The Spirit of Classical Hymn in Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"

Richard Cronin has observed that in Shelley's poetry, as in his life and thought, "there is an ever-present drive towards a rejection of conventional controls" countered by the recognition that "controls, systems, conventions, are humanly necessary" (35). These contrary pulls, as Cronin calls them, make Shelley's attitude toward literary genre problematic and make further genre-linked critical approaches to his poetry very challenging, so much so, in fact, that little genre criticism exists in modern Shelley studies. Yet, as Jennifer Wallace points out, "Shelley was an extraordinarily diverse writer, experimenting with genre far more than either Keats or Byron" and maintaining an active dialogue throughout his life with the forms offered by literary tradition (4). This is not to say that Shelley's generic experiments are poetic imitations. Genre for Shelley is unfixed and mutable. Envisioning genre as a "process [. . .] subject to the flux of history," he judges poetic accomplishment by the degree to which a writer expands or modulates generic conventions and consequently alters them for the future (Cronin 33). "Every great poet," Shelley asserts in "A Defence of Poetry," "must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification" (484). The contrary pulls that Cronin detects in Shelley's poetry, and which problematize the status of genre in the poems, are sometimes activated or exacerbated by Shelley's genre choices. They indicate Shelley's sophisticated understanding of the mutability of genre while they figure that mutability in the poetry itself.

The "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" exemplifies how Shelley employs genre and genre-linked features in innovative and figurative ways. The poem is in dialogue with the classical hymn, a genre to which tradition grants unusual structural flexibility and in which writers, including Shelley, find both a positive support and a challenge to their innovative skill. The classical hymn presupposes fundamental separation while aspiring to unity, and so provides Shelley with inherent contrary pulls, or inherent dialectics, congenial with his aim to contain an effusive, inspiring power in poetic form. That "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" struggles between containment and effusion is not disputed by critics today, but Shelley's modern readers recognize that dialectic as working primarily in language itself. Questions of genre are frequently passed over, and, despite the generic claim of Shelley's title and the features of classical hymn that appear in the poem, critics are reluctant to come to terms with hymn. In fact, critical discussions of the generic resonances of the "Hymn" often rest on misapprehensions about genres that Shelley himself did not share, particularly that genres exist immutably and apply equally to all past and present literary works. Adopting a vague exemplar of the Christian hymn, for instance, recent readers of Shelley conclude that the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is an ironic hymn or simply an ode (Cronin 224; Curran 58; Fry 8; Hall 136). Observing the critical confusion surrounding its genre, Stuart Curran writes that the poem "seems to present us with a generic crux" (58). But largely overlooked by commentators, the tradition of classical hymn can be brought to bear in ways that both supplement our understanding of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and illustrate Shelley's shrewd employment of genre to oppose its potential to become fixed and inert.

Modern critics of Shelley discern a dialectic of containment and effusion in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." Primarily, they understand that dialectic as operating in language itself. For Tilottama Rajan, it is the mechanism of a "Romantic deconstruction" that "unfixes," "disseminates," "disarticulates," and "disrupts" ostensible meaning and unity, so that the poem "survives not as what it originally was but as a series of [indeterminate] self-transformations" (292, 283, 296). Shelley's language "unravels the statement to be illustrated through it" and intimates his profound uneasiness with the relationship of poetic conception and representation (Rajan 281-82). According to Rajan, "illustration and repetition make expression a differential process" in Shelley's writing "by creating crevices between the parts of any analogy or between the different [conceptual and figurative] planes." The resultant "Hymn" is a "fissured" text that "cannot contain its meaning" and that "can become 'poetry' only with the aid of a reader, who will save it from the disfigurations of history or representation" by supplying "a unity not in the text" (280-81, 2). For Rajan, the dialectic of containment and effusion in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is detectable in places of linguistic indeterminacy or gaps in representation that call for additions by the reader beyond the features of the original. She claims her approach "paradoxically renews the originality of the text by liberating it from the tyranny of the original intention behind it" (293).(1)