Arthur's Class Summary 2/1/11

Dr. Foss began our class session on Percy Shelley with a “good afternoon” and a reward quiz. This quiz featured further refining of the questions and a mysterious disconnect resulting in a free point. Our class was assigned the wrong reading, leaving “With a Guitar, to Jane” unread as it had been absent from our blog calendar. Afterwards we went over our class schedule for the day consisting of a reading by Dr. Foss, small group discussion, large group discussion and, time permitting, a reading/discussion of ‘A Defence of Poetry’. He followed this up with a rousing recital of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni” (1063). Mont Blanc stands as the tallest mountain in Europe and a part of the Swiss Alps. According to Dr. Foss, in Shelley’s time the summit had never been reached. He further related that Shelley had been one of his all-time favorite poets when he himself was a student, having gone so far as to write his dissertation, his over 400 page dissertation, on Shelley. This may explain his reference to his love of Shelley in the past tense. We then prepared to for our small group discussion, being encouraged to wrestle with the question of whether Shelley was a poet of Romantic irony or Romantic imagination, as this was the second to last of the “Big Six” of Romantic poets and the question was central to our understanding of the Romantics as a group. Foss asked us to focus “Mont Blanc” in comparison to another poem from the Shelley readings of our choice to use in attempting to answer this question. My group concluded that Shelley was a poet of Romantic imagination, as he reveals a sense of passion and awe rather than detached inquiry in such poems as “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1065). Our impression was of a man who stood in awe of nature as something greater and better than ourselves. Mont Blanc, a mountain than can be viewed from a far but whose summit can never be reached, provides the context for Shelley’s ambiguously ended poem. We did not take it to mean that the question was more important than the answer or that ambiguity was the point of the poem. Instead our group came away with the notion that the underlying theme was really one of communication. A language barrier exists; one between man and nature, man and art, man and man. In his political poetry, “Song to the Men of England” (1166) and “Sonnet: England in 1819” (1166) Shelley’s frustration and bitterness become clear. But his anger has no sense of ironic detachment, but passionate zeal. He turns to nature as a perfect system. His solitude is personal and political, lonely rather than detached.

The large group discussion began with “To Wordsworth” (1062). The poem received mixed interpretations as some group concluded that it was a poem of Romantic imagination with empathy towards Wordsworth while others felt that it was written as a rebuke for having given up the struggle. In “Mont Blanc” one argument was that Shelley was trapped in rhetoric while the counterpoint was that while frustrated with communication his passion was genuine. We moved on to “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” which some felt rejected the idea of nature leading to the divine. It was debated that the yearning for connection and the desire for beauties power to descend. The question posed was, that while the narrator of the poem believes that beauty can come down from on high and transform us, can it or will it? Dr. Foss then read “Ozymandias” as it had been intended as part of our readings but had been absent from our calendar as had “With a Guitar”. The poem illustrates the overwhelming power of nature and time to render the works of mankind obsolete and to show the futility of attempting to overcome nature.

The view of which camp Percy Shelley belonged to, Romantic imagination or Romantic irony varied. Was he poet-prophet or a poet-cynic? If there are concepts, such as beauty, and places, such as Mont Blanc, that transcend ourselves, can we attain a similar state? Can transcendence be accessed by man or is it like Mont Blanc was to Shelley, visible but out of reach? These questions, left unanswered and perhaps unanswerable divide those who read Shelley’s work, leaving interpretation as ambiguous as the work itself.

Also we had a brief tutorial on uploading and link creation for the UMW blogs.