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/

What the Victorians Made of Shelley. By Tom Mole

Visit my Shelley blog! www.grahamhenderson.ca

Introduction

In September at the London Shelley Conference 2017 I had the pleasure of listening to an expert, Professor Tom Mole, speak about one of my favourite subjects: what Victorians thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A link to the speech is provided below. 

I have written at length about this myself including here: "My Father's Shelley - A Tale of Two Shelleys". This is actually extremely important because what the Victorians thought about Shelley set the tone for succeeding generations of readers and critics. They played a crucial and controversial role in the transmission of Shelley's poetry to the modern era.

There have been many treatments of this subject. But to set the scene, it is important to remember that Shelley was not very well known in his own time.  Shortly after he died Mary prepared a slim volume called "Posthumous Poems" which presented a very different Shelley from the one that lived and breathed. She gave the world a poet who was a far cry from the radical revolutionary who died in 1822.  It was the beginning of a tradition of misrepresentation that has continued almost to this day.  My views on this have been recently tempered by the brilliant Nora Crook, whose presentation on the question of Mary's editing of Shelley can be seen here.  Other views appear in Michael Gamer's wonderful book, "Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry". You can buy it here. Then there is a wonderful book by one of the most underrated Shelley scholars of all time, Roland Duerksen: "Shelleyan Ideas in Victorian Literature."

If you want to get to the crux of the issue, look no further than this brilliant encapsulation by Frederich Engels:

"Shelley, the genius, the prophet, finds most of [his] readers in the proletariat; the bourgeouise own the castrated editions, the family editions cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today”

During these times, there was a struggle for Shelley that was fought out between what in modern terms could be called the "left" and the "right". The "hypocrites" of whom he spoke, the Victorian bourgeoisie, owned the sort of anthologies which Tom Mole talks about in this wonderful, engaging and accessible lecture. Exactly who was the Shelley that the anthologies presented to the Victorian reading public?  Professor Mole provides an astonishingly well researched overview of over two hundred different anthologies dating from the years 1822-1900. He has saved us all the trouble!

in his book, Mole did not just focus on Shelley, but he does so in his speech. The anthologies of which he speaks were, he writes, "magic casements" that showcased the "oceanic breadth of romantic poetry, while at the same time framing and limiting the readers view of it."  This matters because Shelley was a poet who set out to change the world. As he wrote to Leigh Hunt once, “I am undeceived in the belief that I have powers deeply to interest, or substantially improve, mankind.”  An intensely political individual, I think Shelley would have been horrified to have been presented to the reading public - many of whom would have been from the proletariat - as a lyric love poet.

But as Mole demonstrates, the anthologists favoured his short lyrics over his longer more political poems. When they did turn to his longer poetry, they had tricky choices to make.  Poems like Queen Mab, The Cenci and Alastor were clearly associated with subversive political themes which the bourgeoisie had absolutely no interest in showcasing. The solution was to focus on what Mole calls "passages of isolated description" which, he notes, is "exactly what Shelley sought to avoid."

The pickings were thin, but the anthologists were nothing if not dedicated to their task.  Mole walks of through three examples from the aforementioned poems. The most popular excerpt from Queen Mab was a descriptive section: lines 420-449. Mole points out that the passage selected, presents a lyrical, sylvan environment free from "narrative, tension and decay."  In other words the exact opposite of what Shelley would have wanted a reader to encounter.  We have to remember that during the period immediately after his death, Chartists and other radicals were gorging themselves on the radicalism of Queen Mab - to thus drain it of its political foundations was a grotesque misappropriation.

Mole does make the point that Victorian anthologies nonetheless circulated what amounted to links to the subversive substrata that existed beyond their pages. For my part I think the damage that was done far outweighs this modest gain. Even today those of us inspired by Shelley's radicalism,  for example Paul Foot, must wrestle with the legacy of misdirection these incredibly influential anthologies left behind. To here Foot on the subject, please read the entirety of his speech to the London Marxism Conference of 1981 here. 

I, however, have said enough - let's turn our attention to Professor Mole!!! You will thoroughly enjoy his presentation.

About Tom Mole

Tom Mole is Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He studied at the University of Bristol and has worked at the University of Glasgow, the University of Bristol and, most recently, as Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. You can find him on Twitter here. Tom's website is here.  Read more about his new book here.

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About Tom's Book

"This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth--one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing--such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles--that in turn remade the public's understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences."

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From the Back Cover!

"This ambitious book is a major contribution to our understanding of Romanticism, not only what it was but also what it became. It will be an essential guide to the web of reception and remaking for period specialists, while also posing urgent questions--and answers--for our own moment of hypermediation."--Clifford Siskin, New York University

"What have Victorian temperance lectures to do with Shelley, retrofitted illustrations to say about Wordsworth, or snuffboxes and postcards to tell us about Scott? In fascinating case studies, Tom Mole traces the unexpected shapes that literature is requisitioned to fill in the interests of its own survival. Mole writes with relish and flair, and with a canny awareness that these are the stories of what happens as texts and reputations are remade and reused for more purposes than those of the professional critic."--Kathryn Sutherland, University of Oxford

"Original and compelling. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism presents a number of valuable insights and perspectives on its topic."--Antony H. Harrison, author of Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology

"Convincing and nuanced. Mole extends existing knowledge of the Victorian reshaping of Romanticism by tracing the cultural transmission of selected Romantic poets through often overlooked reception practices such as sermons, illustrations, anthologies, and statues."--Kim Wheatley, author of Romantic Feuds: Transcending the "Age of Personality"

"A splendid book. Mole provides a much needed perspective on how the broader culture of the Victorian age responded to a highly selective and heavily mediated and remediated version of Romanticism."--David G. Riede, author of Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language

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Background on the Shelley Conference 2017

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.