Not Your Obedient Servant

At the end of the penultimate chapter of Shelley's Living Artistry Madeleine Callaghan quotes Harold Bloom's assessment of the use and uselessness of Shelley's letters for a reading of his poetry. 'I affirm', Bloom intones, in the oracular manner that was clearly already his preferred mode at the very beginning of his long career,

I affirm the unscholarly heresy that a student of Shelley's poetry is best off not having read any of the prose but the Defence. The letters sometimes help; more usually they do not, and two years of steady reading in them have not sufficed for me to find too much of permanent literary or human value therein.

Someone's heresy is someone else's sacred doctrine, and Bloom is clearly rehearsing here what was (in 1959, when Shelley's Mythmaking was published) New Critical, and soon to be deconstructive, orthodoxy. What matters are the words on the poetical page, and Bloom clearly holds that Shelley's pamphlets on Irish emancipation, his vegetarian polemics, his speculative philosophical fragments, his Gothic tales, and even his letters are off the page.

There are, of course, a number of oddities about Bloom's pronouncement – as there are about Shelley's Mythmaking generally, a book that Bloom, in a gesture of authorial self-curation that sits rather uneasily with his latent anti-biographism, renounced some years later. For one thing, for a critic who would later boast that in his prime he read a thousand pages an hour, 'two years of steady reading' in Shelley's reasonably substantial but hardly enormous epistolary corpus seems, let's say, pretty exhaustive – especially so, when the judgement on the merit of that corpus is less than encouraging. There must have been something in the letters – even if not, in one of those routinely idiomatic phrases turned intriguingly treacherous by their rhetorical context, 'too much' – for Bloom to keep returning to them in the time it would usually have taken him to digest the whole of an undergraduate English literature syllabus several hundred times over.

For other, earlier, readers of Shelley, the poet's letters and biography more generally did have a decisive impact. Robert Browning, for example, felt compelled to revise his long-cherished attachment to Shelley when evidence came to light of his marital infidelity. Browning was no naively moralising reader of poetry, and had thought hard about the relation between life and art, both in theory (his 'Essay on Shelley', as it happens, is a significant contribution to thinking about just this relation) and in the teasing, morally complex practice of his most accomplished dramatic monologues.

New Critical strictures on (in William Empson's phrase) 'using biography' and the material – letters, journals, anecdotes – from which biography is formed are now, perhaps, behind us. The title of Madeleine Callaghan's comprehensive treatment of Shelley's writing, which proceeds chronologically from the early Queen Mab and the poems of the Esdaile Notebook through to the late Adonȧіs and uncompleted The Triumph of Life, signals the imbrication of life and art that Callaghan argues is central to Shelley's poetics. Shelley's Living Artistry, that is, aims to show that Shelley's poems are subtle, complex, and highly wrought responses to his experiences, relationships, hopes, and disappointments. In particular, Callaghan takes Shelley's heretofore somewhat under-examined correspondence as the guiding thread by means of which the complex pattern of his art and life might be traced. Callaghan is a confident judge and writer (if occasionally given to adjectival over-abundance – as a fellow sufferer, I sympathise), an able close reader, whose readings are equally adept at handling the discursive tenor of Shelley's often philosophically involved poetry and the intricacies of his metrical and stanzaic patterning, and a diligent scholar with an impressive command of the secondary literature on Shelley's work. She is clearly unafraid of overturning critical commonplaces that have become established in Shelley studies and, moreover, she makes a compelling case for taking the early...