our stories should be composed with the ‘rules of a moral beauty’ [a moral compass] as a new generation searches for beauty, goodness and truth – and seeks a path to restore our cultural confidence.