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aspirations of his life. That life, moreover, was  a miracle of thirty
years, so crowded with striking incident and varied experience
that, as he said himself, he had already lived longer than his
father, and ought to be reckoned with the men of ninety. Through
all vicissitudes he preserved his youth inviolate, and died, like
one whom the gods love, or like a hero of Hellenic story, young,
despite grey hairs and suffering. His life has, therefore, to be told,
in order that his life-work may be rightly valued: for, great as that
was, he, the man, was somehow greater; and noble as it truly is,
the memory of himself is nobler.1
While Shelley s notoriety during his lifetime far exceeded in scope the
limited audience for his works, readers in the later nineteenth cen-
tury invested the figure of the poet with a different kind of glamour.
In the second half of the century, Shelley became famous as a lyric
poet whose widely anthologized verse proved capable of surprisingly
intimate effects.2 Readers like Symonds found themselves moved and
91
92 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity
entranced not only by Shelley s poetry but also by the spectacle of
the lovely, care-worn youth,  sweet, generous, tender, beautiful, and
born a bard; from his birth aglow with the transcendental rapture,
in the breathless words of a contemporary literary history.3
Shelley s afterlife in nineteenth-century culture exemplifies the affec-
tive dynamics this study has been tracing around literary celebrity. The
poet s renown, influence and staying power in culture were closely
bound up not just with the power of his poetry but with the fascination
exerted by the figure of the poet and the emotional response elicited by
the poet s life story.4 Fraught with the scandalous innuendo Symonds
mutes as  extraordinary incident, the story of Shelley s life and early
death carried sensational allure for a widening public, while for some
readers, traces of the poet s presence became charged with a more per-
sonal feeling that speaks to the poet s importance in the reader s own
emotional and imaginative life. Readers fixated on the poet s body as
a correlate to the seductive force of the poetry and, as in Symonds s
account of Shelley dying  like a hero of Hellenic story, young, despite
grey hairs and suffering, they wove the body into the story of what
the poet had uniquely felt and suffered. Because Victorian readers like
Symonds identified Shelley with an ideal of lyric expressivity, Shelley s
poetry was understood as revealing the poet s most intimate feelings.
Conversely, many readers saw the most intimate details of the poet s
life (not least, the exact nature of his relationships with the women in
his life) as elemental to their understanding of his poetry.5
Such a model of reading generated sensations of unusual closeness
to the poet. One of the poet s most ardent admirers, Richard Garnett,
testifies to this experience of intimacy in the Introduction to his
1862 Relics of Shelley (quoting Shelley s lyric  Wedded Souls ):6
Few have borne so severe a scrutiny. Almost every verse he ever
pencilled down, has now become the property of the public, and
any reader [& ] may say in his own words:
 I am as a spirit who has dwelt
Within his heart of hearts, and I have felt
His feelings, and have thought his thoughts, and
known
The inmost converse of his soul. 7
The thrill associated with Shelley s physical presence is similarly
palpable in the first stanza of Robert Browning s short poem
Shelley s Glamour 93
 Memorabilia (1855), sparked by the wonder the younger poet feels
at overhearing a stranger s casual reference to having met Shelley, the
idol of Browning s youth:
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?
And did he turn and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!8
The stanza renders in tense lyric terms the potency of what we might
call Shelley s celebrity effects: the way the celebrity s body becomes
(like lyric) the locus of both collective and private memory, and the
point of exchange between public and private; the way the celebrity
encounter has the potential to interrupt ordinary time, becoming an
event both more and less real than the everyday; the dynamics of
desire and distancing, wonder and embarrassment provoked in those
who encounter a celebrity by the profoundly personal meanings they
attach to a celebrity body that remains both fantastic and, in truth,
fantastically ordinary.9
While in each of my other chapters I focus on the interactions
between poets and their contemporary audiences of passionate read-
ers, in this chapter I examine the way Shelley s feeling readers in
the later nineteenth century, long after his death, negotiated these
celebrity effects surrounding the poet. In the first part of this chap-
ter, I take as a kind of case-study two essays on Shelley by Matthew
Arnold, each of which deals explicitly with Arnold s very mixed
feelings about Shelley s glamour and his celebrity. Shelley s brief but
striking appearance in  The Study of Poetry (1880) allows Arnold
to examine the relationship between the poet s seductive but fleet-
ing forms and what he describes as the overinvested response of the
poet s  votaries. 10 In his 1888 review of Edward Dowden s important
Life of Shelley, Arnold extends these reflections to include a more sus-
tained meditation on Shelley s life, his work, and the conditions of
publicity they inhabit.11 Taken together, these two essays on Shelley
provide us both with Arnold s analysis of the practices and institu-
tions of reading through which Shelley s celebrity is constituted, and
with a compelling view of the way one reader grapples with his own
complicated affective relationship to the poet. In the second part of
the chapter, I connect Arnold s response to Shelley with Shelley s
94 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity
own poetics as articulated in the Defence of Poetry (c. 1821) and with a
broader pattern of response that extends from the poet s nineteenth-
century readers to our own critical moment, in which the staging
of Shelley s celebrity creates a kind of sensational drama around the
reading and transmission of Romanticism.
My reading of Arnold s reaction to Shelley revises the conventional
literary-historical understanding of Shelley s late nineteenth-century
glamour. Arnold was by no means Shelley s most unreservedly
enthusiastic fan, but he was certainly one of the most influential and
most conflicted readers of the poet he memorably, perhaps indelibly,
tagged a  beautiful but ineffectual angel, beating in the void his
luminous wings in vain. 12 Critics have frequently seen in Arnold s
ambivalence about Shelley an index of the Victorians self-conflicted
working through of their own youthful Romanticism, a Romanticism
charged with the excesses Arnold s image of the  beautiful angel
evokes: a flight away from objective reality and social connection
into a purely subjective world of imagination and ideality.13 In what
follows, I argue, by contrast, that Arnold s anxiety about Shelley
concerns not so much relationships of influence as technologies [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]