Mirroring the Future Adonais, Elegy, and the Life in Letters - Critical Essay

Criticism, Summer, 2000 by Michele Turner Sharp

Shelley's concern with reading and reception forms his closest bond to Keats. Moreover, the figures whom Shelley imagines passing the bier of the dead Adonais underscore his sense of the plurality and variability of reading. Shelley includes Byron, who had little admiration for Keats's poetic abilities, Moore, who seems to have been for the most part indifferent to Keats, Hunt, an ardent enthusiast of Keats's poetry, and himself, whose position relative to the merits of Keats's work was ambivalent. Shelley furthermore imagines the hostile critic as, at least indirectly, part of their company. As the shepherds make their way past Adonais's bier, the hostile critic--and an abusive potential available to reading--hovers overhead, threatening and haunting the shepherds' tamer, though divided reading.

As Sacks notes, bringing the hostile critic and his like into the poem provides the speaker with "a burst of energy that will fuel his subsequent ascent" (158). Indeed, stanzas 37 and 38, which broach in direct and intensely honest terms the fact of Keats's death, occupy a position exactly equivalent to Lycidas's penultimate stanza, which brings Milton's poem to its turn. I suggest that these stanzas locate readers and reading as the ground of Keats's death and of his rebirth. Where Lycidas posits the false surmise that ushers in a vision of a body lost and broken by the ocean waves, Adonais posits the plurality and volatility of reading as what smashes Keats's body into atoms, but also shapes the enduring form of his immortality.

Shelley's self-portrait as the frail Form, the pardlike Spirit, "a love in desolation masked;--a Power / Girt round with weakness" (281-82) makes this even clearer. Shelley's entry, particularly in such dramatic and self-important guise, has provoked critical comment from many quarters. In the twentieth century, E R. Leavis has been the most strident in noting its inappropriateness and in casting it as an egotistical display that breaches the bounds of elegiac decorum. In response to Leavis, Judith Chernaik, Angela Leighton, and Curran have mounted defenses of Shelley to which my reading is indebted. For Chernaik, the figure is not Shelley himself, but a stylized portrait of the lyric poet that recurs in much of Shelley's poetry. It encapsulates Shelley's concern with the place of poets and of poetry in the Romantic era. Drawing on Chernaik, Leighton asserts that the frail form dramatizes "an aesthetic process," which Leighton reads as the tension played out across the whole poem between language and its ability to sustain inspiration or to adequately rise to its context.(16) Curran likewise notes how abstract qualities and oxymoron predominate in the presentation of the frail form, suggesting its strategic rather than autobiographical affiliation. For Curran, Shelley's sketch of himself in the guise of the frail form suggests that he has subjected himself to a force similar to that to which Keats's form has been subject. "As the dead Adonais has been divested of the attributes of his personal lite mythologized in the early stanzas of the poem, so the mourner `Who in another's fate now wept his own,' contemplating in formal ritual the principles underlying the death of Keats, refines himself formally into principle," Curran explains (174).