BARS Blog

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 28-29^th 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

Keerthi Vasishta, Postgraduate Helper at the Shelley Conference 2024 discusses below the exhibition at Keats House which ran alongside the conference:

The Shelley Conference 2024 featured a special exhibition from the collections of Keats House inspired by the 1824 Posthumous Poems, corresponding with the theme of this year’s conference. The volume Posthumous Poems was edited and compiled originally by the recently-widowed Mary, who worked through her grief to produce the book.  On display at Keats House is a first edition of Posthumous Poems (1824) ed. by Mary Shelley (John and Henry L. Hunt), the first of the many posthumous publications of Percy Shelley’s writing. Dr. Andrew Lacey, University of Lancaster and the official ‘interpreter’ for the exhibition, explained the thinking behind the items on display:

The Shelley relics collected in our exhibition illustrate Mary Shelley’s careful superintendence of Percy Shelley’s posthumous reputation over almost two decades, and, taken together, gesture towards the diverse nature of Shelley’s various literary afterlives.

Percy Shelley has been subject to constant reinvention and rediscovery by successive generations since his untimely death in 1822. Therefore, Lacey’s gesture towards the ‘diverse nature of Shelley’s various literary afterlives’ creates an exciting moment for readers of Percy Shelley coming to the exhibition. In viewing the physical object, readers conversant with the language and history of Percy and Mary Shelley’s first posthumous collaboration, were instantly transported to the world of 1824.

Seeing the book is a transformative moment. The conference was suddenly not just about words, not about arguments, not about ideas. The materiality and historicity of the events and people under scrutiny came to life to the participants. Any ideas and arguments one might have arrived with to the conference had to reckon with the lived history of the objects on display. Words fall away in viewing the Posthumous Poems because participants were witnessing a testimony of one remarkable woman’s labour and love for her remarkable husband. It is a testimony also to the birth of one of the greatest editorial efforts on the work of any single poet, an object therefore unlike any other, demanding the attention of viewers. As Lacey explained further,

Although, for Mary, the years after Shelley’s untimely death were blighted by grief and adversity, they were also marked by remarkable industry and productivity. The obstacles that Mary successfully negotiated were many, making the establishment of her ‘Collected Shelley’ – a fitting monument to the Shelley that she knew – an all the more remarkable achievement.

It takes a village to nurse a child, and it is much the same with the Shelley’s Posthumous Poems as well as Percy Shelley’s posthumous afterlives and reputation. Mary Shelley’s ‘Autograph letter to Leigh Hunt, undated but c. 23 December 1839’, placed beside Posthumous Poems hints at the many hands that came together to make Shelley the poet we know today. The text of this letter details Mary Shelley’s anxieties in answering G.H. Lewes, who was compiling a life of her late husband (Lewes’ work remained unpublished). Confessing the difficulties to Leigh Hunt, a long-time friend of the Shelleys, Mary shares her continuing pain from the loss of her husband more than a decade and a half prior. She writes in her letter to Hunt, ‘I cannot write or speak of Shelley to any purpose according to my views without taking a seal from a fountain, that I cannot bring myself yet to let flow’. The imagery of a sealed fountain is powerful in describing her volcanic grief while she wrestled with the memory of late husband. Shortly before this, Mary Shelley had headlined a complete collection of Percy Shelley’s poems, with both the preface and the editorial work done by Mary herself. This book, on display at Keats House was titled The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley and was published by London publisher Edward Moxon in 1839. The interpretation to the book at the exhibition quotes Mary’s troubles in the effort of creating the volume:

Editing the poems and drafting the Notes caused Mary Shelley considerable distress: in her journal, she writes: ‘I almost think that my present occupation will end in a fit of illness’, adding ‘I am torn to pieces by Memory’ (12 February 1839)

Yet, Percy Shelley’s posthumous publication and reputation were growing further thanks to Mary’s efforts. Published late in 1839, although bearing 1840 on the title page was Essays, Letters From Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. by Mary Shelley (London, Edward Moxon), the first edition of which is also on display at the Keats House exhibition.

If Mary’s labours were the heart of the conference and the thinking around Percy’s early posthumous reputation, the exhibition at Keats House showcases the diversity of Shelley’s after-lives. Like a leviathan, Percy Shelley’s reputation grew in breadth and scope since his death into the following centuries. His name and reputation had such value that the self-professed ‘psychic’ Shirley Carson Jenney produced The Fortune of Eternity, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Taken Through the Clairaudience of Shirley Carson Jenney, Psychic (Illfracombe, Stockwell, 1950), on display at Keats House. The book, Jenney claimed was, as the interpretation notes: ‘transmitted wholly thro’ clairaudient dictation’. The final word on the display interpretation of Jenney’s piece has this to say:

‘While of limited scholarly value, The Fortune of Eternity stands as testament to the fact that Percy Shelley remained a subject of occultist interest well into the twentieth century.’

Here, the transformative moments of the exhibition at Keats House to the participants of Shelley Conference 2024 were complete. Not only was Percy Shelley posthumous reputation real, but here was evidence (though a hoax) of Percy Shelley having an actual ‘afterlife’!

Keerthi Sudhakar Vasishta is a PhD student at Durham University.