Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
“Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Summary
The phantasmal quality of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetic language probes and interrogates the boundary between the living and the dead while exposing the interconnectedness of the sensory and the mental. His skylark, “Like an unbodied joy,” is an unseen bird which is really a song, its bodily significance usurped by its “profuse strains of unpremeditated art”; his west wind is an “unseen presence” which drives leaves, “like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”; in “Mont Blanc” the speaker seeks “among the shadows that pass by / Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, / Some phantom, some faint image.” As Susan Wolfson observes, “Shelley's visionary poetics—from Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, to Ode to the West Wind and To a Sky-lark, to The Triumph of Life—know the force of negating the known into the apparition.” Earlier generations of Romanticists recognized, analyzed, and indeed privileged the supernatural in Shelley's poetry, while in recent decades, political, historical, and scientific understandings of Shelley have achieved ascendency. Informed by the trends in recent scholarship and literary theory, without minimizing the political and scientific, we ought now to re-examine the “supernatural” in Shelley, because ghosts and spirits are ubiquitous in his writing, nor are these phantoms mere decorative motifs. Rather, Shelley explores the invisible in order to express a complex and nuanced spirituality consistent with his skepticism and scientific learning; the natural is telescoped through the supernatural to challenge distinctions between the two. Furthermore, Shelley's dialogism softens the monism of his ubiquitous “One,” creating a polychromatic rather than a monochromatic visionary poetics which achieves a polyphony of spiritual potentiality symbolized by a plethora of ghosts and spirits.
Shelley was a poet unusually susceptible to influence by and admiration for other writers: some of his crucial literary relationships, with Plato, Milton, Wordsworth, and Byron, have received extensive critical attention. However, the larger question of why and how literary influence is so central to Shelley also requires study.
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- Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives , pp. 103 - 116Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021