ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the Shelley's reflexive imagery present special critical difficulties. It is, on the contrary, a characteristic form of Shelley's imagery 'drawn from the operations of the human mind', to articulate his deepest poetic concerns. Reflexive imagery is fundamentally ambivalent in The Revolt of Islam; the states of consciousness especially political consciousness it signals auspicious or inauspicious, benign or malign. The deep-lying ambivalence of Shelley's reflexive imagery is more powerfully evident than in The Triumph of Life, the other major poem from which William Empson draws his examples of this characteristic figure. But language need not stagger in enacting the burden of reflexive consciousness, as Empson implies in praising the 'great things' Shelley does with reflexive imagery in the narrator's opening vision of Life's victims. In the Defence, however, as in the rest of Shelley's writing, reflexive thinking and writing stand, unsteadily, beside fierce denunciations of selfishness, that 'dark idolatry of self' condemned in The Revolt of Islam.