Art in the Time of Pandemic

Ulisse Lendaro and Jitendra Mishra

A short while ago, I sat down over a zoom call with the two masterminds behind a gorgeously shot 14 minute film that is a celebration and commemoration of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, Ode to the West Wind. It is called “Human O.A.K.”. An actor, producer and director, the multi-talented Ulisse Lendaro is the Italian creative genius behind the film. Lendaro’s co-production partner is Jitendra Mishra, a producer who has already been associated with the production, distribution and promotion of more than 100 films in different categories in various capacities. Many of them have received worldwide acclamation and recognition in global film festivals. For me it was a thrilling and inspirational conversation that was at times philosophical and at times profoundly emotional. Afterwards, Ulisse wrote me to say that our call had “quenched a thirst in my soul”. I share that emotion. I was so inspired by this conversation and what Lendaro has accomplished that I decided to go far beyond a typical interview and delve deeper into the topics we discussed. I hope you will enjoy what follows and become as inspired as I was. Together we can change our world for the better.

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Art in the Time of Pandemic

An Interview With Ulisse Lendaro and Jitendra Mishra

by Graham Henderson

Ulisse Lendaro is an Italian actor, producer and director now living in Vincenza. He first encountered the writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley in high school thanks to his French teacher - it left a profound impression (as Shelley can do!). Ten years later he revisited the poet and then again in 2020 when he was seeking inspiration for a short movie he wanted to make about the effect the pandemic was having on our lives. A very passionate, creative individual, Ulisse believes in the power of art to renew and advance the human race. In the midst of the current crisis he set himself the goal of making a film. He wanted to create a work of art which demonstrated our ability to reinvent and renew ourselves. Ulisse told me that he wanted to use a poem as the narrative foundation of his film - a poem which spoke to the possibilities for renewal and also which demonstrated the resilience of our species. Indeed, he hoped that the mere act of making this film would serve as a beacon of hope, telling me that creators are in effect at “the disposal of humanity to help create a better future”. 

But where was he to start? “Believe me”, says Ulisse, “I looked everywhere: Italian poets as well as English poets like Byron and Keats and even Shakespeare.” This is when it occurred to him to look to Shelley. He quickly realized that it was only Shelley that inspired him. It was “the power of his poetry,” he said, “it speaks in a revolutionary way to our times. His words are also perfect for the cinema.” This is a topic I have written about many times. And the poem he settled on was Ode to the West Wind - a poem enjoying its 200th anniversary just now.

Ulisse with his wife Anna Valle and children Ginevra and Leonardo (all of whom appear in the film).

Ulisse went about his task with his characteristic passion and thoroughness. He immersed himself in Shelley’s poetry and his life. Soon his entire family was reading Shelley’s poetry and experiencing the power of the poet’s words to do something Ulisse found quite remarkable - as he put it: “to influence people from generation to generation to generation.” Like me, Ulisse marvelled at Shelley’s fervent desire to change the world through a revolution of the imagination. As Ulisse remarked, 

“I read Shelley at different times in my life and he always fascinated me because his poems always acquire new and relevant revolutionary meanings. Shelley was a visionary dealing with universal themes and that's why I think he is so very contemporary.”

“I read Shelley at different times in my life and he always fascinated me because his poems always acquire new and relevant revolutionary meanings — Ulisse Lendaro”

This led Ulisse and I into a discussion about Shelley’s theory of the “cultivation” of the imagination as a moral power — something that sets him apart from all other Romantic writers. A lot of ink has been spilled over what the term “cultivated imagination” actually means, but I think Shelley’s theory was expansive enough to allow for many different coherent explanations. 

For me it starts with Shelley’s aversion to the authoritarian political systems with which he was all too familiar. And, much like the Deists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Shelley looked upon established religion as an enabler of those structures and he looked upon religious faith as little more than superstition. “Religion,” he said, “is the handmaiden of tyranny.” To attack these structures, Shelley relied on skepticism -  an ideal tool to undermine entrenched power structures of any kind and in particular religion. Put simply he advocated questioning and undermining all authority. 

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To replace these structures was an entirely more difficult problem, and one which Shelley would rely on a different programme. Shelley talks and writes a lot about love - to the point that many people think of him primarily as a love poet - a writer of harmless romantic poetry. And indeed, Shelley frequently wrote about romantic love and also sexual love. But mostly when Shelley talked about “love” he was very clearly thinking about that psychological capacity that would come to be known as “empathy”: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another person. This alone would not suffice for Shelley, however, because Shelley wanted to change the world, to make it better, to help people, and so Shelley’s empathy is always infused with compassion. To change the world, he thought, required an imaginative revolution; people had to learn to see the world very differently - but how? I think of his response to Coleridge’s partially plagiarized poem about Mont Blanc, “Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni”:

Ye Ice-falls! ye that from the mountain’s brow

Down enormous ravines slope amain -- 

Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,

And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!

Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven

Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun

Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers

Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?—

God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,

Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!

God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!

Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!

And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,

And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!

Like most of his era, Coleridge believed that God was responsible for all that is beautiful and sublime in our world. In this poem he challenges his readers to look at the natural world and not see the handiwork of god. Shelley, writing his own poem dedicated to Mont Blanc some years later, accepted this challenge and tacitly denounced Coleridge’s worldview. Whatever you think about the plagiarism charge, one thing we do know, Coleridge was never in the “Vale of Chamouni”, he never actually saw Mont Blanc - Shelley was and did. Shelley believed it was essential that we look not for “hand of god” in our lives and demanded that we assume responsibility for not only our actions but the world in which we live. To rely on superstition and external powers is to shirk personal responsibility for our lives. 

But to actually see the world differently would require a cultivated imagination that could break the great chain of superstition and reliance on “faith” which inhibits our imagination and holds us hostage to the past. And such an imagination is only possible if we adopt a skeptical view of accepted dogmas and entrenched institutions and cultivate our powers of empathy and compassion. The best way to do that is really quite straightforward - it is done through immersing yourself in the lives and experiences of others - something that can be done though experiencing art in all its formats; I would argue particularly, reading. Ulisse agreed. “I think this is very important,” he said because this is in fact the theme of his film:

“The Oak tree represents the family tree of humanity - it is to this that the little girl in the film is drawn. And it is through literature that she can experience not only the past but the future as well. Reading, literature and art, is the bridge between the past and our future. This is how humanity can regenerate and renew itself.” 

“Reading, literature and art, is the bridge between the past and our future. This is how humanity can regenerate and renew itself. — Ulisse Lendaro”

It was for this reason Ulisse selected Ode to the West Wind. A deeply personal poem, the Ode central metaphor is the wind. As Paul Foot noted, “the wind, and everything associated with it, became a series of shifting symbols each connected with Shelley’s ideas [and] his revolutionary inspiration….” The same is true for Ulisse’s cinematic realization of Shelley’s poem. In the film, the wind is the protagonist, a silent, observing presence that interacts with the actors. Shelley’s poem is somewhat despairing. He regrets the ideals of his youth for revolutionary change seem to be ever more out of his grasp. Yet, the poem ends with a call to the wind which he wants to maintain and spread the revolutionary spirit of his words in what Foot called a “mighty agitation which would reach and awaken all humanity.” 

Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

His invocation has been answered; though ignored, censored and outcast in his own time, Shelley’s poetry went on to inspire generations of enthusiasts, activists and creators - including Ulisse whose film is a literal response to Shelley’s closing stanzas. I find Ulisse’s reinterpretation of Shelley’s masterpiece to be altogether uplifting and full of hope. Shelley would be profoundly gratified. You will need to see for yourself the manner in which Ulisse has developed the Shelley’s ideas.

Ursula K. Le Guin.

I reminded Ulisse of Shelley’s famous remark in The Defense of Poetry: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I have always unpacked this to mean that creators are the representatives of the people. and that their works incarnation of the hopes and desires of humanity. Take this a step further and what Shelley seems to be saying is that creators speak for the people and are therefore an essential if not critical component of the political system. It also makes them a formidable foe of authoritarians, which probably explains why they view writers in particular as such a threat — and often imprison or even kill them. As Ursula Le Guin once remarked, “Dictators fear poets.” My friend Ciaran O’Rourke defined this role particularly well, in his article Shelley in a Revolutionary World, he wrote of James Connolly the famous Irish republican and socialist:

“If Shelley conceived of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, a great part and purpose of this role lay, for him, in the capacity to perceive and express the radical aspirations of the toiling “many” (in Ireland and farther afield)”.

One of Le Guin’s other well known statements was that “we read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” Remarks like this are why I believe Le Guin was a Shelleyan through and through. Her thinking her almost exactly aligns with Shelley - and Ulisse as well — in his film, literature (specifically books), play an essential role in his vision of the renewal of humanity.

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. — Ursula K. Le Guin”

All of this put the importance of creators in our society in the front and center of our minds, and so our conversation turned to the plight of creators today in the wake of the pandemic. Ulisse talked about dancers he knew who were now unable to dance, shuttered theaters and out of work actors. I pointed to the music community where an entire way of life has been almost destroyed. While both Ulisse and I agreed that art forms such as music and theater will never die, neither of us fully understand what it is into which they will morph.

Something else is clear as well, during the current crisis, the rich are getting fabulously wealthy and the middle class and the poor are being squeezed. This form of inequity is exactly what Shelley himself railed against two hundred years ago. I have often said that I think the things that would shock Shelley the most were he to time travel to our time would not be computers and rockets, but rather that the share of wealth concentrated in the hands of the few has become even greater. He would have expected better of humanity after the passage of two hundred years. We should be ashamed. If Shelley and Ulisse are right about the role of the creator in shaping our future (in fueling our resistance, our renewal and our resilience) then it really feels like the survival of the artistic community becomes increasingly important.

