Introduction: ‘Internal Powers’ and ‘External Influences’

Abstract

No critical issue is more topical or vexed than the value of the contextual study of literature. In writing this volume on Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) for the Macmillan Literary Lives series, I find myself in a complicated position. On the one hand, I still hold the view (expressed elsewhere) that ‘substantiation of context can tell us only so much about why a poet produces a masterpiece’¹ — or, indeed, whether what he produces is a masterpiece. In a previous book on Shelley (The Human Mind’s Imaginings, Oxford, 1989), which I regard the present study as complementing, I focus more on the verbal particulars that constitute Shelley’s literary achievement than on contextualist considerations. On the other hand, it is increasingly plain to me that extrinsic stresses and pressures (whether to do with a writer’s social or personal experience, or bound up with larger historical, intellectual and economic trends) exert an undeniable if complex influence on the creation of literature. In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1818–20) Shelley himself formulates incisively the nature of the relationship between a poet’s ‘internal powers’ and ‘external influences’:

A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man’s mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, inanother, the creations, of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape. (PW, p. 206)