Shelley’s Visual Imagination by Nancy Moore Goslee (review)

In this intriguing book, Goslee puts to good use her experience of editing Shelley’s notebooks in the Bodleian Library for the Garland Bodleian Shelley Manuscript facsimile series. Goslee asks fascinating questions here about the relationship between the material conditions of Shelley’s drafts and the verses which they contain. These questions range from considering “to what extent did the availability of blank pages in a given notebook, or the portability of a small notebook, shape Shelley’s choice of verse form for a particular project?” (p. 15) to exploring the potential connections between the ink blots that mark Shelley’s draft of The Triumph of Life and one of the key moments in that poem: the appearance of the “Shape all light” who (which?) “blots” from the figure of Rousseau’s mind all memory of his former experiences (pp. 187ff.). Moreover, Goslee expands her inquiry beyond possible relationships between the material conditions and the contents of Shelley’s drafts to investigate how Shelley’s drafts might “be understood both as meaningful in themselves and as hermeneutic guides to the completed version” (p. 10). Goslee, through detailed examination of the relevant drafts, offers us new genealogies of the “allegorical personifications” at the center of some of Shelley’s most canonical works: figures like Hope, Liberty, Superstition, Anarchy, Murder.

Arguing for the primacy of the “epipsyche” and the “triumphal procession” in Shelley’s “visual imagination” (pp. 16, 19), Goslee traces these elements through a selection of Shelley’s poetry from Queen Mab (1813) to the unfinished draft of The Triumph of Life (1822). After an introduction which includes, among other things, a timely re-assessment of the fortunes of iconography in the cultural history of the Romantic period, and in subsequent academic criticism of that period, Goslee begins with a discussion of the much-revised and much-redacted text of Queen Mab that Shelley published as “The Daemon of the World” in his Alastor volume (1816). Subsequent chapters examine Shelley’s shifting conception of “intellectual beauty” in the drafts and extant texts of his eponymous hymn; the use of personification and figuration in Laon and Cythna (1817); Shelley’s engagement with the broader “historical struggle for hermeneutic control of public icons” in The Mask of Anarchy (1819); the “turn away” from “allegorical personification” (p. 95) in Prometheus Unbound (1820); and Shelley’s iconoclastic refusal to afford “physical or anthropomorphic characteristics” (p. 122) to liberty in his Ode to Liberty (1820); Shelley’s remediation of the historical Teresa Viviani in the “rhetorical personification” (p. 140) of Emilia in Epipsychidion (1821); Shelley’s self-representation in Adonais (1821); and the “patterns of interruption and continuity” (p. 187) that mark both the draft and the narrative of The Triumph of Life (1822).

Goslee’s lucid and informative discussion offers valuable re-assessments of the aesthetic elements of works by Shelley that recent critics, justifiably eager to assert the poet’s intellectual maturity, have often tended to assess more as political or philosophical manifestos than as works of art. However, much of Goslee’s discussion is also paleographic in nature and concerned, in general, with the minutiae of Shelley’s drafts, a concentration that suits the volume for the Shelley specialist. That said, this paleographic emphasis suggests a doubt about the status the books affords Shelley’s drafts. Are these to be understood as worthy of study in their own right? Or merely as valuable to the extent that they can enable new readings of finished poems? This sense of uncertainty about the relationship between draft(s) and finished poem(s) comes most to a head in the discussion of The Triumph of Life, where Shelley’s radically incomplete draft has almost acquired the status of a published poem, and the reader is left wishing that Goslee might have analyzed further the complex hermeneutic relationship between draft(s) and finished poem(s). So, too, Goslee’s reading of Adonais, leaves the reader wishing that she had been able...