著者

田久保 浩

出版者

イギリス・ロマン派学会

雑誌

イギリス・ロマン派研究 (ISSN:13419676)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.39, pp.67-80, 2015

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<p>Frederick Jones suggested in his notes to Shelley's letter to John Gisborne that the poet's own description of <i>Epipsychidion</i> as a mysterious poem written only for the <i>Synetoi</i>, the initiated, was an intentional mystification. In spite of critics who agree with Jones's view considering either Shelley's anxiety about finding an audience for the poem or the need to protect himself from attacks based on misconstrued relationships, it seems worthwhile to see the poem as indeed an "esoteric" poem. </p><p>Shelley always felt like a <i>Synetoi</i> as part of an intellectual minority carrying, like Prometheus, secret wisdom as their only weapon against the powerful and repressive establishment. Shelley's increasing sense of disappointment in finding audience in his later years led him to the idea of poetic tradition in which the best poetic spirit is disseminated across time as he eloquently argued in <i>A Defence of Poetry</i>. He saw himself as participating in that great tradition. <i>Epipsychidion</i> has characteristics as an esoteric text with its assumed distinction between the initiated and the uninitiated. Reading the poem as an exoteric text with ritualistic elements answers a number of questions, including the issues of its elaborate Renaissance style, the ambiguous identity of the "Sweet Spirit," the relevance of the philosophic statement on love to the idealized history of the poet, its concern with poetry and language, the reason for the apparently escapist message of the <i>envoi</i> to get away from the ignorant mass, and finally, the political implications this poem may possibly have. The ideal esoteric audience for Shelley would appreciate the imaginative poetic language of the poem, understand the poetic tradition that celebrates love as exemplified by Dante, and share Shelley's view that the social institution of marriage sustains the sexual discrimination, the property system, and inequality. The poem is supposed to provide a ritual for the purpose of inspiring visionaries to unite and follow the imagination and the love principle so that, despite the adverse time, the tradition of imaginative poetry can be transmitted to future generations.</p>

著者

田久保 浩

出版者

徳島大学総合科学部

雑誌

言語文化研究 (ISSN:2433345X)

巻号頁・発行日

no.25, pp.1-22, 2017-12-26

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The boom of Della Cruscan poetry which developed on the pages of the British daily newspaper, The World, in the late 1780s is a remarkable phenomenon in many ways. First, it is notable as a media phenomenon made possible by the development of print media and journalism in which anonymous writers, both men and women, contributed their poems thereby forming a dramatic discourse. The discourse thus formed was one that every reader felt participating in. It is comparable to modern discourses on the Internet in which a phenomenon called viral takes place, where a YouTube or Twitter site have access from a huge multitude of media audience in a very brief period. Second, as a literary history of Sensibility which is known for Gothic and sentimental novels and verse that prepared the way for Romanticism and its major writers like Wordsworth and Byron. Third, in its ideological aspect pertaining to the discourses in feminism and revolution, as many women contributed to the newspaper as writers and as readers, which invited censure from conservative critics, also as many of the chief contributors to the Della Cruscan poetry were sympathetic to the cause of the French Revolution, which was alarming the conservatives as well. This paper aims to show that those three aspects were inseparably involved in its discussions on how the media, the sentiment, the literary expression, and the ideology interacted each other. Those relationships will reveal a particular history of ideas in the late 18th century that seems to have been erased in the later accounts of the literary history of the 18th century and the Romanticism, as we see in the neglect of a great number of important women writers active in those periods.