Long gone, but clearly speaking for our time: Shelley, the poet against moral and political corruption

By: Kenan Malik / The Guardian
Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

"Will corruption go unnoticed,
In the weary sky, shall the voice of flattery be exalted;
And will there be no patriot to tear the veil?
Who hides these vices from the light of day?
Is public virtue dead? - Has he lost his courage?!"

No, the essay is not a description of the moral vacuum in contemporary Britain, but lines from "Poetic Essay on the Existing State of Things", an exposition of the moral decay occurring two centuries earlier in late Georgian Britain (the years 1814-37 of the reigns of kings George I, George II, George III and George IV – c. AD). It was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and published anonymously in 1811 in support of the radical Irish journalist, Peter Finnerty, who was imprisoned for a public statement - after accusing the Anglo-Irish politician, Viscount [Robert Stewart] Castlereagh, of the torture and execution of Irish rebels who challenged British rule.

Shelley's poem was "lost" for almost 200 years, before a single copy of the pamphlet was "rediscovered" in 2006 and a decade later bought by Oxford's Bodleian Library so it could - finally - be read again from the public. A poem that speaks to our age as much as to the Britain of the previous two centuries.

Friday marked the bicentenary of his death. He drowned when the ship that was taking him home – after visiting his friend and fellow poet Lord Byron in the Italian city of Livorno – capsized in a storm. It was a month short of his thirtieth birthday.

[William] Wordsworth said of Shelley that he was “one of the best artists of us all; I'm talking about mastery of style." He is also one of our most important political essayists, "the implacable enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority derived from wealth and exploitation," as Paul Foot observed, whose work "Red Shell" – of 1981 – helped restore the relevance of Shelley's political work.

Shelley's greatest gift was the skill with which he combined poetics and politics. For Shelley, poetry needed to acquire a political dimension. And politics required poetic imagination. This was why, as Shelley put it in a famous line from his essay “Defense of poetry", "poets are the unknown legislators of the world".

Poetry did not stand aloof from the world, but sought to engage with it and transform it. We live in an age in which working-class politicians can be laughed at for carrying on opera. For Shelley, the measure of high culture lay in the degree to which it could fire the imagination of ordinary people.

Born into the landed aristocracy, educated at Ita and Oxford, Shelley seemed destined for a life at the heart of the British establishment. However, it was also born in an era of turmoil, in an intellectual and political maelstrom stirred by the French Revolution. This turmoil helped Shelley find her own voice. And, in turn, Shelley tried to give voice to that. It was – as his most perceptive biographer, Richard Holmes, said – just like his poetry; not ethereal as the literary tradition would have it, but "darker and more earthy".

Shelley's first important work, "The Necessity of Atheism", published in his first year at Oxford, led to his expulsion from the university and strained his relationship with his father to the breaking point. Living precariously as an itinerant writer, Shelley most happily found his home on the radical fringes of British politics, as a crusader against moral and political corruption, as an activist for republicanism and parliamentary reform, for equal rights and for the abolition of slavery, for free speech and for a free press, for the freedom of the Irish and for Catholic emancipation, for freedom of religion and for freedom from religion.

His political ideals were often contradictory, his revolutionary spirit clashing with his Fabian instincts (according to the Roman politician, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus – d. AD) for gradual and non-violent change. However, unlike other Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge, Shelley never abandoned radicalism, contempt for authority, or the value of the voices of working-class people.

His personal life was also turbulent. He left his first wife, Harriet Westbrook – who later took her own life – to live with and then marry Mary Godwin, daughter of the radical philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. He tried forever to find shelter from debt collectors, and eventually he and Mary left Britain to live in Italy. Mary Shelley to "Frankenstein" will create one of the great explorations of the contradictions of modernity and what it means to be human.

Despised by the literary and political establishment, Shelley wrote of working-class autodidacts for whom learning and culture were means to elevate themselves and challenge those in power. Fearing the consequences, his work was suppressed by the authorities, either through outright censorship or through the threat of the publishers being charged with sedition.

As a result, most of Shelley's work was not published until after his death. "The Mask of Anarchy" is perhaps the most famous political poem in the English language, written in the frenzy following the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when at least 15 people were killed when cavalry charged into a crowd of some 60 gathered for them demanded parliamentary reform and the extension of the right to vote. Shelley sent it to his friend, the radical editor and publisher Leigh Hunt. But Hunt did not publish it because, to do so, would be like asking for immediate imprisonment for sedition. And, in 1832, this poem with its famous last stanza was finally published:

"Get up like lions after sleep
In the undefeated number –
Shake off the chains like dew on the ground
Since they fell on you during your sleep –
You are many – they are few.”

In the decades following Shelley's death, his poetry became an inspiration across generations and borders. [Poem] "Queen Mab" it became known as the Bible of Chartism (movement suppressed in Britain - c. A. Sh.) which was read aloud at meetings of the working class. The slogan of the suffragettes (the right to vote for women - v. A. Sh.), "Deeds not words", was taken from "The Mask of Anarchy". And, this last stanza has been on the lips of many who have "shaken the chains," from the Jewish strikers [for the right to religious clothing] in early 80th century New York to the protesters - XNUMX years ago later – in Tiananmen Square, as well as a century later in Tahrir Square.

And, above all, perhaps in his persistence we look for Shelley's voice today when we question the claim to power of those in power. Because, as he said in "Queen Mab":

“Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen...
... and obedience,
The destruction of intelligence, virtue, freedom, truth,
He makes slaves out of man and out of the human body
A mechanical automaton". /Telegraph/