Lydia Shaw, Shelley Conference Postgraduate Helper, here details for the BARS Blog, an overview of the Shelley Conference:
‘The Shelley Conference, Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations’ took place on 28-29th June 2024 at Keats House in London. On the eve of the conference, Mark Sandy gave a beautiful pre-conference lecture titled ‘‘Waters on a Starry Night’: Shelley’s Poetic Reflections on Wordsworth’. The lecture discussed touchstones between Percy Shelley and Wordsworth’s poetic imagery with a focus on haunting loss, absent presences, vacancy and effervescent similes that took us on a ‘poetic quest for the unseen’, to borrow Sandy’s words.
The following morning saw the beginning of the first full day of the conference. The day began with opening remarks by Amanda Blake Davis on the continuing importance of collaboration to Shelley Studies, especially in Anna Mercer’s approach to Shelleyan collaboration in the 2017 Shelley Conference and in her monograph, and within Shelley’s own circle during and after his lifetime (i.e. The Liberal).
The first set of panels were The Liberal and ‘Posthumous Existence’. Following a coffee break were the panels ‘Affect and Co-Creation’ and ‘Mary as Editor’. I attended the ‘Affect and Co-Creation’ panel which consisted of a fascinating talk by Katy Boyer on Shelley’s corpse and the relation between Percy Shelley’s drowned body and his poetry. Merrilees Roberts explored Mary, Jane and Percy’s collaborative grief in ‘The Choice’ and lyrics to Jane Williams. Lisa Vargo gave a paper on ‘The Zucca’ and Mary Shelley’s role as editor, seeing the poem as a sort of dialogue between Mary and Percy.
Another short break was followed by the parallel panels on ‘Twentieth Century Touchstones’, and a panel consisting of musicality and considered silences, aptly named ‘Sound and Silence’. Camila Oliveira Querino gave a brilliant paper on ‘‘Music’ and other Posthumous Poems set to music’. This was followed by a more contemplative paper on ‘Silence and Sympathy in ‘Julian and Maddalo’’ by Elspeth Askew that considered the role and value of silence in the poem. The panel was closed by Amanda Blake Davis’s excellent discussion of ‘Arboreal Soundscapes in ‘The Woodman and The Nightingale’’ which explored subjective responses to objective sounds in the poem, the experience of writing through sound and the significance of Shelley’s identification of specific trees such as the poplar.
Next was lunch in the garden of Keats House followed by the Plenary Panel ‘Editing the Dead’. The panel consisted of talks by Will Bowers, Nora Crook, Paul Hamilton and Valentina Varinelli with fruitful discussions on Mary Shelley’s role as editor, the ‘Jane poems’ and how they substitute and consummate Percy Shelley’s feelings for Jane, and questions surrounding the publication of the Posthumous Poems. The plenary panel was followed by a drinks reception to launch volumes 5 and 6 of The Poems of Shelley (Longman Annotated English Poets), hosted by two of the editors of the volumes, Will Bowers and Mathelinda Nabugodi. The event culminated in a brilliant and moving speech by Kelvin Everest, who shared his experience of editing Shelley for Longman.
The summer weather continued for the second day of the conference with opening panels on ‘Uncovering Editions’ and ‘Shelleyan Disruption’. The former took place in the Nightingale Room and included talks by Andrew Hodgson, Gary Kelly and Keerthi Vasishta on Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Milner and Sowerby’s editions of Shelley and the role of Leigh Hunt as editor.
A brief coffee break preceded the second set of parallel panels on ‘Beyond the Human’ and ‘Transnational Shelley’. The former saw a fantastic discussion by Paul Stephens on ‘Shelley’s Theory of Economic Value’. Touchstones between the value of land and the transformation of nature into human property were also compellingly explored by Sola Ogunbayo and Yuan Ge.
These parallel panels were followed by another short coffee break before the final panels of the conference on ‘Conversation and Influence’ and ‘Translations’. The former, chaired by Andrew Lacey, saw fantastic talks by Laura Blunsden on ‘‘Alastor’, Wieland, and Shelley’s Symbolic Mind’ and Oliver Clarkson’s ‘Wordsworth After Shelley’, and my own paper on ‘The Poetics of the Ocean and Human Potentiality in Shelley’s ‘Julian and Maddalo’’.
Saturday’s roundtable saw Kate Singer and Omar F. Miranda discuss the recently published Percy Bysshe Shelley for Our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2024) with respondents Mark Sandy and Jennifer Wallace. Singer elegantly described the purpose of the book being to ‘ripple the water of thinking about Shelley’ and the aims of the editors (Singer and Miranda) to create a book that reflects not only our current times but future times. Sandy summed up the value of such a book, and the continued importance of studying Shelley, as that we see something in him, in his ideas, that mirrors back to ourselves.
Following this exciting roundtable was the keynote lecture by Ross Wilson. This engaging lecture drew attention to Shelley’s persisting concern with the posthumous condition, from the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson to themes of posthumousness, living again, ceasing to live again, and fragmentary forms as recurrent in Shelley’s corpus. Shelley’s concern with the posthumous condition was strikingly considered in the fragment ‘On Life’, wherein Wilson reflected upon Shelley’s remarkable claim that ‘in living we lose the apprehension of life’. This phrase was, of course, adopted as the title for Wilson’s seminal 2013 monograph on Shelley.
In his capacity as Conference co-organiser, Andrew Lacey delivered some heartfelt closing remarks, thanking his co-organisers Amanda Blake Davis, Paul Stephens and Merrilees Roberts, together with the PG Helpers Keerthi Vasishta and Lydia Shaw, and to Rob Shakespeare and the brilliant staff at Keats House.
Closing the conference was Omar F. Miranda and Kate Singer with a drinks reception and raffle on the front lawn of the Keats House, hosted by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
‘The Shelley Conference, Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations’ was filled with inspiring talks, dynamic discussion, the exchanging of ideas within a supportive community and will no doubt be the birthplace of new Shelleyan collaborations to come.
Lydia Shaw has recently completed her PhD at Durham University. Her thesis refigures Byron and Shelley’s poetics in relation to current environmental discussions. In examining these two Romantic poets’ engagements with, and treatment of, the Italian landscape, she employs environmental discussions of interconnection to interrogate the conceived divisions between human and nature. Lydia was a recipient of The Byron Society PhD Bursary in the years 2022/3 and 2023/4.
Image credits: Keats House Museum