BARS Blog

Bysshe Coffey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Newcastle University. He is an expert on Percy Bysshe Shelley, having published extensively on his philosophy, prosody, and cultural contexts; his current project considers Shelley’s diverse legacies in the period between the death of Mary Shelley and the centenary of his drowning. His first monograph, Shelley’s Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song, which we discuss below, has just been published by Liverpool University Press.

1) How did you come to realise you wanted to write a book on Shelley’s pauses and intermittences?

The book’s germ lay in my awareness of a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. It developed into a realisation that intermittence is a pervasive quality not only of his prosody, but of the incidents his verse describes. Intermittent states of being, vacancies, suspensions, strange immaterial formulations, tenuous and porous networks lace throughout his poetry. He is interested in the powerful interval between the course one was on and where one has ended up, and in the intervals of action, feeling, and thinking. Pausing shapes his view of living.

With the book, I wanted to show the ways in which Shelley’s verse, with its repertoire of pauses and intermittences, is philosophically and scientifically astute. Beautiful, assuredly, the verse is also intellectually profound, polymathic in its ambition. For instance, Shelley had an abiding interest in the intersection of manifest and non-manifest material phenomena. As Shelley wrote to Thomas Love Peacock: ‘You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present & tangible object’. By non-manifest phenomena, I mean formulations posited as material entities that cannot be perceived immediately through our senses, such as the sensorium, Newtonian vis inertiae, the atom, and so on. But Shelley did not intend to resolve the divide between the material and immaterial world of the soul in his poetry (a quite impossible task anyway). Rather, he sought to actuate and enact the dynamic between sensuous reality and the gaps and pauses that punctuate it. Shelley’s imagination did not only think in the terms of reductive materialism with its matter in constant motion (all that talk of balls and the soiled baize of billiard tables), but it challenged such a vision frequently, returning repeatedly to ideas of stasis and limit-points. I hope readers will appreciate the staggering breadth, intensity, and inventiveness of Shelley’s poetic thought.

2) Your book opens by modifying F.R. Leavis to contend that ‘Shelley had a firm grasp upon the weakness of the actual’.  What for you are the most important implications of this insight?

I begin by subjecting Leavis to his own dictum: that every judgement is implicitly cast in the form ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ expecting the response ‘Yes, but . . .’. I wanted to see whether it might be productive to think again about his charge of vagueness levelled against Shelley; the poet had a ‘weak grasp upon the actual’.

Most people get Leavis very wrong. They have an idea of him and that is enough. But it is an impoverishment for he was one of our greatest critics. There is so much to gain from disagreement, and I don’t mean just a stomach ulcer. For Shelleyans, the Leavis story tends to go like this: Leavis hated Shelley, but it isn’t true. So far from telling students that Shelley was not worth reading, Leavis directed students away from the canon set up by Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the short lyrics, and pointed them toward reading a hard-edged Shelley, the Shelley who wrote Mask of Anarchy and Peter Bell the Third. But whoever talks about that? Towards the end of his life—I won’t give the full story here, you’ll have to read the book for that—Leavis showed his preparedness to rethink his notorious Shelley essay. He was willing to subject himself to self-revaluation. We, in turn, now tend to sneer at Leavis where he is remembered at all. 

I, however, begin with gratitude. As a sixth-former questioning whether I would spend my life in medicine or literature, it was Leavis who confirmed my choice. His evaluative criticism was liberating. With the book, I took the opportunity to revisit his Shelley essay, and cannot but be grateful for his phrase about Shelley’s grasp on the actual, for it stimulated a train of thought that in turn encouraged me to examine the interrelations between philosophy, science, and prosody in the work of Shelley. My modification of Leavis, ‘Shelley had a firm grasp upon the weakness of the actual’, for all its impishness, is serious. The most important implication is that Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. His work is suffused with the philosophical and scientific contexts from which he derived his understanding of the brokenness of materiality itself, the weakness of the actual.

3) Your book makes extensive use of the Marlow List, which details the contents of Shelley’s library in 1818. What can careful analysis of this list reveal, and what are its limitations as a window on Shelley’s intellectual makeup?