Rabindranath Tagore. 1861 - 1941

There was another undercurrent to our conversation and that is the Indian connection here. Jitendra, Ulisse’s affable, thoughtful production partner remarked that there was in fact strong link between his country and Shelley. I pointed out that Shelley was actually extremely interested in Indian art and poetry. He had read extensively about India and the imagery in Prometheus Unbound was heavily influenced by mythological motifs drawn from there - Stuart Curran writes extensively about this in his book “Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis”. Toward the end of his life he wrote to Hogg remarking that he was thinking of going to India "where I might be compelled to active exertion and enter into an entirely new sphere of action". Later however, he despondently wrote to Byron saying "I feel sensibly the weariness and sorrow of past life.” The idea of doing something new in India had become for him, "I dare say a mere dream".

Jitendra responded by pointing out the fact that Gandhi was fond of quoting lines from The Mask of Anarchy.  Shelley, as is well known, was one of the very first writers to express the idea that the most effective response to oppression and force was massive, non-violent resistance. We can not underestimate exactly how revolutionary that would have seemed at the time. Some have guessed that Shelley’s ideas may have been transmitted to Gandhi during the time he spent in England; possibly through the medium of Henry Salt. But the link has never been established. What we can say is that Shelley and Ghandi shared a particular outlook on life at least insofar as pacifism is concerned. 

Another influential Indian thinker who was certainly aware of and influenced by Shelley was Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941). He was sometimes described as the “Bengali Shelley” for reasons even a cursory examination of his biography will make plain. The first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), Tagore was a Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the west and vice versa. However, the connection that interested Jitendra the most was between the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati (1882 - 1921) and Shelley. Bharati is perhaps one of India’s most famous poets (and one of the least known outside of its borders). Bharati was phenomenally prolific and influential - he was also a nationalist and revolutionary in his outlook. And one thing we know for certain - he was profoundly influenced by Shelley - to the point he adopted the pen name “Shelley-Dasan” - meaning “disciple of Shelley”. One of his poems, entitled “Wind”, appears to be designed as a meditation on and reinterpretation of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. It is infused with a Shelleyan revolutionary spirit - a spirit Bharati has made entirely his own:

Wind, come softly.

Don’t break the shutters of the windows.

Don’t scatter the papers.

Don’t throw down the books on the shelf.

There, look what you did — you threw them all down.

You tore the pages of the books.

You brought rain again.

You’re very clever at poking fun at weaklings.

Frail crumbling houses, crumbling doors, crumbling rafters,

Crumbling wood, crumbling bodies, crumbling lives,

Crumbling hearts —

The wind god winnows and crushes them all.

He won’t do what you tell him.

So, come, let’s build strong homes,

Let’s joint the doors firmly.

Practise to firm the body.

Make the heart steadfast.

Do this, and the wind will be friends with us.

The wind blows out weak fires.

He makes strong fires roar and flourish.

His friendship is good.

We praise him every day. (Translated from the Tamil by A.K. Ramanujan)

Ulisse Lendaro, through the medium of film, is clearly following in this august tradition!

The links between Shelley and India strike me as poorly understood. I was able to locate what seems to be a seminal book by Dr. John G Samuel of the Institute Asian Studies: “Comparative study of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, English Romantic poet, with the poetry of C. Subrahmanya Bharati, 1882-1921, Indian revolutionary poet”. A quick scan of the literature turns up very little in the way of current scholarly investigations of Shelley’s influence on either Tagore or Bharati. Given the current climate in academic romantic circles, this would seem to be a glaring oversight. I welcome my readers to point me in the direction of anything of interest. This is a subject I wish to pursue.

“Creators are at the disposal of humanity to help create a better future. — Ulisse Lendaro ”

Jitendra and Ulisse very kindly provide me with a link to the film's trailer. And I am pleased to be able to share that with you today.

HUMAN OAK, 2020, ITALY-INDIA Director: Ulisse Lendaro Producers: Ulisse Lendaro, Jitendra Mishra Cast: Anna Valle, Ginevra Lendaro, Leonardo Lendaro Music: N...

The film is scheduled for release in the new year and I will have many more details which I can provide you with in due course. What I can say is that this is very clearly a work of art that was created in a distinctly Shelleyan revolutionary spirit with great sensitivity and love. The film expressly commemorates the 200th anniversary of the publication of Ode to the West Wind. Human O.A.K. is beautifully scored and the production values are extraordinary — all the more so due to the fact that this was filmed during the pandemic under very difficult circumstances. Ulisse and Jitendra are themselves the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit they so admire in Shelley; a spirit of resistance, resilience, and ultimately renewal. In these difficult times, their film is a breath of fresh air and an inspiration.

“Resistance. Resilience. Renewal.”

