Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Parenthetical Citations
- Introduction: A Philosophical Poet (of Ordinary Language)
- The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry
- Chapter 1 The Everlasting Universe of Things as Shelley Found It in 1816: “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
- Chapter 2 Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote for: The Signature of “Ode to the West Wind”
- Chapter 3 Knowing What We Do (With Words): Act I of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 4 Recounting Reverses, Recovering the Initiative: Act II of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 5 The Congregated Powers of Language: Act III of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 6 Resounding Celebrations and Constraining Commissions: Act IV of Prometheus Unbound
- Coda: A Voice to Be Accomplished
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - The Everlasting Universe of Things as Shelley Found It in 1816: “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Parenthetical Citations
- Introduction: A Philosophical Poet (of Ordinary Language)
- The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry
- Chapter 1 The Everlasting Universe of Things as Shelley Found It in 1816: “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
- Chapter 2 Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote for: The Signature of “Ode to the West Wind”
- Chapter 3 Knowing What We Do (With Words): Act I of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 4 Recounting Reverses, Recovering the Initiative: Act II of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 5 The Congregated Powers of Language: Act III of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 6 Resounding Celebrations and Constraining Commissions: Act IV of Prometheus Unbound
- Coda: A Voice to Be Accomplished
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The matter is to express the intuition that fantasy shadows anything we can understand reality to be. As Wittgenstein more or less puts a related matter: the issue is not to explain how grammar and criteria allow us to relate language to the world but to determine what language relates the world to be. This is not well expressed as the priority of mind over reality or of self over world. … It is better put as the priority of grammar—the thing Kant calls conditions of possibility (of experience and of objects), the thing Wittgenstein calls possibilities of phenomena—over both what we call mind and what we call the world. If we call grammar the Logos, we will more readily sense the shadow of fantasy in this picture.”
Although Shelley's “Mont Blanc” is a difficult poem that has elicited widely differing interpretations, its readers have arrived at several generally accepted points of agreement about its significance and place in the Shelley canon. It is, for example, routinely assumed that this poem and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” are to be taken together, the one “sister” to the other.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Constitution of Shelley's PoetryThe Argument of Language in Prometheus Unbound, pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009