Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays by Madeleine Callaghan (review)

Madeleine Callaghan’s incisive study begins with a discussion of the irrevocable connections made by scholars and critics between Percy Bysshe Shelley’s art and his life. Shelley’s poetry, loves, and beliefs, which were considered so unconventional during his lifetime, are now the stuff of Romantic myth, and the subject of countless biographies and critical studies. What Callaghan’s work does differently to the multitude, however, is to abolish the use of ‘crude biographical criticism’, to instead successfully provide a ‘long overdue reassessment of how the personal might inform the poetry of Shelley’.

Callaghan achieves this through the innovative use of a selection of Shelley’s letters, which span from October 1811 to June 1822, and are addressed to notable figures including Thomas Love Peacock, and his future wife, Mary Godwin. These letters are then analysed alongside corresponding poems. The author makes the observation that Shelley’s letters ‘bridge […] the personal and the poetic’ and are thus used alongside the poems to scrutinise ‘the relationship between individual private letters and the artistic work’. The rest of the text is comprised of eight chapters, each of which is focused around particular poems and the letters that Callaghan links to Shelley’s fictional work. They are organised roughly chronologically in order to demonstrate the progression of Shelley’s poetical prowess, and how his letter-writing supplemented and influenced this progression.

The first chapter explores the links between the Esdaile Notebook, the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab, when placed alongside Shelley’s October 1811 letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, the young woman Shelley persuaded to join his family before shunning her. Callaghan indicates that the four examples of Shelley’s written work shows his ‘burgeoning interest in poetic artistry’, as he considers in both his early works and the letter to Hitchener the ideas of thought, feeling, and considerations of death we have come to associate with Shelley. It is these works, the author argues, that reveal ‘Shelley self-consciously presenting to the reader his transition into a mature artist’.

‘“These transient meetings”: Alastor and Laon and Cythna’ is the subject of the second chapter, as letters to Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Mary Godwin from 1814–15 are used to emphasise points and moments of plot within the poems. Close analysis of the poems combined with insight gleaned from the letters chosen by Callaghan, demonstrate that ‘Shelley embeds his thoughts, emotions, and responses from incidents that moved him in his life into visionary poetry’, and indicate his attempts to track the development of the poet’s mind. Chapter 3 emphasises editorial issues and the letter as its own definitive literary text, by exploring a July 1816 letter to Thomas Love Peacock alongside the Scrope Davies notebook, famously found in a Barclays bank vault in 1976. Considering the drafts within the Davies notebook in comparison with those already thought to be canonical, together with the elaborate journal-like style of the Peacock letter, ensure an alternative perspective of Shelley as a ‘certain’, rather than uncertain, letter-writer; that is to say, the sense of his confidence and self-assurance are predominant within this epistle.

Particularly interesting is Chapter 4’s examination of Shelley and his poetic voice when responding to other poets, as seen in the poems ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo. The relationship Shelley has with Wordsworth and Byron – through both epistolary and poetic exchanges – is studied in detail here. The chapter culminates by emphasising how Shelley experiments with using aspects of his life, such as his correspondence and conversations with Byron, merging them with the fictional to create works such as Julian and Maddalo. Following this is a chapter entitled ‘“In a style very different”: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci’, which focuses on the impact of politics on Shelley’s letters and poems of the late 1810s. Shelley’s fascination with Tasso’s...