Shelley S Ambivalence

A study of Shelley's poetry, approaching it from the viewpoint of contemporary Jungian analytical psychology that incorporates the theories of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott. Material that relates to the earliest stages of the ego's development - to the pre-Oedipal situation - are used.

First published in 2009. This book argues that the images of and allusions to music in Shelley’s writing demonstrate his attempt to infuse the traditionally masculine word with the traditionally feminine voice and music. This further extends to his even more fundamental desire to integrate the "object voice" with his own subjectivity. For Shelley, what plagues this integration is the prospect of losing both the poet’s authority and the subjectivity upon which it relies. This book asserts that the resultant deadlock and instability paradoxically becomes Shelley’s ultimate goal — creating a steady state of suspension that finally preserves both his authority and his humanity.

Madness and the Romantic Poet examines the longstanding and enduringly popular idea that poetry is connected to madness and mental illness. The idea goes back to classical antiquity, but it was given new life at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book offers a new and much more complete history of its development than has previously been attempted, alongside important associated ideas about individual genius, creativity, the emotions, rationality, and the mind in extreme states or disorder - ideas that have been pervasive in modern popular culture. More specifically, the book tells the story of the initial growth and wider dissemination of the idea of the 'Romantic mad poet' in the nineteenth century, how (and why) this idea became so popular, and how it interacted with the very different fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, their poetry, and attacks on or defences of Romanticism as a cultural trend generally - again leaving a popular legacy that endured into the twentieth century. Material covered includes nineteenth-century journalism, early literary criticism, biography, medical and psychiatric literature, and poetry. A wide range of scientific (and pseudoscientific) thinkers are discussed alongside major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, Byron, and John Clare. Using this array of sources and figures, the book asks: was the Romantic mad genius just a sentimental stereotype or a romantic myth? Or does its long popularity tell us something serious about Romanticism and the role it has played, or has been given, in modern culture?

Rivermen examines the mythic context and psychological dimensions of the river and its source through an investigation of the recurring motifs associated with the source in classical and English literature -the heroic quest, the river journey, and the naiad or muse. Frederic Colwell focuses on the writings of those redoubtable rivermen, the English Romantic poets. He explores poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, showing that the image of the river is used in their work as a compelling archetype and a metaphor for the nature and process of the creative impulse. From the preface: "Unlike the rhythms of oceans, rivers have direction and a purposive flow. The river's will is always its own, not laid down by man, for whom the river passage demands a surrender to its will, its currents and eddies. To move with the flow is to course with time and change; to stand astride or view it from a height offers the prophetic stance by which we contemplate its entire passage, its past, present, and the brightening waters or rippling shoals ahead."

First published 1984. In a provocative study, this book argues that the problems posed by Shelley’s notoriously difficult style must be understood in relation to his ambivalence towards language itself as an artistic medium — the tension between the potential of language to mirror emotional experience and the recognition of it’s inevitable limitations. Through an exposition of Shelley’s idea of language, as reflected in his theoretical writings and individual poems, this book makes a strong case for his artistic worth. A definitive introduction to Shelley, useful for both scholars and newcomers, this book will be interest to students of literature.

Complementing recent feminist studies of female self-representation, this book examines the dynamics of masculine self-representation in nineteenth-century British literature. Arguing that the category "autobiography" was a product of nineteenth-century individualism, the author analyzes the dependence of the nineteenth-century masculine subject on autonomy or self-naming as the prerequisite for the composition of a life history. The masculine autobiographer achieves this autonomy by using a feminized other as a metaphorical mirror for the self. The feminized other in these texts represents the social cost of masculine autobiography. Authors from Wordsworth to Arnold, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Gosse, use female lovers and family members as symbols for the community with which they feel they have lost contact. In the theoretical introduction, the author argues that these texts actually privilege the autonomous self over the images of community they ostensibly value, creating in the process a self-enclosed and self-referential "community of one."

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major Romantic poets and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English Language. In this volume, the editors have selected the most popular, significant and frequently taught poems from the six-volume Longman Annotated edition of Shelley’s poems. Each poem is fully annotated, explained and contextualised, along with a comprehensive list of abbreviations, an inclusive bibliography of material relating to the text and interpretation of Shelley’s poetry, plus an extensive chronology of Shelley’s life and works. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary for an informed reading of Shelley’s richly varied and densely allusive verse, making this an ideal anthology for students, classroom use, and anyone approaching Shelley’s poetry for the first time; however the level and extent of commentary and annotation will also be of great value for researchers and critics.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the fourth volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. Most of the poems in the present volume were written between late autumn 1820 and late summer 1821. They include Adonais, Shelley’s lament on the death of John Keats, widely recognised as one of the finest elegies in English poetry, as well as Epipsychidion, a poem inspired by his relationship with the nineteen-year-old Teresa Viviani (‘Emilia’), the object of an intense but temporary fascination for Shelley. The poems of this period show the extent both of Shelley’s engagement with Keats’s volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) — a copy of which he first read in October 1820 — and of his interest in Italian history, culture and politics. Shelley’s translations of some of his own poems into Italian and his original compositions in the language are also included here. In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.