The ‘Marlow List’ is an extremely important but virtually unknown document in the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle in the New York Public Library (Pforz. Shelleyana 1082). Nora Crook, to whom my book is dedicated, made me aware of its existence; she released to me her full transcription and annotated edition. This builds on work previously done at the Pforzheimer Collection in the New York Public Library. It’s due to be published on Romantic Circles, so that it will be available to all scholars. It is a list of books in Shelley’s possession, still unpublished as I write, that he left behind when vacating his library in Marlow in February 1818. It restores to us something we did not know that we had lost, the astonishing variety of Shelley’s reading.  We all know that Shelley had the appetite of a polymath, but the ‘Marlow List’ moves us away from an overreliance on this or that set of authors or texts. Indeed, it uncovers an array of philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts, and many others besides, which mattered to Shelley. Certain works on the ‘Marlow List’ played a significant role in Shelley’s poetic and intellectual development, and their effect can be clearly traced in Shelley’s verse and its technique. Some corroborate or confirm what have been hitherto merely well-founded conjectures, and many are entirely fresh and new.

Whilst careful analysis can cast light on the incidents his verse describes, his thought, and artistry, one must be judicious. I do not aim to present any hitherto unnoticed book or group of books in Shelley’s Marlow library as unlocking the key to his thought. I do not present Shelley as an adherent to any system of thinking, just as the key to his mind is not to be found in any present fashion whether it be a philosophy, concept, sexuality, or political ideology. Poetry offered Shelley a unique means of thinking in its own terms. Poetry makes thought happen. With the ‘Marlow List’ in mind, Shelley’s Broken World seeks to uncover some of those thoughts which have passed by unnoticed.

4) How did you arrive at the book’s current shape, with two initial chapters on eighteenth-century thought that transition through a consideration of Shelley’s own speculations to three chapters examining Alastor, Peter Bell the Third and Epipsychidion?

This book contains six chapters and a coda, each presenting a different aspect of the engagement in Shelley’s poetry and thought with ideas of intermittence, rupture, and breakage. Whilst I consider, or touch on, pretty much the whole of Shelley’s career, including poems from the early Esdaile Notebook, Rosalind and Helen, ‘Julian and Maddalo’, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and ‘The Triumph of Life’, each of these three later chapters homes in on a single long, major poem belonging to a distinct phase of Shelley’s poetic maturity: Alastor (1816), Peter Bell the Third (1819) and Epipsychidion (1821). Poem talks to poem, though each is sharply different from the other two in form (blank verse, ballad metre, heroic couplets), genre (loco-descriptive psychological narrative, satire, erotic confession) and in content.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I am happily embarked on a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Newcastle University. For the next three years, I am focused on Shelley’s reception history. As we approach the bicentenary of Shelley’s drowning, his work seems as timely as in the years between the death of his first editor (Mary Shelley) and his first centenary. During this period (1851-1922), Shelley was canonised in the anglophone world, Europe and even the Far East. Streets were named after him. My project examines the phenomenon of ‘High Shelleyanism’, the international cast of Shelleyans, Shelleyites, and Shelleyphobes, and the differing ideologies and methodologies of the poet’s numerous editors, amateur and professional. But it aims beyond textual scholarship and colourful competing personalities. It charts the diffusion of Shelley’s works through cheap reprints, illustration, music and networks of influence. The research will result in a book, provisionally titled Shelleyolatry and Shelleyphobia, and an annotated digital gallery of illustrated editions of Shelley, visual representations of the poet, and musical settings of his verse between the years 1851-1922. The website, which is in its initial stages, will go live later this year.

Among other things, I am working on an experimental book on Shelley’s time at Marlow with a wonderful publisher, and with Anna Mercer and Consulting Editor Nora Crook, we are nearing completion on The Frankenstein Review Shelley Notebook. A Facsimile and Diplomatic Transcription of MS. 13, 290 (Bucknell University Press, in Association with the Library of Congress). With Amanda Blake Davis, Anna Mercer, and Paul Stephens I am co-organising the Shelley Bicentennial conference at Keats House, Hampstead 2022. For more information you can follow us on Twitter: @shelleyconf2022. 

Mark Sandy is Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He has published extensively on Romantic poetry and its legacies, including the monographs Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Ashgate, 2005) and Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (Ashgate, 2013; reprinted by Routledge, 2019). He has also curated a series of edited collections on Romantic echoes from the nineteenth century to the present day, decadence, Venice and, most recently, the spectral (Ghostly Encounters: Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Routledge, 2021), co-edited with Stefano Cracolici). He is currently the editor of The BARS Review. His new monograph, Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment, which we discuss below, was published earlier this year by Edinburgh University Press.

