Why Percy Shelley Irritates Me

For years I have had trouble teaching Percy Shelley's poetry; and his works--unlike those of Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake--wouldn't even come close to being on my desert island list of books. Why? It hit me a few years ago--it's his cowardly atheism. I like a courageous atheist, like James Mill; but cowardly atheists--whether ancient or the more commonly-encountered postmodern variety--give me a pain. There's a glaring contradiction in their worldview: if you don't believe in God, how can you believe in anything? What is the source of consciousness? Blind chance? Mere luck? Shelley irritates me because he's a clever cop-out. Like most smart-ass undergraduates, he adopts a smug skepticism instead of a commitment to a position about which he could be said to have some passion.

Look at the first line of the third verse paragraph of "Mont Blanc": "Some say that gleams of a remoter world / Visit the soul in sleep." Some say? What game are you playing? Grow a pair, and commit yourself to something for once in your life! Don't play with me--say something! Take a stand! Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, says, "I have the courage to doubt everything, but I don't have the courage to affirm anything, to believe anything." That's Shelley in a nutshell--substituting a cagey skepticism for the courage to affirm anything. Make a decision! Say what you think--don't throw out a bunch of half-statements, and expect me to give you my admiration.

Of course you don't say what you think, because if you commit to following where your beliefs lead, you might have to commit to something else--a single woman, a way of life, a purpose. Like many lucky men, you found a woman who was intrigued by your slipperiness, and she lets you get away with it--even encourages your lack of commitment, because it brings more drama into her life, and allows her to continue her childhood pattern of being a victim of men. It saves her from the existential challenges of commitment, which involve the assumption of responsibility, either for others or for oneself. Mary stayed with Percy because she was with him but not with him, because he gave himself the option of splitting once a new impulse washed over him.

It's very convenient, this failure to commit--it lets you do whatever you want, to try on different, even mutually exclusive ways of life, to marry one woman, and leave her for another woman when she comes along, and then leave for another when the fancy strikes. We laud people for the "rebellious courage" they show in refusing to submit to custom or more, but we're conditioned by the unquestioned mythos of Byronism to view the commitment to a set of beliefs as "surrender" to unjustly constituted conventional authority.

But automatic skepticism is easy--all that's needed is to question everything, and the magic and majestic thing about consciousness is that it's fungible enough even to doubt its own existence. There's no trick to skepticism--it's just a more placid and contemplative version of the Byronic everlasting No! Believing is harder, and therefore more courageous, because courage is the quality that enables us to do what's hard, what's difficult. It's highly ironic that the story of Shelley's death has his heart surviving the funeral pyre. His heart endured, perhaps, because in life it was never really tried. Taking heart, courage, endurance, committing to one way of life--these Shelley never did.

And it's a shame, because he really was talented. He was the most musical of the Romantics, and the best at handling complex rhythms. But I utterly reject his worldview, which I find impossible to respect. He's an interpersonal and philosophic coward. There's the cowardice of excessive conformity; but even more distasteful is the cowardice of knee-jerk skepticism. By establishing a pre-determined end point for the thought process, both serve as means to short-cut the hard work of thinking things through. Shelley's thoroughgoing skepticism serves as a means of avoidance--avoidance of having having to be pinned down to a position from which he can be criticized. If I affirm nothing, he says in effect, I can deny everything. What's refreshing and superior about Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth is their shared refusal to buy into this convenient, self-serving skepticism. They believe in something, and through their works avow that belief. Shelley believes in nothing but his own pleasure, his own convenience.