Post by Admin on Aug 6, 2021 23:20:42 GMT
Percy Bysshe Shelley: romanticism and revolution
redflag.org.au/index.php/article/percy-bysshe-shelley-romanticism-and-revolution
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Crime and Punishment, wrote, “The darker the night, the brighter the stars”. Few people have personified this more than Percy Bysshe Shelley. Born in 1792, Shelley died in a boating accident in Italy in 1822. His all-too-short adult life coincided with a particularly dark time in British and European history. By the first years of the nineteenth century, the great hopes for change aroused by the French revolution of 1789 had all but been extinguished, and a new period of reaction had set in.
Amid the gloom of those years—a time of war, of obscene inequality and of the savage violence of a ruling class desperate to defend its privileges from any (real or perceived) threat from below—Shelley gave voice to a new spirit of resistance that was then just emerging but which, in the following decades, would shake Europe to its core. His rage against injustice and revolutionary ardour burned with an intensity perhaps unmatched in the history of art.
To understand how brightly Shelley’s star shone, it’s instructive to situate him in relation to the shattered hopes, and increasingly conservative political leanings, of romantic poets of the previous generation, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his autobiographical poem “The Prelude”, recounting the enthusiasm that he and others felt at the outbreak of revolution in France in 1789, Wordsworth wrote:
Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
For a few short years it seemed as if anything was possible. Wordsworth wrote of “human nature seeming born again”. Coleridge, in his 1798 poem “France: an ode”, wrote:
When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared,
And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea,
Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free,
Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared!
As Coleridge’s friend and fellow radical John Thelwall later put it, Coleridge was “a decided Leveller—abusing the democrats for their hypocritical moderatism, in pretending to be willing to give people equality of privileges and rank, while, at the same time, they would refuse them all that the others could be valuable for—equality of property—or rather abolition of all property”.
Unfortunately, conditions in Britain at the time were far from conducive to the realisation of their hopes. The period in which a space opened for the expression of radical ideas proved fleeting. One reason for this was the success of the wave of repression unleashed by the British government. Those suspected of Jacobin sympathies were hounded by the authorities, and many of the leading figures were arrested and prosecuted for treason. Wordsworth and Coleridge themselves were under almost constant surveillance by government spies. In this context, their enthusiasms had to be expressed mainly within a small circle of their friends.
If the climate of reaction at home wasn’t enough, their hopes were delivered another blow by developments in France. The terror came in 1793, followed by the Thermidorian reaction that led, ultimately, to the dictatorship of Napoleon. France and Britain were from then at war almost continuously. In 1799, Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth, complaining about those who “in consequence of the complete failure of the French revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophies”.
The two of them, however, were soon to follow the same path. In his poetry, Wordsworth grew more and more conventional—all daffodils and lonely wanderings—and in his politics moved in the direction of outright reaction. As the “mature” Wordsworth saw it, “The people [are] already powerful far beyond the increase of their information and their improvement in morals”. In a letter to a friend in the early 1800s, Coleridge complained similarly: “Without religious joys and religious terrors, nothing can be expected from the inferior classes in society”.
The blissful hopes of the 1790s were, in the 1800s, plunged into darkness. The war against Napoleonic France bled Britain dry. In 1811, there were 640,000 in the armed forces out of a population of only 12 million (the equivalent, in Australia today, would be an army of more than 1.3 million). From the poor, ever greater exertions and sacrifices were demanded in the name of “King and country”. In addition to the burden of furnishing the human material for the army, there was the heavy taxation imposed to fund the war. Wages, particularly of agricultural workers, were held at starvation levels.
When the war finally ended in 1816, things barely improved. Thousands starved as employment opportunities completely dried up. Those lucky enough to have work may not have starved, but the combination of poverty wages and brutal conditions meant life was barely worth living. The life expectancy of workers in industrial centres like Manchester plunged to as low as seventeen.
Meanwhile, the everyday life of the ruling class was basically just one long party. In G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England, we read that “the upper class throve on enhanced rents, and paid too small a proportion in wages”. “Never again”, Trevelyan writes, “was a country house life more thriving or jovial, with its fox hunting, shooting and leisure in spacious and well-stocked libraries. Never was sporting life more attractive”.
No wonder that there were also flickers of resistance. In 1811-16, the Luddite rebellion emerged—in which small but highly organised groups of workers went around smashing machinery, the introduction of which threatened livelihoods in areas previously dominated by craft-based production.