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Ulisse Lendaro is an Italian director, producer and actor. He received a special mention for his acting from the theater critics at Premio Hystrio in 2004. After appearing for many years in theatrical productions, Lendaro produced a cult horror film directed by Jonathan Zarantonello. In 2017 he directed Imperfect Age, a movie that premiered at the Rome International Film Festival and which was warmly recieved. Produced by Aurora Film and Rai Cinema Imperfect Age was been described by Rolling Stone Magazine as a mix between Black Swan and All about Eve. In 2020 Lendaro directed the short film En Pointe with the participation of Roberto Bolle. The film was entered in the competition at the Giffoni Film Festival in 2020.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/24647461/admin/

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0501764/

https://filmfreeway.com/UlisseLendaro450/photos

Jitendra Mishra is one of the few Indian film producers & promoters who have been able to create a
benchmark in ‘Alternative method of Film Production, Distribution & Promotion’ at international level. Committed towards meaningful cinema, Jitendra has already been associated with the production, distribution and promotion of more than 100 films in different categories in various capacities. Many of them have got worldwide acclamation and recognition in global film festivals like Venice, Cannes, Berlin & Toronto. His recent feature film production ‘The Last Color' has already been selected in more than 50 international film festivals and won 15 awards as of now. The film had a special screening at the prestigious UN
headquarters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitendra_Mishra
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4251856/

Michael O'Neill (1953-2018) - A Brief Remembrance

Michael O'Neill (1953-2018) - A Brief Remembrance

Michael O’Neill, 1952-2018

Professor Michael O’Neill was a renowned poet and also one of the great modern scholars of Romanticism. No less an authority than Seamus Perry recently called him “one of our leading Shelleyan commentators.” He has died - at the dismayingly young age of 66. You can read the obituary published by the Keats Foundation here: This is a great loss and one which it will not be easy to recover from. Personally, I did not know Michael, but I was lucky to have witnessed and recorded one of his bravura performances in 2017 at the Shelley Conference in London. One of Professor O’Neill’s greatest attributes was his ability to write and speak plainly and accessibly - unpacking often highly complex thoughts and presenting them in a simple, straightforward manner. In her touching obituary for the Keats Foundation, Heidi Thomson wrote, “above all, Michael lived for his love of poetry and he had a tremendous gift for talking about the intricacies of poetic form and poetic dynamics.“

This capacity of his was on full display that day in London when he spoke about Shelley’s use of language. I have read many books on the subject and for the most part they descend into almost impenetrable jargon from the get go. Not O’Neill. He also has a mellifluous speaking voice and could read poetry like no other. You don’t need to take my word for this - with the permission of the conference organizers I recorded it! I urge you to set aside some time to listen to one of THE great romantic scholars speaking on a subject near and dear to his heart. It will change the way you think of Percy Shelley and it will help us to keep the memory of Professor O’Neill alive.

Professor O’Neill wrote extensively in his subject area. Two of my favourite books of his are The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry and Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life. Do yourself a favour, find these gems and spend sometime with them.

Professor O’Neill delivered the third and final keynote of the Shelley Conference 2017, and takes us on an extraordinary excursion through Shelley’s prose.  Alighting on works such as A Defense of Poetry, On Life, Address on the Death of Princess Charlotte, A Philosophical Review of Reform, On Christianity, and Speculations of Metaphysics, O’Neill conveys a deep and abiding knowledge and love of his subject. He offers common sense, close readings which bring Shelley alive and illustrate what he calls Shelley’s "drama of thought". The first 15 minutes set the scene and once O’Neill hits his stride with a magisterial reading of An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte, we are comfortably in the hands of a master who takes us on a tour of Shelley’s metaphysical, polemical and religious ruminations.

Rain, Steam and Speed, JMW Turner. I think Turner's approach to his painting resonates with Shelley's approach to his poetry. Can you see how?

Professor O'Neill's keynote digs into how Shelley uses language to challenge custom and habit; or, as O’Neill puts it, to "invite [his readers] to reconsider the world in which we live." This, to me, strikes at the heart of Shelley’s entire output; this was a man who believed that poetry (or more generally cultural products) could literally change the world.  I have written about this here and here.

Of great interest to me is O’Neill’s opinion that Shelley’s prose can be thought of more as poetry – or rather an amalgam of prose AND poetry.  This interests me because I have often thought of his poetry as prose in disguise.  For example, take the final portion of the Spirit of the Hour’s speech at the end of Act III in Prometheus Unbound. In poetic form, there are 40 lines of poetry. However, a cursory inspection reveals a startling fact: the passage is composed of only two long sentences. It is tough sledding as a performance piece. But if you render the verse into paragraph form it looks like this:

Thrones, altars, judgement-seats, and prisons; wherein, and beside which, by wretched men were borne sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance, were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes, the ghosts of a no-more-remembered fame, which, from their unworn obelisks, look forth in triumph o'er the palaces and tombs of those who were their conquerors: mouldering round, these imaged to the pride of kings and priests a dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide as is the world it wasted, and are now but an astonishment; even so the tools and emblems of its last captivity, amid the dwellings of the peopled earth, stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now.

