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 2 - Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote for: The Signature of “Ode to the West Wind”
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
What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may imagine them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me.
Repeatedly in his prose speculations, Shelley insists upon the undifferentiated chaos we habitually make of our semantic and semiotic fields. When a linguistic community inevitably cannot sustain what the “Defence” calls the, “vitally metaphorical language of poetry,” it disorganizes a system of manifest relations into the opacity of dead metaphor. The process is nicely defined as “semantic entropy” by John Wright, and against this collective backsliding Shelley would frame his utterance so as to
[reduce] the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments of its own creation.—By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including what is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter sense almost all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others, in their capacity of suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts.—Our whole life is thus an education of error (NS 507).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Constitution of Shelley's PoetryThe Argument of Language in Prometheus Unbound, pp. 33 - 56Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009