Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works

"Shelley was arguably the most ambitious of all the Romantic poets. Certainly, he saw the mission of Romantic poetry in the grandest terms. Poets, he proclaimed, are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” by which he meant they write the script for the future (which is essentially what I argued earlier, proving that everything we think and say is touched by the Romantics.). His ‘Ode to the West Wind’ was written after an afternoon’s walk along the river Arno, in Florence, where he watched a tempestuous wind shake the autumn leaves from the trees, and allowed his imagination full flight. As if equipped with a mental GoPro camera and an Iron Man flight suit, Shelley takes us spinning through the atmosphere into the storm clouds, then, in an instant, out over the crystalline blue waters of the Mediterranean, then onto the Atlantic, plunging underwater to ‘the sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear/the sapless foliage of the ocean.’ “Shelley set me free, which was, of course, his intention.” These superpowers are given, Shelley tells us, to the poet, whose words are like the dead leaves spinning in the air by the Arno, ready to be buried and reborn as a prophecy for mankind, of a future freed from tyranny. The third stanza of this poem, where Shelley describes the sea, is personally very special to me. I read it for the first time in an English class as a teenager growing up in Adelaide, Australia, about as far from Florence and the Mediterranean as you can be. But Shelley’s lines, many of which I barely understood, or could even visualise, set off a bomb in my brain: “Is he really allowed to write like this? If so, then anything is possible.” Shelley set me free, which was, of course, his intention. I always bring this story up with my students when they complain that Romantic poetry, or any other great literature, are not relevant to them. Where are we as human beings if only what is relevant is important, and relevance is defined as only what we already know? Count me out. Shelley was fascinated by everything , especially the world we could not yet see . . . These are the lines that were like an electrical shock to me: Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay. Oh, absolutely. And for that we have the most wonderful antidote, named Lord Byron. He called Wordsworth, ‘Turdsworth,’ and accused Keats of wanking his imagination. His funniest take-down of Romantic poetry navel-gazing is in his magnificent epic comedy, Don Juan . The young hero has the hots for a beautiful married woman but mistakes his horniness for existential confusion: “’Twas strange,” jokes Byron, “that one so young should thus concern/His brain about the action of the sky./ If you think ’twas Philosophy that this did,/I can’t help thinking puberty assisted.” For Byron, all our precious institutions, marriage, the church, higher learning, etc. are simply screens for sexual drives or what he calls, more poetically, “the controlless core of human hearts.” So, still a Romantic in the end. “With Chaucer and Cervantes, Byron makes the podium for greatest comic writer of all time.” I’ve kept this list to the best shorter Romantic poems, but Don Juan deserves special mention. This raunchy, philosophical masterpiece is not taught in schools for the simple, dumb reason it’s so digressively long. They have ‘most underrated’ categories in football, don’t they? Well, Don Juan is the most underread of the great poems. With Chaucer and Cervantes, Byron makes the podium for greatest comic writer of all time. Please do your bit for civilization — and your own personal happiness index — and take Don Juan to the beach this summer. Just be prepared for some stares in your direction when you catch yourself pounding your hand on the sand with laughter."