Notes on Shelley

Shelley is who I want to write my 5-page paper on, and I need to get my thoughts in order. My first idea was to write about how for him beauty and justice are continuous. He was a political radical as well as an aesthetic maker; he wrote "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (what it sounds like) but also "England in 1819" (enraged, unpretty, a diatribe of a sonnet, a reaction to the Peterloo Massacre, a call for revolution).

(Here is an exercise: compare and contrast these two titles. The first is transcendent, reverent, of a piece with the stanzas that follow [though the turn halfway through to autobiography does surprise]. The second is grounded in a place and time--a country and a year in its manifest history--and withholds what will be the tone of the poem proper. The title "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" sets up and sums up the poem it heads; the title "England in 1819" does more work on the setting-up count--the sonnet needs its title, because the reader does--but doesn't do any summing-up work. [One summary might be: "England in 1819 is soaked with blood and rotten with corruption. Bring on the revolution!"] Instead it does a kind of moral work. There is a way in which the title's objective tone--here is the time, here is the place--"objectifies" the poem's anger too, in the sense of making it objective: here is the time, here is the place, here is the attitude that accompanies this time and this place. Facts. This is bolder and more effective than outright moralizing--"anger is what you should feel"--than lyric expression of the poet's own feeling--"anger is what I feel"--and even than whatever rhetorical move the poet might make to indicate that, of course, he and the reader are on the same page--"anger is what we feel, since we're good people." Nope. Shelley doesn't go through any of those contortions. It's simply England. 1819. Anger. Facts.)

Anyway, I'd gotten yea far into a précis for my examiner--"This isn't how we talk about these values today; in fact, those of us who wish to talk about beauty at all may find it hard to speak up when other, ongoing conversations--about oppressions and inequities, empowerment and activism--are so sophisticated and important. Beauty and justice aren't continuous when an interest in the former feels like a distraction from the latter."--when I realized that I wasn't talking about Shelley, I was talking about me--my fascination with the tension I see between beauty and justice, the difficulty I have reconciling my thrilling to beauty with my social conscience. Shelley didn't have this difficulty, was all I really saying.

Thinking back, I'm not sure how I would even have supported this argument. Would I just have put "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" next to "England in 1819" and said "Look! He wrote both!"? The problem is that because Shelley didn't have this difficulty, there really is no point in writing a paper about his not having this difficulty. The paper is supposed to be on Shelley, and a paper on there is this whole issue! but actually Shelley had no issue with it! is not a paper on Shelley.

Furthermore, I just looked at the assignment description for this writing option (there are three, the others being a quote collage [which I chose to do for my other field] and a response to an examiner-posed research question) and I don't need an argument: "An integrative/synthesis essay, calling upon the candidate to provide a critical integration or synthesis of the 6 works from that field's list. The synthesis might be thematic, structural, analytic, theoretical etc. in nature and include contextual research."

My current idea then is to write on a question my examiner mentioned I might think about vis-à-vis the six poems on my list: "What makes this a Shelley poem?"

More anon!