The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Devil’s Walk

The Devil’s Walk The first evidence that PBS had begun this poem appears at the end of his letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of ?16 January 1812 (Letters I, 235–37; BL Add. MS 37,496, f. 80 verso), in which PBS included seven irregular ballad stanzas (49 lines) on the theme of Satan’s encounters with members of the British establishment, introducing the poetry thus: “Here follows a few stanzas which may amuse you. I was once rather fond of the Devil.” The stanzas are modeled on The Devil’s Thoughts, a poem that Southey and Coleridge had composed jointly and published (anonymously) in the Morning Post, 6 September 1799. (That text appears in the notes to J. D. Campbell’s Poetical Works of Coleridge [1893 etc.], 621–22.) PBS probably first read The Devil’s Thoughts while seeing Southey at Keswick, beginning about Christmas 1811. Before they met, PBS had been prejudiced against Southey by reports that he had grown more conservative, but after they talked a few times, he wrote to Hitchener: “Southey tho’ far from being a man of great reasoning powers is a great Man. . . . He is a man of virtue, he never will belie what he thinks” (Letters I, 212). Southey’s contemporary letters show that he and PBS discussed the relation of Southey’s youthful political and religious beliefs to PBS’s current ones. If during these conversations PBS confessed to Southey his school-boy attempts to raise the Devil, Southey likely tried to maintain his rapport with the youthful enthusiast by showing him his own early antiestablishment poems, including The Devil’s Thoughts. Other Romantic Devils The Devil’s Thoughts, begun for amusement while shaving, as Southey tells in his extended version (Poetical Works of Southey [1838], III, 96), became popular through its many unauthorized reprintings under various titles over the years. Richard Porson (1759–1808), a Cambridge classical scholar who was also a radical Whig apologist, even tried to take credit for composing it. In 1813, Lord Byron wrote The Devil’s Drive as an imitation of The Devil’s Thoughts, which he had read in a version misattributed to Porson; Byron, following what he believed to be the spirit and substance of Porson’s liberal political views, changes the verse form and adds touches from 281 Goethe’s Faust that had come to him via Staël’s De l’Allemagne (see Byron, CPW III, 95–104, 428–30). Finally, in 1827, Southey publicly claimed authorship for Coleridge and himself, while expanding their poem to 57 stanzas and (ignorant of PBS’s poem) changing its name to The Devil’s Walk to distinguish it from the version falsely attributed to Porson. PBS’s The Devil’s Walk (DW) of 1812 openly imitates both the larger conception and some specific details of Southey and Coleridge’s original Devil’s Thoughts, which aims barbs at corrupt or incompetent lawyers, apothecaries , and booksellers, war and its financial burdens, unhealthy prisons that enforce unequal justice, false religion and its support of war, and an unnamed general probably either Isaac Gascoigne or Banastre Tarleton, both of whom had been “involved in England’s suppression of Ireland” and who publicly opposed the abolition of slavery (see M. D. Paley, “Coleridge and the Apocalyptic Grotesque,” in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. T. Fulford and Paley [1993]). Except for PBS’s scathing attack on the Prince Regent, his targets in DW are similar to those of Southey and Coleridge, for as S. E. Jones observes of PBS’s poem, “‘derivativeness’ is precisely the point. . . . Shelley declares himself to be derived from . . . the best in the earlier work of the elder poets” (Shelley’s Satire [1994], 41–42). Often forgotten in commentaries on DW is its ultimate indebtedness to the Bible and Satan’s reply to God that he comes “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it” (Job 1:7 and 2:2). Historical Contexts The draft of DW in PBS’s mid-January 1812 letter to Hitchener (which we print as Supplement to the published version) is far from a finished poem. But by August 1812, PBS had prepared for distribution a fully developed satirical poem of thirty stanzas and had it printed as a broadsheet (arranged in three columns of ten stanzas apiece) entitled The Devil’s Walk, A Ballad. This poem treats several topics that are absent from his draft in the January letter some of...