Shelley's Vestimentary Poetics

Abstract

The figures of veils in Shelley's poetics have long been understood as an inconsistent and potentially confused contribution to a debate between representational and expressive accounts of language. However, Shelley's veils are crucial to a broader range of aesthetic and ethical questions in his poetics, and when read alongside the related figures of clothing, armor, uniform, dress and draped curtain, these vestimentary figures underwrite some of the most ambitious of Shelley's claims: that poetry is infinite and yet tangible, that it contains "eternal truth" while existing within a historical context, and that it does not compete with but underwrites the work of reason. Poetry appears in veils but is not concealed. The subjects of poetry are "clothed in its Elysian light" not to serve the vanity of poets but to make visible a measure of their inspiration. 1 This claim, central to Percy Shelley's Defence of Poetry, finds few sympathetic ears. The metaphor of poetry's dress suggests to some that poets engage in obfuscation, if not reckless cover up. William Hazlitt says as much in an 1824 review of Shelley's Posthumous Poems. "His Muse offers her services to clothe shadowy doubts and inscrutable difficulties in a robe of glittering words, and to turn nature into a brilliant paradox. … Where we see the dazzling beacon-lights streaming over the darkness of the abyss, we dread the quicksands and the rocks below." For Hazlitt, the "robe" of Shelley's composition is a beautiful distraction from his faulty ideas. Hazlitt's broader point is a rebuke, familiar in this period, to abstract, systematic thought: in spite of Shelley's "genius," and his brilliant execution of individual thoughts, images and passages, given the time and opportunity he would always get himself "entangled in a system" to the detriment of his writing. 2 To show that systematic philosophy has no place in poetry, Hazlitt employs Shelley's language of clothing against him, setting the covering against the covered, his decorative words against his underlying thought. The clothing metaphor here provides a theory of language which is itself anti-theoretical: a theory that divides language from systematic thought, and words from ideas. For Shelley, however, clothing metaphors permit some of the riskiest and most challenging claims in the Defence to be made. 2 The Defence of Poetry has long been regarded as troublesome. M.H. Abrams made a distinction not unlike Hazlitt's between its "magnificent passages" and "loosely articulated critical theory." Earl Wasserman noted more bluntly that for many of his contemporaries the Defence "had proved something of an embarrassment, if not an annoyance." 3 Certainly, there is cause for irritation if one is looking for a consistent and recognizably modern critical position: the Defence frustrates a historicist account of poetry by insisting that the parts of poetry that matter are not historically determined, and frustrates a formalist account by expanding the medium of poetry to encompass not only prose but at times ev...