1) How did you come to realise you wanted to write a book on the influence of British Romanticism on American literature?

Although my primary research interests have been in Romantic poetry, I have always been fascinated by how you can trace the legacies of Romanticism (positive and negative) in the literary culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This, coupled with my love of reading and teaching American literature, made me wonder whether the writings of Blake, Byron, Keats, and Shelley were as important to the formation of American literary culture as, say, the writings of Coleridge and Wordsworth. This question stayed with me, especially as I had often felt the presence of these other Romantic writers in the works of Emerson and Thoreau, as well as later twentieth-century American writers. This haunting sense of the Romantic presences of Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writing formed the first seeds of what became this book.

2) Many of your chapters invoke nature prominently.  Is nature, for you, at the heart of the legacy of British Romanticism in the United States?  If so, to what extent would you figure this as a positive inheritance?

For me, at least, nature – in all its varied forms sublimely beautiful and sublimely terrifying – is central to the British and American Romantic Imagination but also, inextricably, bound up with these ideas and representations of nature are questions about the self and identity. You can see, for example, in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman how they adapt models of nature from British Romanticism to capture the vastness of America’s land- and seascapes in ways that also voice the newly emergent sense of individual and collective identity that these writers experienced.  I think that the influence of British Romanticism in the United States is, on the whole, positive. Whether Romantic ideas about the self and nature are emulated, transmuted, transduced, or shunned, they remain a vital wellspring for the American Imagination. ‘The romantic ought to be everywhere’, Wallace Stevens claims and then, paradoxically, continues (embracing both negative and positive Romantic legacies), ‘But the romantic must never remain.’   Stevens’s conundrum, I think, perfectly captures and embraces the double-bind of positive and negative Romantic influence on the American literary imagination.  

3) Which U.S. authors did you begin the project with the strongest interest in examining?  Which writers surprised you the most as you traced their interactions?

As Keats has been a Romantic poet who has featured prominently in my research into other aspects of Romanticism, I was very keen to revisit the question of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Keats.  It is well known through Fitzgerald’s letters, novels, and other writings that he was a great admirer of Keats and many of his works of fiction make both direct and indirect allusion to the poet’s work. There are also many biographical parallels between Fitzgerald and Keats (as Jonathan Bate’s recent book underlines), despite the historical distance between them.  For my part, I wanted to think through the extent to which Keats’s ideas about negative capability helped shaped Fitzgerald’s mode of narration, especially in The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, but also elsewhere. More surprisingly or, at least, less obviously, there are also important lines of Romantic influence (and response) that can be traced in the writings and thinking of two of the most important twentieth-century American novelists, Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison.  The extent and depth of their engagement with Wordsworth in particular, and Romanticism more generally, is truly remarkable.

4) The majority of the book’s chapters pair British poets and U.S. prose writers.  What did you find most revealing about exploring influence not only across the Atlantic, but also across forms?

In traversing the Atlantic and the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry, my study reasserts the significance, in particular, of second-generation Romantic poets for American literary culture by reassessing our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity, and the natural world in the American imagination. As with the negative and positive inheritance of Romanticism, tracing the imaginative exchanges between British Romantic poetry and later American novelists reveals a similar story of continuities and discontinuities, as well as augmenting a stylistic impulse towards the poetic in these American writers (especially the works of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow, and Morrison).

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

My continuing fascination with questions of Romanticism’s bequests and its haunting presence in the post-Romantic literary imagination will inform a new book-length study that I plan to write, provisionally titled Ghostly Presences in Romantic and Victorian Poetics: From Wordsworth to the Brownings.

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, politics and religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing. She has published articles on Sarah Butler and Charlotte Brooke and edited Charlotte Dacre’s Confessions of the Nun of St Omer for the Chawton House Library Series. Her particular passion is William Blake, on whom she has published several articles and book chapters and who is the subject of her first monograph, Blake and the Failure of Prophecy, which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan and which we discuss below.

1) How did you first become interested in William Blake?

