Shelley, Dante, and Romantic Irony By John B. Padgett Table of Contents    Works Cited
Copyright © 1991, 1995 by John B. Padgett

Abstract

The undaunted optimism Shelley demonstrated in his early works — the realistic hope of man's perfectibility, a terrestrial paradise, the inevitability of reform, both political and social — by the end of his career had waned to a guarded skepticism wary of unreasonable expectations and to downright despair. Poetic masterpieces like Prometheus Unbound, "Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" depicted humanity perfected, mankind's quest for ideal love successfully completed, the threat of evil among the earth's populace eradicated. This "vision" corresponds closely to the vision of paradise regained, both here on earth and in the afterlife, depicted in Dante's epic Comedy. Shelley, a great admirer of the fourteenth-century poet, adapted and arranged much of Dante's poetics in his own poetry. Through his increasing dependence on specific Dantesque subject matter and ideals, Shelley creates a prosody which more and more often delves into a pessimistic view of life, ultimately resulting in romantic irony.

Shelley attempted to demonstrate the similarities and to resolve differences between Dante and himself in his prose work A Defence of Poetry. Dante used his era's doctrinal rigidity, Shelley says, only as a medium in which to set his true goal: to create a poetry which would transcend the temporal constraints of mortality to speak to future generations. Dante's Comedy endowed modern mythology with a "systematic form" which cannot be forgotten because it is stamped with the "eternity of genius," and the poem is Dante's ultimate depiction of a quest for an ideal poetry. Shelley adapts these Dantesque themes into his own Prometheus Unbound, a secular re-working of Dante's Comedy, sharing both Dante's apotheosis of womanhood in Prometheus's love interest Asia, and Dante's interest in the poetic process, represented in Shelley's poem by Demogorgon.

After the optimistic height of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley embarks upon a darker quest in Epipsychidion. Ostensibly modeled after Dante's La Vita Nuova, Shelley's poetic quest for the ideal love intentionally fails. Epipsychidion mimics both the epical "quest" of Dante and the presence of the ideal for whom the quest occurs. In particular, Shelley adapts Dante's ideas of the ineffability of language as a finite system by which to communicate transcendent thoughts. The speaker's self-awareness and despair at the failure of his task contrasts with the implicit presence in the poem of a Dantesque ideal love-poetry, echoes of which resonate throughout the poem. The contrast between Dante's success and Shelley's failure result in romantic irony, in which contradictory ideals stand side by side in a poetry whose primary characteristic is ambivalence.

Such ambivalence reaches its height in Shelley's bleakest poem, ironically titled The Triumph of Life. Unfinished, Triumph refers not to man's victory over life but rather the opposite: life's relentless conquest over man. The terza rima poem is Shelley's most obvious adaptation of Dante, borrowing not only his verse form but also a Virgilian figure in Rousseau, a pageant of souls in death, and a first- person narrative from an objective observer. The poem ironically adopts a Dantesque ideology even as it suggests the need for artists to remain independent of such historical, "borrowed" ideologies. As in Epipsychidion, the poem simultaneously criticizes the earlier Dantesque idealism even as it praises the efficacy of the Dante's poetry, but more important, the poem asserts that the only resolution in the modern world is irresolution. Hence, The Triumph of Life becomes a latter-day attempt to revise the Dantesque vision into an apt model of the contemporary world.

Shelley attempted throughout his career a multi-level system of reform, but his poetry lapses into romantic irony through the poet's attempts to hold simultaneously incompatible images of the eternal and the temporal, to quest for the ideal love while fully realizing that such an endeavor will end in failure. But the irony of his last pessimistic prosody becomes even more indomitable in view of his reworking of Dante's philosophical ideals to create a hellish topsy- turvy and undoubtedly Shelleyan Comedy. Shelley's last poem is a black comedy, a dark, existential prophesy of the inefficacy of mankind's power; it represents simultaneously Shelley's strongest embrace of Dantesque subjects and his greatest departure from their philosophies. In his last poem he abandons completely any faith that multi-level reform is possible but nonetheless asserts the continuous need to seek for reform, anticipating existentialism by decades.

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