Shelley’s Defence was
an explicit response to Peacock’s The
Four Ages of Poetry. Which should be better known, if only because the way
it is treated reveals so much about Poetry World.
There are full texts of Peacock on line:
The introduction to
the Poetry Foundation’s version states: Peacock is unsparing in his literary critique, but also difficult to
take seriously, given the wide swath and humorous tone of his criticism. As
Peacock notes, “The marvellous too is very much like a snowball: it grows as it
rolls downward, till the little nucleus of truth which began its descent from
the summit is hidden in the accumulation of superinduced hyperbole.”
Such an attitude is
not uncommon. One should not rattle the cage.
As one of Shelley’s
modern editors wrote: It’s not too much to say that but for
Shelley’s Vigorous Defence Peacock’s essay would have been dead and forgotten
long since. If it lives, it does so in the shade of Shelley’s inspired reply.
For either from a literary or from a critical point of view Peacock’s essay is
of little importance.
Yet it’s difficult to
see exactly what is hyperbolic about some of Peacock’s statements, or why his
criticism is difficult to take seriously.
One of Peacock’s editors can state:
To take it as a serious attack on poetry would be absurd (p.x). However, Peacock did not write: That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best,
inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have
been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if
we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men. Shelley did. No one argues that Shelley’s is a comic masterpiece.
We can see Foucault’s ‘Author Function’ at work here.
Shelley’s Defence is a fantasy of bad history, dubious linguistics, self-aggrandisement and outlandish
claims which is only preserved because of who wrote it and because it allows a
certain type of critic to go into raptures. If biographers thought Shelley had
a sense of humour then the Defence would be regarded as a good joke in response to
Peacock’s The Four Ages.
Peacock is funny, and
blunt, and his history is probably much more accurate than either Sidney’s or
Shelley’s. In Peacock’s version there is nothing romantic or ethereal about the
early days of poetry: The successful
warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief becomes a king; his next want is
an organ to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent of his
possessions; and this organ he finds in a bard, who is always ready to
celebrate the strength of his arm, being first duly inspired by that of his
liquor. This is the origin of
poetry, which like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the
commodity and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market” (Peacock
p4). Such a history,
however, sits uncomfortably
with the refined and delicate souls who find Joy, Truth and Beauty wandering in Shelley’s effusions. As one editor wrote, and you should try saying this out loud:
So if we are to believe Peacock, the
first poet was nothing but a hireling and a drunken one!
Poet’s drank and
wanted to be paid? How shocking. The Gentleman may not have read the
Anglo-Saxon poem, Deor.
Peacock’s argument was
that ‘Poetry’ had made a double movement: the traditional history of the ages:
Gold, Silver Iron Brass altered: to Iron, Gold, Silver Brass, in the ancient
world, with a second post dark age movement with the same progression, as
Poetry in his own time was entering a lesser age as the best minds moved to
other fields.
The conclusion to his long final
paragraph sounds as true today as it was then, although some of the proper
nouns he used need updating. The paragraph is far too long to quote but he identifies
poetry’s shrinking audience as readers turn to other sources of writing for
either entertainment or information, and he moves towards his climax with:
…intellectual power
and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better
channels and have abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the
degenerate fry of modern rhymsters and their Olympic judges , the magazine
critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it
were still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual
progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as
mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicans, historians,
politicians, and political economists who have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid,
from the summit of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and,
knowing how small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their
prospect, smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with
which the drivellers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the poetical
palm and the critical chair.
Editors and critics may have
dismissed Peacock, but he’s
probably closer to the reality of his time than they are, or Shelley was. While it’s easy to
think of the Romantic Period as a time when everyone was crazy for poetry, a
quick glance at the sales figures for books in that period is an essential
context for Shelley. Which is for
the next post. And then Shelley.
CE: As with the other posts in this sequence proper referencing has been removed. You are welcome to use any of these posts as long as you acknowledge the source. The absence of proper references should make plagiarism difficult. Leave a request in the comments and I'll happily supply them.
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