And those foul shapes, abhorred by god and man, -- which, under many a name and many a form strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable, were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world; and which the nations, panic-stricken, served with blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless, and slain amid men's unreclaiming tears, flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate, -- frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines: the painted veil, by those who were, called life, which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, all men believed or hoped, is torn aside; the loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man passionless? -- no, yet free from guilt or pain, which were, for his will made or suffered them, nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, from chance, and death, and mutability, the clogs of that which else might oversoar the loftiest star of unascended heaven, pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

Depiction of Aias' suicide.

I believe that rendered into a prose format, the poetry scans much more easily.  Try it yourself - read it aloud both ways.  I think Shelley's models for this sort of speech were the classical Greek dramatists. I am thinking, for example, of some of Sophocles' lengthy speeches in, say, Aias. As an actor or reader, you must manage your way through two densely packed sentences with nested sub-clauses and hope to come out the other side alive. This is not easy. But it is easier if you convert the lines of poetry into paragraphs. Then, to my mind, the speeches flow on, beautifully and serenely - like a sylvan river! It does not surprise me to find Shelley challenging the boundaries of convention.

At the outset, O’Neill makes it clear that he is not taking us on a voyage into Shelley’s belief system – he challenges us to read him not to determine "what system of thought we can gather" from his prose or to distill "Shelley’s essential tenets", but rather "to live with the words, to see the process of the mind at work". For me, this was a novel and refreshing approach.  O’Neill wants us to see "the way he uses language and see the way he delights in language". Shelley, he notes, plays with words to "free the mind from its own constructions".

My take away from this is that Shelley does not want his readers to passively absorb his prose. It is through an active engagement in unpacking his word play that Shelley expects his readers to undergo a change which is personal to them. The distilled ideas become the our own. Shelley, a skeptic to his core, is not attempting to impose any doctrinal truth upon his audience. Shelley intends that we undergo a process of imaginative transformation or reinvention – that belongs to us. I believe that this dovetails with his theory of the imagination, and I am reminded of PMS Dawson’s shrewd observation that for Shelley,

The world must be transformed in imagination before it can be changed politically, and here it is that the poet can exert an influence over “opinion.” This imaginative recreation of existence is both the subject and the intended effect of Prometheus Unbound.

As with his poetry, so it is with his prose. Shelley is asking us to read, engage and be present. Shelley expects us to reinvent ourselves and therefore the world around us because as O’Neill so trenchantly observes: "we live the lives we lead because of the thoughts we think".

Sketch of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Edward Williams. This drawing most closely resembles Leigh Hunt's late-in-life description of him.

This is why many readers find Shelley confusing. It is because words are often wrenched out of their context and applied in circumstances that are novel or counter-intuitive. He holds words up like objects to be marveled at and examined from all sides. A good example of all of this occurs in one of my favourite segments: O’Neill’s consideration of A Philosophical View of Reform which starts at 27:30.

Shelley was, as O’Neill remarks, "always battling with what he takes to be illusory or self-deceiving modes of thinking that are embodied in the language of politics". This was particularly important for Shelley because as a republican his goal was to upend the existing political order: monarchy. To accomplish his task, Shelley undertakes what O’Neill calls a "deliberative but explosive assault" on the concept of "aristocracy".  Shelley asks at the outset "why an aristocracy exists at all"? He goes further and questions why we even have the very word. In what O’Neill refers to one of Shelley’s wittiest passages, Shelley goes on to define "aristocracy as that class of persons who possess a right to the labour of others without dedicating to the common service any labour in return". Shelley considers the mere existence of such a class as a "prodigious anomaly in the social system".

Shelley’s goal, it would seem, was to rob the word of its power or fascination – a goal he seems singularly (and sadly) to have failed to achieve given the fact that 200 years later England is class-ridden and burdened with a noisome, irksome, entitled aristocracy. But we can applaud him for the attempt.

Michael O’Neill is to be commended for a thrilling glimpse into the mind and heart of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I left the conference with a renewed interest in Shelley’s prose and a new method of approach. If we can approach his prose without seeking definitive philosophical statements or conclusions; then perhaps we can free our own minds from custom and habit.

Sir William Drummond. After Arminius Mayer. Hand coloured engraving, early 19th century.

I also think such an approach suits Shelley’s formal skeptical agenda. Shelley was a skeptic in the tradition of Cicero, Hume and Sir William Drummond. He actually met Drummond in Rome in 1819. He read, re-read and extensively commented upon Drummond's writings during a period of time that was co-extensive with his entire philosophical output. Drummond's book, Academical Questions was his favourite work of contemporary philosophy. He was deeply suspicious of what the Greeks called doxa (“opinion”) and believed opinion to be the foundation of organized religion and therefore most of the world's woes. He advocated suspension of judgement and applied the doctrine of lack of certainty to most of his worldly interactions (in the Greek, epochê and akatalepsia, respectively). He wrote of the "prodigious depth and extent of our ignorance respecting the causes and nature of sensation". This was also tied to his political theory as he linked skepticism (which questions all dogma) with political liberty and ethical behaviour.

