On Shelley and the Apprehension of Life
Ross Wilson, Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), viii + 225 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-04444-5; £19.99 (pb).
There is a term that scholars have been using with increasing relish over the past decade: “to problematize.” I am not a fan of the term or the practice, believing that poetry is already opaque enough for most readers, and the critic’s role is to offer clarity where possible. Yet, we do it anyway, casting and recasting arguments from an ever-growing array of unique, sometimes obscure, perspectives, refracting the light, and turning what could have been telescopes—tools to bring something distant and lovely across the boundaries of time, place, genre, or identity into our vivid understanding—into kaleidoscopes: pretty, intriguing, but useless as navigational aids.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s corpus is already problematic, fraught with fragments, co-authored works, deletions, contradictory manuscript copies, and titular revisions, almost to the same degree that his corpse was problematic: decayed, dismembered, sainted, quarantined; all of it dubious, difficult, and intensely intriguing. Surprisingly, one subject on which Shelley was more or less consistent throughout his brief career was his conception of “life” as that which quenches the original fire, fades the inspirational coals, and stains “the white radiance of eternity.” Repeatedly, in poems, essays, and letters, he explores new ways of expressing the dulling effects of time on one’s ability to perceive. For Shelley, poetry was the antidote, the tool capable of restoring that lost vision, freshness, and vitality. One can see why he returned to this topic: it forms an ars poetica. For Shelley, writing poetry was vital to the practical health—political, spiritual, relational—of the entire world. Why else write it?
In Shelley and the Apprehension of Life, Ross Wilson surveys this territory, asking what is unique and consistent in Shelley’s mode of apprehension. Along the way, he problematizes what had been clear for most Shelley scholars. Wilson begins a paragraph in the book’s introduction with a quotation from Shelley’s essay “On Life”: “We live on, and in living, we lose the apprehension of life” (p. 1). He then offers his own ars poetica, providing the closest thing to a thesis in the book: “This book is an extended reading of this statement.” He qualifies this by arguing that Shelley does not merely acquiesce to the obliteration of “the apprehension of life” by “living.” On the contrary, Shelley’s work is both a profoundly informed, incisive critique of what might be called mere life and an attempt to harness the resources of poetic imagination to restore what he calls “the apprehension of life.”
To this claim, one might respond, “Well, yes.” Wilson is not wrong: he demonstrates a thorough command not only of Shelley’s work but also of its drafts, minutiae, scholarly tradition, and philosophical allusions, as comprehensive as any I have encountered. He is correct that such restoration is one of Shelley’s intellectual projects. But is the point not so obvious as to be self-evident? Had anyone thought Shelley acquiesced to the forces that dull perception? Had we imagined he considered poetry impotent against them? Shelley’s energetic optimism, despite everything, and his belief in the possibility of cultural renewal are among the most well-known aspects of his legacy, alongside his rebellious spirit and lofty soul.
Wilson’s prose is marked by verbal tics that some might find endearing—it takes all kinds to make a world, does it not? For instance, we encounter “to be sure” and “certainly” as double qualifiers in the same sentence (p. 3). The term “however” appears repeatedly, even when no contrary idea precedes it (p. 2). There are sentences with missing articles (e.g., “life is […] not [a] more broadly thematic concern”) and misplaced modifiers (e.g., “Life in this book is […] performance itself”). The book also plays with English idioms, such as “acquiesce in” where “acquiesce to” is meant, or poems that “tail off into infinity” rather than “trail off” (p. 13). We find redundancies like “also, moreover” (p. 21) and a recurrent use of “then” (e.g., p. 35) not to conclude an argument but to introduce a new point. These quirks keep the prose lively, though they often strain the reader, prompting us to wonder, “What do you mean by ‘x’?” Only after reworking the sentence into standard syntax do we realize, “Oh, that old thing? Of course,” recognizing a point we had assumed since our first undergraduate readings of Shelley.
This is not necessarily a flaw. It demonstrates how thoroughly Wilson is a Shelleyan. As Shelley writes in A Defence of Poetry (1821), “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world” and “makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” This is precisely what Wilson’s book achieves. Who is not familiar with the notion that “life turns out never to confirm mere thoughts about it” (p. 39)? Or who has not encountered the idea that “language’s ability to articulate regret is close to being overwhelmed” (p. 31)? Or that “thinking happens differently in poetry and in prose” (pp. 16–17)? Or that “tyranny […] is […] exploitation” (p. 28)? Wilson burnishes these worn ideas, casting away the veil of familiarity—every thought here has been thought a thousand times—and making them appear strange, even revelatory. Shelley and the Apprehension of Life is a problematic book, despite its truly remarkable textual and philosophical work, but only because it is so dedicated to problematizing the familiar, which is to say, because it is so much like poetry.