Back when I was doing an MA in Modernity and Culture and thinking naïvely that I might do a PhD on imagist poetry or something, I took a module run by the eminent Coleridge scholar Jim Mays on intertextuality which featured Milton’s Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton and Allen Ginsburg’s Howl. Mays had chosen the Tate facsimile edition of Blake’s Milton as the set text but you couldn’t get it anywhere and I became mildly obsessed with hunting it down. After traipsing all over London I finally tracked down a battered copy in the Tate gift shop and then opened it to find the strangest work of literature I’d ever come across. It was the sense that this mad vision was always on the point of making transcendent, mind-blowing sense that hooked me and it’s that same quality that still has me coming back to Blake today.

2) How did Blake’s understanding of the role of the prophet differ from the way we’d commonly conceptualise that figure today?

I think that as literary scholars it’s hard to escape the habit of treating prophecy primarily as a rhetorical stance or mode out of a kind of squeamishness with its claims to have access to a “divine vision” or whatever you want to call it. But to track the shifting significance of prophecy in Blake’s oeuvre means accepting that for him prophecy was a kind of action you do in the world. Yet if we accept that his prophetic poetry is performative and its purpose was to change the world then by his own standard his life’s work was an utter failure. In the book I wanted to try to capture how this trauma plays out across his career, as he tries to recover that unity of action and purpose he had felt in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the French Revolution.

3) In your Introduction, you argue that Blake’s ‘awareness of divergent temporalisations of prophetic action allowed him to adjust his use of the prophetic form as his understanding of his authorial mission evolved over time’.  Where in his milieu would you locate the starkest of these adjustments?

I’m not sure if this is the ‘starkest’ but maybe the most consequential of the shifts I discuss is from the Old Testament model of prophetic temporality to an apocalyptic model. In the popular consciousness they tend to be treated as interchangeable but there is an important distinction in how these models understand the relationship between prophecy and time that had major consequences for Blake and his sense of himself as a prophet.

For the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, who influenced Blake’s earliest articulations of the power of prophecy, the outcome of the prophet’s judgment was a matter of negotiation between God, his prophet, and his people. In other words, the future could be changed if the people listened to the prophet and altered their course. For apocalyptic prophets, on the other hand, the future is set. The end of the present world is coming and you can’t do anything about it. All you can do is wait for the fireball of righteous judgment to consume you like that guy in the car in Independence Day. So when Blake moved towards an apocalyptic model with works like “A Song of Liberty” and America he was expressing more than his confidence, he was signalling his certainty, that the end for all the corrupt regimes of Europe was imminent come what may. But then it didn’t happen. In the book I consider the ways he attempted to reinvent his prophetic system over and over again across the rest of his career, moving between these models, as he tried to think through how and why he had been so wrong.

4) Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics are one of the book’s inspirations: what for you were the most exciting elements of Blake made visible by the book’s development of Ricoeur’s insights?

Ever since I was a Philosophy undergrad I’ve had a thing for Ricoeur because his theory of hermeneutics has always struck me as a profoundly humane way of thinking about our predicament, flailing around trying and failing to understand each other and our world. Ricoeur is often lumped in with Derrida as just another post-structuralist for whom the notion of truth is subject to deep suspicion. But for Ricoeur it’s not that there is no truth, just that it is multifaceted, perhaps endlessly so, since we are constantly changing and our perspective on the truth changes with us.

One of Ricoeur’s explanations of the hermeneutic method, in particular, helped me to conceptualise both my own analytical process and also Blake’s poetic practice. Ricoeur describes our attempts to grasp the truth when we perform hermeneutics as moving in a spiral pattern with each attempt approaching the truth at a different level or angle. Failure is therefore built into this process since each revolution reveals only part of the truth and the whole truth remains stubbornly elusive. For me, this is how Blake came to understand his own prophetic method, which is (if you are familiar with his later work especially) often maddeningly repetitive. I argue that these repetitions in his poetry reveal it to be a reiterative hermeneutic practice through which he attempts to work through his previous failed attempts to discern that visionary truth he was chasing throughout his career.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Something completely different! I’m currently putting together a Medical Humanities podcast with a UCD colleague (Alice Maugher, School of History) called The Demon Drink, which looks at Ireland’s fraught relationship with alcohol from the 1600s through to 1922 (the founding of the Irish state). The podcast should be coming out in late-July/August. This developed out of my work on my second monograph which is focused on drunkenness in eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish literature.