Professor O’Neill’s presentation will appear in a new book, Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence: New Relations - to be issued by Oxford University Press at the beginning of March.. You can read more about it here and pre-order it.

You can also pre-order his final book of poetry, Crash and Burn; it is coming out in April.

Or, even better, ask your local bookseller to order these books for you.

Thank you Michael, you will be sorely missed and the world is much impoverished by your departure.

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This presentation of Professor Michael O'Neill's keynote was done with both his permission and that of the Shelley Conference 2017.  Michael was a Professor of English at Durham University. He was Head of Department from 1997 to 2000 and from 2002 to 2005. From 2005-11, he was a Director (Arts and Humanities) of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at Durham University; he served as the Acting Executive Director of the IAS from January 2011 until May 2012. He is a Founding Fellow of the English Association, on the Editorial Boards of the Keats-Shelley Review, Romantic Circles, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, Romanticism, The Wordsworth Circle, and CounterText, Chair of the International Byron Society's Advisory Board and Chair of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation. In 2005 he established and was Director of an intra-departmental research group working on Romantic Dialogues and Legacies. He has written many books on Shelley, including The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life and The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry. Read more about him here.

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Background on The Shelley Conference

What follows is an edited version of the CFP prepared by conference organizer, Anna Mercer for The Shelley Conference 2017. You can read the original version here.

On 14 and 15 of September 2017 a two-day conference in London, England celebrated the writings of two major authors from the Romantic Period: Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS) and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS).

There is a continuing scholarly fascination with all things 'Shelley' which is due in part to the
unprecedented access we now have to their texts (in annotated scholarly editions) and manuscripts (presented in facsimile and transcript). The Shelleys' works are more readily available than ever before. However somewhat disturbingly, there is no annual or even semi-regular conference dedicated to PBS (comparable to those that exist for other Romantic writers). It was this fact that prompted Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal to organise The Shelley Conference 2017.

Shockingly, it has taken almost 200 years for detailed, comprehensive editions of PBS's works to appear.  I believe he is the only major poet in the English literary canon to be so woefully under served. However, two editions are nearing completion: The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited by Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook; and The Poems of Shelley edited Kelvin Everest, G.M. Matthews, Michael Rossington and Jack Donovan.  There is much, therefore, to celebrate. In addition there is the astonishing Shelley-Godwin Archive which will provide, according to the website, "the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers." It must be seen to be believed.

Conferences at Gregynog in 1978, 1980, and 1992 and the Percy Shelley Bicentennial Conference in New York in 1992 have provided a wonderful legacy for future Shelleyan academics, and it is in the spirit of these events The Shelley Conference 2017 was undertaken. MWS is included in this new conference, as she also does not have her own regular academic event. However, the recent conference 'Beyond Frankenstein's Shadow' (Nancy, France, 2016) focused specifically on MWS, and the emphasis placed on her work at the 'Summer of 1816' conference (Sheffield, 2016) indicated that her role on the main stage of Romanticism is increasingly appreciated.

It is for these reasons that the 'Shelley' of the conference title was left ambiguous. The Shelleys are increasingly seen as a collaborative literary partnership, and modern criticism reinforces the importance of reading their works in parallel. The nuances of this, however, are far from simple, and this statement does not imply there is anything like a sense of either consistent 'unity' or 'conflict' when considering the Shelleys' literary relationship. This is the kind of issue which was explored at The Shelley Conference 2017 by speakers such as the legendary Nora Crook.

Multiple parallel panel sessions allowed the organizers to present a wide range of exciting papers delivered by researchers from the UK, Europe, and beyond, as well as three featured presentations by eminent Shelley scholars: Kelvin Everest, Nora Crook and Michael O'Neill. These are some of the "superstars" of the Shelleyan world.

“We Live the Lives We Lead Because of the Thoughts We Think”

In this, the third and final keynote of the Shelley Conference 2017, Professor Michael O’Neill takes us on an extraordinary excursion through Shelley’s prose.  Alighting on works such as A Defense of Poetry, On Life, Address on the Death of Princess Charlotte, A Philosophical Review of Reform, On Christianity, and Speculations of Metaphysics, O’Neill conveys a deep and abiding knowledge and love of his subject. He offers common sense, close readings which bring Shelley alive and illustrate what he calls Shelley’s "drama of thought". The first 15 minutes set the scene and once O’Neill hits his stride with a magisterial reading of An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte, we are comfortably in the hands of a master who takes us on a tour of Shelley’s metaphysical, polemical and religious ruminations.

Professor O'Neill's keynote digs into how Shelley uses language to challenge custom and habit; or, as O’Neill puts it, to "invite [his readers] to reconsider the world in which we live." This, to me, strikes at the heart of Shelley’s entire output; this was a man who believed that poetry (or more generally cultural products) could literally change the world.  I have written about this here and here.

