Shelley and the Ambivalence of Idealism

In a departure from critics such as Stuart Sperry, who views The Triumph of Life as revealing Shelley’s movement into “mature skepticism,”¹ this article will argue that Shelley’s skepticism is constant throughout his work, as is his preoccupation with embodying visionary thought in language.² Burning with potential, the “electric life” in Shelley’s poetry is propelled by uncertainty and indefinability.³ The “peculiarly melodious” notes of his early poem Alastor show the embattled idealism that persists until The Triumph of Life.⁴ Idealism, though aspired towards, remains from first to last a fraught and questioned goal in Shelley’s poetic universe.

The Triumph of Life, in its movement between a first and third person unfolding of vision, dazzles with its intense, ambiguous images. Here Shelley refigures his earlier Alastor, which used a mediating figure to recount the tale of a Poet and his eventual destruction. This altered perspective suggests Shelley’s increasing stress on visionary apprehension: Alastor and The Triumph of Life sound some of Shelley’s darkest notes, with the former showing the Poet “blasted by his disappointment” and the latter plumbing depths of disenchantment with Life’s “savage music” (SPP, Preface to Alastor, p. 73; The Triumph of Life, line 435). Yet both poems resist this darkness. Tilottama Rajan, Jerrold Hogle, and Michael O’Neill, among others, have examined The Triumph of Life in light of Shelley’s doubt, Rajan concluding that Romantic poetry’s “darker elements … threaten to collapse their organic unity.” I disagree. Shelley’s poetry pivots on the awareness that “we are on that verge where words abandon us,” and on the dizziness of “look[ing] down into the dark abyss of—how little we know” (SPP, “On Life,” line 636). His poetry consciously mingles fear and beauty. I wish to stress the aesthetic productivity of this vacillation, and the authority of vacillation as a key Shelleyan principle.⁵ Shelley’s final poem may have won more critical acclaim than its predecessors, but it shares with them a consistent notion of the ideal.⁶ Shelley’s idealism was always veined with an awareness that heaven remained, and perhaps would always stay, “unascended” (Prometheus Unbound, III.ii.203).

F. R. Leavis remarked that Shelley “hand[s] poetry over to a sensibility that has no more dealings with the intelligence than it can help.” Despite Leavis’s animosity, his comment elucidates Shelley’s habit of opening poetry to waves of ambiguity.⁷ Yet, as O’Neill argues, this lack of certainty is not a “mandarin, self-delighting scepticism,”⁸ but the productive ground of Shelley’s poetic imaginings. This principle pervades Shelley’s oeuvre from “England in 1819,” which pivots on the conditional “may” (“England in 1819,” line 13), to “Ode to the West Wind’s” final open-ended question.⁹ In Alastor and The Triumph of Life as well, indeterminacy forms the center of both poems. United by the spectral female, in Alastor, “the veiled maid” (line 151), and in The Triumph of Life, as a female “Shape all Light,” Shelley presents the encounter with a feminized vision. The episodes are as teasingly like as they are patently unlike. Shelley’s Narrator in Alastor offers information to the reader that is spurned by The Triumph of Life’s movement between the first-person speaker and inclusion of Rousseau’s first-person narration of his experience. In Shelley’s last poem a grim but energetic vision of Life and its victims propels the reader along. Alastor offers a history of the Poet told by a Narrator, and highlights the difficulty of interpretation and the proliferating possibilities generated by poetry and vision through the Narrator’s quasi-elegiac memories of his subject. That both figures offer an ambiguous model for the reader makes it difficult to force a definitive reading onto Poet or Narrator.¹⁰ Both Alastor and The Triumph of Life refuse the safety of allegory.

In Alastor, the female figure’s reality is questioned by the Narrator’s suggestion of her dream-like nature: “A vision on his sleep / There came, a dream of hopes that never...