Rest in Link.
redflag.org.au/index.php/article/percy-bysshe-shelley-romanticism-and-revolution
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Crime and Punishment, wrote, “The darker the night, the brighter the stars”. Few people have personified this more than Percy Bysshe Shelley. Born in 1792, Shelley died in a boating accident in Italy in 1822. His all-too-short adult life coincided with a particularly dark time in British and European history. By the first years of the nineteenth century, the great hopes for change aroused by the French revolution of 1789 had all but been extinguished, and a new period of reaction had set in.
Amid the gloom of those years—a time of war, of obscene inequality and of the savage violence of a ruling class desperate to defend its privileges from any (real or perceived) threat from below—Shelley gave voice to a new spirit of resistance that was then just emerging but which, in the following decades, would shake Europe to its core. His rage against injustice and revolutionary ardour burned with an intensity perhaps unmatched in the history of art.
To understand how brightly Shelley’s star shone, it’s instructive to situate him in relation to the shattered hopes, and increasingly conservative political leanings, of romantic poets of the previous generation, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his autobiographical poem “The Prelude”, recounting the enthusiasm that he and others felt at the outbreak of revolution in France in 1789, Wordsworth wrote:
Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
For a few short years it seemed as if anything was possible. Wordsworth wrote of “human nature seeming born again”. Coleridge, in his 1798 poem “France: an ode”, wrote:
When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared,
And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea,
Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free,
Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared!
As Coleridge’s friend and fellow radical John Thelwall later put it, Coleridge was “a decided Leveller—abusing the democrats for their hypocritical moderatism, in pretending to be willing to give people equality of privileges and rank, while, at the same time, they would refuse them all that the others could be valuable for—equality of property—or rather abolition of all property”.
Unfortunately, conditions in Britain at the time were far from conducive to the realisation of their hopes. The period in which a space opened for the expression of radical ideas proved fleeting. One reason for this was the success of the wave of repression unleashed by the British government. Those suspected of Jacobin sympathies were hounded by the authorities, and many of the leading figures were arrested and prosecuted for treason. Wordsworth and Coleridge themselves were under almost constant surveillance by government spies. In this context, their enthusiasms had to be expressed mainly within a small circle of their friends.
If the climate of reaction at home wasn’t enough, their hopes were delivered another blow by developments in France. The terror came in 1793, followed by the Thermidorian reaction that led, ultimately, to the dictatorship of Napoleon. France and Britain were from then at war almost continuously. In 1799, Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth, complaining about those who “in consequence of the complete failure of the French revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophies”.
The two of them, however, were soon to follow the same path. In his poetry, Wordsworth grew more and more conventional—all daffodils and lonely wanderings—and in his politics moved in the direction of outright reaction. As the “mature” Wordsworth saw it, “The people [are] already powerful far beyond the increase of their information and their improvement in morals”. In a letter to a friend in the early 1800s, Coleridge complained similarly: “Without religious joys and religious terrors, nothing can be expected from the inferior classes in society”.
The blissful hopes of the 1790s were, in the 1800s, plunged into darkness. The war against Napoleonic France bled Britain dry. In 1811, there were 640,000 in the armed forces out of a population of only 12 million (the equivalent, in Australia today, would be an army of more than 1.3 million). From the poor, ever greater exertions and sacrifices were demanded in the name of “King and country”. In addition to the burden of furnishing the human material for the army, there was the heavy taxation imposed to fund the war. Wages, particularly of agricultural workers, were held at starvation levels.
When the war finally ended in 1816, things barely improved. Thousands starved as employment opportunities completely dried up. Those lucky enough to have work may not have starved, but the combination of poverty wages and brutal conditions meant life was barely worth living. The life expectancy of workers in industrial centres like Manchester plunged to as low as seventeen.
Meanwhile, the everyday life of the ruling class was basically just one long party. In G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England, we read that “the upper class throve on enhanced rents, and paid too small a proportion in wages”. “Never again”, Trevelyan writes, “was a country house life more thriving or jovial, with its fox hunting, shooting and leisure in spacious and well-stocked libraries. Never was sporting life more attractive”.
No wonder that there were also flickers of resistance. In 1811-16, the Luddite rebellion emerged—in which small but highly organised groups of workers went around smashing machinery, the introduction of which threatened livelihoods in areas previously dominated by craft-based production.
Rest in Link.