Rain, Steam and Speed, JMW Turner. I think Turner's approach to his painting resonates with Shelley's approach to his poetry. Can you see how?

Of great interest to me is O’Neill’s opinion that Shelley’s prose can be thought of more as poetry – or rather an amalgam of prose AND poetry.  This interests me because I have often thought of his poetry as prose in disguise.  For example, take the final portion of Spirit of the Hour’s speech at the end of Act 3 in Prometheus Unbound. In poetic form, there are 40 lines of poetry.  Rendered in paragraph form it looks like this:

Thrones, altars, judgement-seats, and prisons; wherein, and beside which, by wretched men were borne sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance, were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes, the ghosts of a no-more-remembered fame, which, from their unworn obelisks, look forth in triumph o'er the palaces and tombs of those who were their conquerors: mouldering round, these imaged to the pride of kings and priests a dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide as is the world it wasted, and are now but an astonishment; even so the tools and emblems of its last captivity, amid the dwellings of the peopled earth, stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now. And those foul shapes, abhorred by god and man, -- which, under many a name and many a form strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable, were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world; and which the nations, panic-stricken, served with blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless, and slain amid men's unreclaiming tears, flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate, -- frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines: the painted veil, by those who were, called life, which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, all men believed or hoped, is torn aside; the loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man passionless? -- no, yet free from guilt or pain, which were, for his will made or suffered them, nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, from chance, and death, and mutability, the clogs of that which else might oversoar the loftiest star of unascended heaven, pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

Depiction of Aias' suicide.

A cursory inspection reveals a starting fact: the above passage is composed of only two long sentences. It is a difficult read in poetic form, but rendered into a prose format, it scans much more easily.  Try it yourself.  I think Shelley's models for this sort of speech were the classical Greek dramatists. I am thinking, for example, of some of Sophocles' lengthy speeches in, say, Aias.

As an actor, you would have to manage your way through densely packed sentences with nested sub-clauses and hope to come out the other side alive. This is not easy. But it is easier if you convert the lines of poetry into paragraphs. Then, to my mind, the speeches flow on, beautifully and serenely - like a sylvan river! It does not surprise me to find Shelley challenging the boundaries of convention.

At the outset, O’Neill makes it clear that he is not taking us on a voyage into Shelley’s belief system – he challenges us to read him not to determine "what system of thought we can gather" from his prose or to distill "Shelley’s essential tenets", but rather "to live with the words, to see the process of the mind at work". For me, this was a novel and refreshing approach.  O’Neill wants us to see "the way he uses language and see the way he delights in language". Shelley, he notes, plays with words to "free the mind from its own constructions".

My take away from this is that Shelley does not want his readers to passively absorb his prose. It is through an active engagement in unpacking his word play that Shelley expects his readers to undergo a change which is personal to them. The distilled ideas become the our own. Shelley, a skeptic to his core, is not attempting to impose any doctrinal truth upon his audience. Shelley intends that we undergo a process of imaginative transformation or reinvention – that belongs to us. I believe that this dovetails with his theory of the imagination, and I am reminded of PMS Dawson’s shrewd observation that for Shelley,

The world must be transformed in imagination before it can be changed politically, and here it is that the poet can exert an influence over “opinion.” This imaginative recreation of existence is both the subject and the intended effect of Prometheus Unbound.

As with his poetry, so it is with his prose. Shelley is asking us to read, engage and be present. Shelley expects us to reinvent ourselves and therefore the world around us because as O’Neill so trenchantly observes: "we live the lives we lead because of the thoughts we think".

Sketch of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Edward Williams. This drawing most closely resembles Leigh Hunt's late-in-life description of him.

This is why many readers find Shelley confusing. It is because words are often wrenched out of their context and applied in circumstances that are novel or counter-intuitive. He holds words up like objects to be marveled at and examined from all sides. A good example of all of this occurs in one of my favourite segments: O’Neill’s consideration of A Philosophical View of Reform which starts at 27:30.

Shelley was, as O’Neill remarks, "always battling with what he takes to be illusory or self-deceiving modes of thinking that are embodied in the language of politics". This was particularly important for Shelley because as a republican his goal was to upend the existing political order: monarchy. To accomplish his task, Shelley undertakes what O’Neill calls a "deliberative but explosive assault" on the concept of "aristocracy".  Shelley asks at the outset "why an aristocracy exists at all"? He goes further and questions why we even have the very word. In what O’Neill refers to one of Shelley’s wittiest passages, Shelley goes on to define "aristocracy as that class of persons who possess a right to the labour of others without dedicating to the common service any labour in return". Shelley considers the mere existence of such a class as a "prodigious anomaly in the social system".

