Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’
- Standard Abbreviations and Note on Texts
- 1 ‘Painted fancy's unsuspected scope’: The Esdaile Notebook, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab
- 2 ‘These transient meetings’: Alastor and Laon and Cythna
- 3 ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook
- 4 ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo
- 5 ‘In a style very different’: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci
- 6 ‘The sacred talisman of language’: The Witch of Atlas and A Defence of Poetry
- 7 ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems
- 8 ‘The right road to Paradise’: Adonais and The Triumph of Life
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’
- Standard Abbreviations and Note on Texts
- 1 ‘Painted fancy's unsuspected scope’: The Esdaile Notebook, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab
- 2 ‘These transient meetings’: Alastor and Laon and Cythna
- 3 ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook
- 4 ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo
- 5 ‘In a style very different’: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci
- 6 ‘The sacred talisman of language’: The Witch of Atlas and A Defence of Poetry
- 7 ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems
- 8 ‘The right road to Paradise’: Adonais and The Triumph of Life
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Shelley opens his letter to Thomas Love Peacock of 22 July 1816 by setting up the problem that propels the Scrope Davies Notebook into being:
But how shall I describe to you the scenes by which I am now surrounded.— To exhaust epithets which express the astonishment & the admiration—the very excess of satisfied expectation, where expectation scarcely acknowledged any boundary—is this to impress upon your mind the images which fill mine now, even until it overflows? (Letters: PBS I. p. 495)
The challenge of transmuting words into experience, the excessiveness of which experience seems to prevent any straightforward description, becomes the animating force of Shelley's letter and the poetry written in the summer of 1816. The Scrope Davies Notebook consists of two sonnets, ‘To Laughter’ and ‘Upon the wandering winds’, a version of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, and Scene—Pont Pellisier in the vale of Servox, a version of Mont Blanc. Recovered in 1976 from a Barclay's vault, these poems create special editorial problems with regard to how to consider these drafts in relation to the other ‘finished’ poems, Mont Blanc (published in 1817 in Shelley and Mary Godwin's History of a Six Week's Tour) and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (published on 19 January 1817 in the Examiner) that have been part of the Shelley canon since their publication. Mark Anderson notes the ‘substantial’ variations between the poems while admitting that ‘in the case of both the “Hymn” and “Mont Blanc,” these changes are manifestly not substantial enough to accord the versions the status of being different poems in our ordinary understanding of the term’.The recent nature of the discovery of ‘To Laughter’ and ‘Upon the wandering winds’ has meant that they have received slighter critical attention, but this chapter will seek to show that the shared compositional history of these poems facilitates them being read as a distinct group coloured by the letter to Thomas Love Peacock. Tilottama Rajan argues that Mont Blanc and the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ ‘converge on the same problem: the mind's need to transcend life by positing some transcendent, form-giving fiction’.This insight suggests the seriousness of the poetic philosophy explored in the poetry, and this idea should be extended to Shelley's other poems in the notebook.
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- Information
- Shelley’s Living ArtistryLetters, Poems, Plays, pp. 77 - 110Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017