Poetic Autonomy in Peter Bell the Third and The Witch of Atlas

Abstract

In his prefatory poem to The Witch of Atlas, Shelley claims there can be no comparison between his graceful Witch, with her ‘Light … vest of flowing metre’ (37) and Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, ‘a lean mark hardly fit to fling a rhyme at; /In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello’ (44–5). But if Peter Bell and the Witch appear to be antithetical figures, in a deeper sense they are related — as a comparison of The Witch of Atlas (1820) and Peter Bell the Third (1819), Shelley’s parody of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, reveals. Both Shelley’s Witch and his Peter Bell practise a poetry of autonomy. They live imaginative lives that aspire to a condition of self-sufficiency, and they attempt to exist without significant engagement with the world. On the one hand, Peter Bell the Third materialises poetry by trying to possess the world rather than relate to it, and ends by becoming so absolutely self-absorbed that he obliterates mind and puts his world to sleep. At the opposite extreme, the beautiful Witch of Atlas is so immortally perfect in body and soul that she needs nothing beyond herself and must transcend the mortal world lest it make her weep. Both of Shelley’s protagonists produce poetry — Peter’s is small and solid, neat verbal ‘pipkins’ (447) that are an outgrowth of his potter’s trade; whereas the Witch of Atlas, like her descendant the Lady of Shalott, sits in splendid isolation in her poetic cave ‘aloof… broidering the pictured poesy/Of some high tale upon her growing woof (The Witch of Atlas, 249–53).