Poetry as an instrument of social change

Shelley knew well that he was two men, a man and a poet. This is a dangerous knowledge, especially when applied to men who are not poets but who think they are. Yet it is certainly true of a poet like Shelley that one of the characters in his double-personality was a man trying out the crude material of his poetry crudely in his life; the other, the poet who purifies, moulds, and transforms this material in his work. The man Shelley had the shrill, excitable voice which jarred on the ears of several hearers (they still complain to posterity about it) : the poet has a voice which wins readers by the thrilling purity 'of its music. The political thinker and activist, Shelley lived out ideas which often seem staring caricatures of themselves in his example : the poet was engaged in a perpetual struggle to express these ideas in vivid and impassioned imaginitive language, so that they might pierce beneath the surface habit of thinking of his readers, to a deeper level where human existences are bound together in love, and thus change men by giving them a new and truer view of their natures, so that they in turn might change society. Shelley wrote-directly and indirectly-a good deal about what he considered the function of poetry to be. There is no better way of examining his own poetry than by con­sidering first of all some of these aims, and then comparing them with his achievement.

The mine of all his views is contained in the famous essay The Defence of Poetry, which contains the challenging and challenged statement that ' poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind'. His argument is that the roots of human institutions lie in the imaginitive life of humanity, so that the animation of this life by poetry will affect institu­tions. He is surely not wrong in making this general claim. The law of the Old Testament is very close to the poetry of the prophets. The self-visioning of England by the English which has sent generations of the young to the ends of the earth, and which has inspired again and again the defence of their island from opponents, is to an incal­culable extent owing to Shakespeare, Milton, and Words­worth. Perhaps it is the incalculableness of the effect of the poet on legislation which makes Shelley's statement objec­tionable to some minds. Or perhaps it is the poet's idea that in this lies the defence of poetry. Herrick's poem about 'a sweet disorder in the dress' may have affected sartorial fashion, but one cannot imagine Herrick defending his poem on these grounds. He was simply occupied in making an object, a poem, without regard to its effect. Shelley certainly represents a tendency of poets to have their eyes not on their poems, but on the effects of their poetry. On the other hand, Shakespeare in his sonnets makes extravagant worldly claims for his poetry, and both Milton and Wordsworth regarded themselves as ' unacknowledged legislators', if not as something much grander. Too much has been made of an effective phrase which is neither so original or so controversial as some critics seem to imagine.

The core of Shelley's belief about poetry lies in the fol­lowing passage from the same essay:

We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economic knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumul­ation of facts and calculating processes. . . . We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.

'Imagining that which we know.' By this, Shelley means creating in poetry a language of the imagination which may include the enormous advances in specialized knowledge of the modern age. Thus poetry may become a meeting place of the forces most affecting a modern society. Such poetry would be at the same time modern and traditional. Poetry would be continuously revolutionized by the new life of modern men, and at the same time it would retain that traditionalist position at the centre of social forces, which it has had in the great ages of literature.

So that in Shelley's view poetry should be an instrument which translates specialized branches of knowledge and specialized activities of modem life into one symbolic language where all these separate activities meet within the life of the imagination. But at the same time, Shelley remembers that the poet is an individual with particular tastes decided by his own personality, that is by his indivi­dual capacity for love:

Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.

This, written, in 1821, shows how far Shelley had travelled in the eight years since he wrote the didactic Queen Mab. Of all his work, the one in which he was most successful in fulfilling his own poetic ideal is undoubtedly Prometheus Unbound. For here he creates poetry enclosing in its references the whole range of his considerable knowledge. He pursued his own vein of fantasy without inhibition, and without forcing himself into didactic channels; and the subject he chose-the liberation of Prometheus (humanity) from his enchainment by Jupiter (tyranny of rulers and beliefs)- is ennobling and beautiful in the highest degree. The famous lines with which the Third Act ends show Shelley's poetry functioning according to his ideal vision of his poetic function:

None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear

Gazed on another's eye of cold command,

Until the subject of a tyrant's will

Became, worse fate, the abject of his own,

Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death.

None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines

Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak;

None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart

The sparks of love and hope till there remained

Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed,

And the wretch crept a vampire among men,

Infecting all with his own hideous ill ;

None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk

Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes,

Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy

With such a self-mistrust as has no name.

And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind

As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew

On the wide earth, past; . . . . . . . .

This passage-and the whole speech by the Spirit of the Hour, from which it comes-is one of those rare examples ­found rarely also in Wordsworth-in which a poet's theories about the function of poetry suddenly fuse with his inspira­tion. The structure of the thought has an extreme sim­plicity which is illustrated with rich complexity. It con­trasts the negation of a certain kind of life with its opposite, the assertion of another life. The overthrow of Jupiter by Prometheus in the poetic drama is supposed to have freed the positive virtues of living from the freezing social lies which are negative. Here Shelley creates in his poetry the microcosm of a change within society which is supposed to transform the world; and within the same imaginative act he is able to draw vividly upon his impressive knowledge of science, as well as of classical mythology, to illustrate the change.