Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (review)

The sublime has attracted the attention of critics of Romantic writing for quite some time. Cian Duffy's recent Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime will be welcomed by readers because it helps us to reconfigure the historical and theoretical terms in which Shelley's relation to the sublime has usually been understood. The central thesis of the book is that Percy Shelley devoted many of his poetic efforts toward revising British accounts of the sublime that connected aesthetic contemplation to a belief in God. Following closely in the footsteps of Hume and other skeptical empiricists, Duffy claims Shelley relentlessly questioned the superstitious trappings of the sublime mode; at the same time, however, he refused merely to undo its appealing imaginative power.

While prominent critics of Shelley's poetry—the most often cited interlocutors here are Angela Leighton and Frances Ferguson—have usually seen Shelley in the Kantian tradition, Duffy sees this as a problem not merely because it mistakes Shelley's actual intellectual interests but because "it wholly elides the obvious political overtones of Shelley's engagement with the discourse on the natural sublime" (2). The attempt to re-historicize the sublime, then, is also an attempt to revive its more or less ambiguous politics. While turning a skeptical eye toward the sublime's worship of divine power, Shelley also sought to harness the natural sublime's energies in the service of radical political sympathies.

As Duffy explains in his first chapter, prominent aesthetic theorists like Thomas Reid and Archibald Alison routinely connected the feeling of the sublime with an awe of the deity, thus connecting the imaginative resources of an observer's appreciation for natural "grandeur" to the power of God (17). Baron d'Holbach's Le Système de la Nature (1770), so influential for Shelley in his composition of Queen Mab (1813), dismissed such anthropomorphizing views of nature as mere vulgar superstition, inspired by irrational fear, but Shelley only uneasily accepts d'Holbach's arguments (18-20). In Queen Mab, Duffy argues, Shelley does not simply dispense with the imagination: he criticizes religious superstition while redirecting the discourse of the sublime to an apprehension of the "all sufficing Power" of nature (27). This new role for the imagination also has explicitly political valences to it, making the poet's work waver uncertainly between a commitment to the revolutionary potential realized in the power of the natural sublime, and the more reasoned gradualism espoused by Shelley's father-in-law, William Godwin. What emerges is a carefully poised acceptance of revolutionary enthusiasm moderated by a commitment to gradual change (34).

It's a bit odd that Duffy does not connect his claims to recent conversations about religion and the secular—Martin Priestman's Romantic Atheism and Robert Ryan's Romantic Reformation would be obvious intellectual resources for Duffy, but this work is entirely neglected here.¹ The new role for imagination described in chapter 1 is expanded in the following chapter's account of the fragmentary narrative "The Assassins" and Alastor (1912); the "cultivated" imagination is an imagination weaned away from its superstitious tendencies and developed into a more reasoned apprehension of natural laws. And, as the reading of "Mont Blanc" in chapter 3 more explicitly discusses, the cultivated imagination is political because of its ability to glean a revolutionary "truth / Of nature" from natural scenery (118). Observing the "awful scene" (116) of Mont Blanc, the poem's speaker avoids a merely superstitious response to natural grandeur and instead interprets the human political world on the basis of natural laws, or "an intuition of the Necessity informing the landscape" (119). In the poem's "scientific understanding of natural phenomena," natural laws are political laws, showing how violent changes are part of an "eternal" cycle of growth and destruction (120).

Chapter 4 shows how this general commitment to viewing political progress in terms of natural processes leads Shelley to an explicit response to the French Revolution in Laon and Cythna (1817). Duffy wants us to reconsider exactly what Shelley meant when he wrote...