Description
Book SynopsisThrough attuned close readings, this volume brings out the imaginative and formal brilliance of Percy Bysshe Shelley''s writing as it explores his involvement in processes of dialogue and influence. Shelley recognizes that poetic individuality is the reward of connectedness with other writers and cultural influences. ''A great Poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight'', he writes, ''and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight'' (A Defence of Poetry). He is among the major Romantic poetic exponents and theorists of influence, because of his passionately intelligent commitment to the onward dissemination of ideas and feelings, and to the unpredictable ways in which poets position themselves and are culturally positioned between past and future. The book has a tripartite structure. The first three chapters seek to illuminate his response to representative texts, figures, and themes that constitute the triple pillars of his cultural inheritance: the classical world (Plato); Renaissance poetry (Spenser and Milton); Christianity and, in particular, the concept of deity and the Bible. The second and major section of the book explores Shelley''s relations and affinities with, as well as differences from, his immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Hazlitt and Lamb; Wordsworth; Coleridge; Southey; Byron; Keats (including the influence of Dante on Shelley''s elegy for his fellow Romantic) and the great painter J. M. W. Turner, with whom he is often linked. The third section considers Shelley''s reception by later nineteenth-century writers, figures influenced by and responding to Shelley including Beddoes, Hemans, Landon, Tennyson, and Swinburne. A coda discusses the body of critical work on Shelley produced by A. C. Bradley, a figure who stands at the threshold of twentieth-century thinking about Shelley.
Trade ReviewImagining anyone more widely read than Percy Shelley is difficult, but O'Neill (Durham Univ., UK) has the ability to discover Shelley's slightest allusions and to trace his inheritance in later texts -- an ability that speaks to O'Neill's mastery of a remarkable range of texts. ... O'Neill's nuanced and perceptive tracing of Shelley's allusiveness reveals how Shelley re-created texts and genres, but O'Neill also produces an original, sophisticated understanding of Shelley's complex relations with his predecessors and contemporaries, and of how his poetry initiates a rewarding dialogue with future readers and writers. This study will be of interest to scholars of Shelley and 19th-century British poetry, but also to those interested in rethinking the complexity of intertextuality. ... Highly recommended. * D. D. Schierenbeck, CHOICE *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Emulating Plato: Shelley as Translator and Prose Poet 2: 'The Right Scale of that Balance': Shelley, Spenser, Milton 3: 'A Double Face of False and True': Poetry and Religion in Shelley 4: Shelley, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Revolutionary Imagination 5: 'A Kind of an Excuse': Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited 6: The Gleam of Those Words': Shelley and Coleridge 7: Shelley and Southey Reconsidered 8: 'The Fixed and the Fluid': Identity in Shelley and Byron 9: Narrative and Play: Shelley's The Witch of Atlas and Byron's Beppo 10: 'The End and Aim of Poesy': Shelley and Keats in Dialogue 11: Turning to Dante: Shelley's Adonais Reconsidered 12: 'The Inmost Spirit of Light': Shelley and Turner 13: Shelley, Beddoes, Death, and Reputation 14: 'Materials for Imagination': Shelleyan Traces in Felicia Hemans's Later Poetry 15: 'Beautiful but Ideal': Intertextual Relations between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon 16: The Wheels of Being: Shelley and Tennyson 17: 'Stars Caught in My Branches': Shelley and Swinburne Coda: A. C. Bradley's Views of Shelley Bibliography
