Shelley- the
Peoples’ Poet
Shelley more than any other Romantic poet understood the
importance of the power of words to improve the lot of human beings – and he
believed passionately that he had a duty to educate, agitate and organise for that end.
It must be so- I will arise and awaken
The multitude, and like a sulphurous hill,
Which on a sudden from its own snows has shaken
The swoon of ages, it shall burst and fill
The world with cleansing fire: it must, it will-
It may not be restrained! – (Islam, 11 xiv)
This stemmed from a love of human beings. In his preface to “Alistor”
he declares this love.
“Those who do not love their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives,
and prepare for their old age a miserable grave…. They are morally dead.” – and
in “A Defence of Poetry” he writes “A
man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
himself in the place of another and of many others ; the pains and pleasures of
his species must become his own.”
By being able to imagine standing in another’s shoes , particularly
those of the exploited and oppressed, the poet could identify with those
others, engage in a struggle against all oppression and exploitation and use
words as weapons to end that oppression.
For Lord Byron his resistance was personal – the poetry of
someone motivated not by love of his fellow man but anger at a wounded hurt
pride at his own class. Not for no reason did Marx declare famously:
‘the real difference between Byron and Shelley is this:
those who understand and love and rejoice that Byron died at thirty six,
because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they
grieve that Shelley died at twenty nine, because he was essentially a
revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advance guard of
socialism”
In poems, letters and prose essays alike Shelley attacked “all
those who enjoy the profit of the labour of others, as compared with those who
exercise this labour.” In the Prose essay “ A Philosophical Review of Reform”
he opposes both the landed aristocracy and “ those sections of Capitalists too
whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interests – bankers
, stock-jobbers, fund holder etc.”
In addition to “The Mask of Anarchy”- his famous poem about
the massacre at Peterloo in Spa fields- he also wrote to Leigh Hunt by letter
at the time at the beginning of the blasphemous trial of Richard Carlisle for
publishing the work of Tom Paine.
“First we hear that a troop of the enraged master
manufacturers are let loose with sharpened swords upon a multitude of their
starving dependents and in spite of the remonstrance’s of the regular troops
that they ride over them and massacre without distinction of sex or age , and
cut off women’s’ breast and dash the heads of infants against the stones”.
In the “Assassins” he attacks “the respectable man- the
smooth, smiling, polished villain, whom all the city honours; whose very trade
is lies and murder; who buys his daily bread with blood and tears of men “ . This
is the period following the French Revolution, a Revolution Shelley uniquely
amongst the Romantic poets never turns his back on. Here he is on the role of
the Constitutional Monarchy:
“The power which has increased therefore is the power of the
rich. The name and office of King is merely the mask of this power, and is a
kind of stalking horse used to conceal these “catchers of men”, whilst they lay
their nets. Monarchy is only the string which ties the robber’s bundle.” -a
perceptive, wise comment that sadly is as relevant now as it was two hundred years
ago!
In the same prose essay “A Philosophical View of Reform” (an
essay suppressed for 100 years) he makes comments on the terrible effects of
the Industrial Revolution- poverty, growing inequality, the contradiction
between the tremendous productive power of the Industrial Revolution and its
terrible effects on the working – class and poor:
“Population increased, a greater number of hands were
employed in the labours of agriculture and commerce, towns arose where villages
had been, and the proportion borne by those whose labour produced the materials
of subsistence and enjoyment to those who claim for themselves a superfluity of
these materials began to increase indefinitely” – “–“Discoveries which should
have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam”.
He goes on to attack Malthus for blaming sexual intercourse by
the poor for population growth. He has “ the hardened insolence to propose as a
remedy that the poor should be compelled …to abstain from sexual intercourse,
while the rich are to be permitted to add as many mouths to consume the
products of the labour of the poor as they please”!
He condemns the “sordid lust of self” the “grovelling hope
of interest and gold” in Queen Mab- everything including human life is turned
into a commodity to be bought and sold in the market place -the Industrial
worker is the modern day slave:
Yon squalid form,
Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes
A sunless life in the unwholesome mine,
Drags out in labour a protracted death. (Queen Mab, 1`111
112-15)
In “The Mask of Anarchy” he contrasts wage-slavery with freedom
thirty years before “The Communist Manifesto “
'What is Freedom? - ye can tell
That which is slavery is, too well -
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.'
Shelley was also clear that this oppression was shored up
and defended by the Capitalist State. And that bourgeois freedoms were insufficient
to end this system The consequences are poverty, misery, moral degradation,
crime and alienation
'
What
are thou Freedom? O! could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand - tyrants would flee
Like a dream's dim imagery:'
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'Thou
art not, as imposters say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.'
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'For
the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy home.'
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'Thou
art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude -
No - in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.'
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And a State that would use force when inevitable resistance
materialised against wage –slavery.
But Shelley was optimistic that the working class would end
this system:
XXV
'This is
the Winter of the world; and here
We die,
even as the winds of Autumn fade,
Expiring
in the frore and foggy air.
Behold!
Spring comes, though we must pass who made
The
promise of its birth,--even as the shade
Which
from our death, as from a mountain, flings
The
future, a broad sunrise; thus arrayed
As with
the plumes of overshadowing wings,
From its
dark gulf of chains Earth like an eagle springs. (Islam.1X XXV)
And “the future is contained within the present, as
the plant within the seed” (In Defence of poetry p 28)
Shelley was clear that capitalism would only come
through to an end through a “Social Act”.
Shelley’s enemies deal with him by misinterpretation
him or censoring him. His work was too uncompromising and of a high standard to
either ignore or do anything else .Bourgeois critics emphasises his poems about
skylarks clouds west winds etc. But within the working class he was loved and
the effect of hundreds of pirated editions of Queen Mab on the growing trade
union and Chartist movement cannot be underestimated.
Prometheus Unbound is a play that represents a vision of the future without tyrants. It is Shelley's response to a French revolution gone wrong and perhaps the piece of work that best reveals his politics , values and ideals. He states his intentions in the Preface:
"My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined
imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful
idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire,
and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds
cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into
dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness."
Shelley speaks in the epilogue through Demogorgon to champion free will and hope in the face of oppression.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
Shelley was a Fighter ,Activist ,Poet and Revolutionary and his work deserves to be read, studied and used in the struggle for the Freedom he so cherished.
For a more
detailed examination of Shelley’s work read the essay on Shelley by Paul Foot
Shelley: The
Trumpet of a Prophecy
Jacqueline
Mulhallen, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary (Pluto
2015), xiv, 170pp. There is a review of this new book on Shelley here:
Best
biography – Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes.
Reviews and
Discussion of this biography here:
