The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form by Ronald Tetreault (review)

HUMANITIES 111 A similarly pragmatic and successful method governs her assessment of Clare's learning. Her own learning, on the other hand, frequently weakens the credibility of her argument. In her conclusion, for example, she picks a quarrel with Edmund Blunden and John Middleton Murry over their refusal 'to credit Clare with the most basic intellectual skills.' She acknowledges that their criticism is out of date, but insists that their 'imperious refusal' continues to inform Clare criticism today (190). Such a mistake might be pardonable if it did not remind her reader that a whole generation of Clare scholarship has been largely ignored throughout her book, the generation which immediately precedes her own and which has already taken up the quarrel with Blunden and Middleton Murry. It is fair enough to argue that a scholarly book should be accessible to the non-specialist, as she does, but it is quite another thing to convey the impression that no other critic or biographer has dealt with the concerns that she does. Such a method leads to other problems. In the chapter on 'The Nature of Society,' for example, the author betrays the fact that she is not a social historian, yet she invokes the aid ofno otherscholars to help her sketchin a convincing picture of early nineteenth-century society. Elsewhere, too, she asserts that she does not quote from the manuscripts because that would restrict her reader's access to the poems. By refraining, however, she also cuts herself off from the multitude of Clare's poems that have not been published, a limitation that must hamper her categorization of the poems and limit the material that informs her conclusions. Closer attention to the manuscripts could also have prevented the fallacious claim that Clare 'rarely revised his first drafts' (122). These aspects of scholarly procedure aside, this book presents a balanced view of Clare, a good discussion of his dialect, a perceptive reading of several of Clare's poems, and a detailed account of Clare's developing attitude to his class and its influence on his art. Paradoxically, by dwelling on the bounds of Clare's circumstances, it awakens our appreciation of his extensive intellectual and artistic horizons. (WILLIAM HOWARD) Ronald Tetreault. The Poetry ofLife: Shelley and Literary Form University of Toronto Press. 290. $35.00 This work considers Shelley as a revolutionary not only in politics and society, but also in his insights into the structures and function of language. Tetreault argues for the importance of Shelley's developing commitment to the publicvoices ofepic and drama rather than the private voice ofthe lyric, and claims that his work, in a departure from the 'highly 112 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 centred' discourse of traditional writing, is increasingly open to the reader's consciousness. Tetreault stresses the empiiical and sceptical strain in Shelley's thought, and usefully reminds us that Berkeley regarded the universe as 'a vast semiotic system open to interpretation and re-interpretation' (76), an idea which has more recently occurred to the traditionally Cartesian French. This salutary awareness of a long-established British tradition of semiotic scepticism may partly explain why this work, though it employs some of the concepts of post-structuralism, is not totally immersed in either its language or its thought. The book is weakest when contemporary criticism is reverentially invoked. Deriida, for example, is approvingly cited as asserting, of 'The Triumph of Life,' that 'its essential unfinishedness cannot be reduced to inadequacy or incompleteness,' on the grounds that it reflects 'the essential unfinishedness of life' (255). This naIve notion ofartas offering a resemblance of life is in contradiction with the vigorous and approving account given earlier of Shelley'S Aristotelian view of poetry not as a mIrror held up to nature, but as something offering 'an intelligible and beautiful analogy of reality' (130-1). Similarly, loose rhetoric and dubious thinking are at times elevated into virtues, since they can be seen as releasing the reader's autonomous creativity. Of the 'Ode to the West Wind' we are told that Shelley 'has become enough of an artist not to force his meaning on his auditors but to yield them their autonomy' (219). Tetreault points out that...