Shelley’s goal, it would seem, was to rob the word of its power or fascination – a goal he seems singularly (and sadly) to have failed to achieve given the fact that 200 years later England is class-ridden and burdened with a noisome, irksome, entitled aristocracy. But we can applaud him for the attempt.

Michael O’Neill is to be commended for a thrilling glimpse into the mind and heart of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I left the conference with a renewed interest in Shelley’s prose and a new method of approach. If we can approach his prose without seeking definitive philosophical statements or conclusions; then perhaps we can free our own minds from custom and habit.  As O’Neill reminds us: "we live the lives we lead because of the thoughts we think".

I also think such an approach suits Shelley’s formal skeptical agenda. Shelley was a skeptic in the tradition of Cicero, Hume and Sir William Drummond. He actually met Drummond in Rome in 1819. He read, re-read and extensively commented upon Drummond's writings during a period of time that was co-extensive with his entire philosophical output. Drummond's book, Academical Questions was his favourite work of contemporary philosophy. He was deeply suspicious of what the Greeks called doxa (“opinion”) and believed opinion to be the foundation of organized religion and therefore most of the world's woes. He advocated suspension of judgement and applied the doctrine of lack of certainty to most of his worldly interactions (in the Greek, epochê and akatalepsia, respectively). He wrote of the "prodigious depth and extent of our ignorance respecting the causes and nature of sensation". This was also tied to his political theory as he linked skepticism (which questions all dogma) with political liberty and ethical behaviour.

I understand that Michael O’Neill’s presentation will appear in a new book soon to be issued by Oxford University Press.  In the meantime, we have his wonderful keynote to enjoy and treasure for all time, thank you Michael!

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This presentation of Professor Michael O'Neill's keynote is done with both his permission and that of the Shelley Conference 2017.  I thank them both. Michael is a Professor of English at Durham University. He was Head of Department from 1997 to 2000 and from 2002 to 2005. From 2005-11, he was a Director (Arts and Humanities) of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at Durham University; he served as the Acting Executive Director of the IAS from January 2011 until May 2012. He is a Founding Fellow of the English Association, on the Editorial Boards of the Keats-Shelley Review, Romantic Circles, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, Romanticism, The Wordsworth Circle, and CounterText, Chair of the International Byron Society's Advisory Board and Chair of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation. In 2005 he established and is Director of an intra-departmental research group working on Romantic Dialogues and Legacies. He has written many books on Shelley, including The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life and The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry.Read more about him here.

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Background on The Shelley Conference

What follows is an edited version of the CFP prepared by conference organizer, Anna Mercer for The Shelley Conference 2017. You can read the original version here.

On 14 and 15 of September 2017 a two-day conference in London, England celebrated the writings of two major authors from the Romantic Period: Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS) and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS).

There is a continuing scholarly fascination with all things 'Shelley' which is due in part to the
unprecedented access we now have to their texts (in annotated scholarly editions) and manuscripts (presented in facsimile and transcript). The Shelleys' works are more readily available than ever before. However somewhat disturbingly, there is no annual or even semi-regular conference dedicated to PBS (comparable to those that exist for other Romantic writers). It was this fact that prompted Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal to organise The Shelley Conference 2017.

Shockingly, it has taken almost 200 years for detailed, comprehensive editions of PBS's works to appear.  I believe he is the only major poet in the English literary canon to be so woefully under served. However, two editions are nearing completion: The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited by Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook; and The Poems of Shelley edited Kelvin Everest, G.M. Matthews, Michael Rossington and Jack Donovan.  There is much, therefore, to celebrate. In addition there is the astonishing Shelley-Godwin Archive which will provide, according to the website, "the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers." It must be seen to be believed.

Conferences at Gregynog in 1978, 1980, and 1992 and the Percy Shelley Bicentennial Conference in New York in 1992 have provided a wonderful legacy for future Shelleyan academics, and it is in the spirit of these events The Shelley Conference 2017 was undertaken. MWS is included in this new conference, as she also does not have her own regular academic event. However, the recent conference 'Beyond Frankenstein's Shadow' (Nancy, France, 2016) focused specifically on MWS, and the emphasis placed on her work at the 'Summer of 1816' conference (Sheffield, 2016) indicated that her role on the main stage of Romanticism is increasingly appreciated.

It is for these reasons that the 'Shelley' of the conference title was left ambiguous. The Shelleys are increasingly seen as a collaborative literary partnership, and modern criticism reinforces the importance of reading their works in parallel. The nuances of this, however, are far from simple, and this statement does not imply there is anything like a sense of either consistent 'unity' or 'conflict' when considering the Shelleys' literary relationship. This is the kind of issue which was explored at The Shelley Conference 2017 by speakers such as the legendary Nora Crook.

Multiple parallel panel sessions allowed the organizers to present a wide range of exciting papers delivered by researchers from the UK, Europe, and beyond, as well as three featured presentations by eminent Shelley scholars: Kelvin Everest, Nora Crook and Michael O'Neill. These are some of the "superstars" of the Shelleyan world.