Shelley as Revisionist: Power and Belief in Mont Blanc

Abstract

A recurrent problem for serious readers of Shelley (as in Bloom, 1976b, pp. 83–111; Leighton, 1984; and Blank, 1988) is his oscillation between strongly rejecting and constantly repeating Wordsworth and Coleridge. On the one hand, despite his clear indebtedness to both of them (noted by his friend Peacock, 1970, p. 43), he comes to regard these immediate precursors as reactionary ‘slaves’ and systematisers, especially in their later writings. In his eyes they turn their ‘natural pieties’, because of the ‘one Life’ they find ‘within us and abroad’ (to quote Coleridge’s Eolian Harp, 26), to the service of monotheistic religions, social hierarchies centred on one dictating figure or class, and German idealisms positing internal and eternal Absolutes,¹ all of which Shelley wants to put in question. The younger poet therefore reworks the sceptical empiricism of David Hume, William Godwin and Sir William Drummond partly to counter the absolutism that, more and more, seems to dominate the so-called ‘first generation’ of English Romantics.² In answer to Wordsworth and Coleridge (among others) and in support of all things existing only as perceived, Shelley decides that all ‘causes’ and points of origin are late suppositions retroactively assumed by thought to explain why one thought — or remembered perception — repeatedly precedes or succeeds another.