ABSTRACT
What exactly did Wordsworth mean when he called Shelley ‘one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style’? 1 Commentators, literary historians and anthologists often cite Wordsworth’s judgement as if its meaning were apparent, yet for many readers it is neither apparent nor central to their sense of why Shelley’s poetry matters. There have been some finely detailed readings of individual poems, and a few useful studies of particular stylistic features. But the larger question of Shelley’s ‘workmanship of style’ has for the most part been either set aside as an old and no longer very interesting debate initiated by Eliot and Leavis and prosecuted by the New Critics, or absorbed into kinds of reading for which the terms ‘artist’, ‘workmanship’ and even ‘style’ itself have become quaint mystifications that prevent our accepting the indeterminate play of all writing, including – or especially – Shelley’s. This study grew out of a conviction that the old debate about Shelley’s characteristic ways of using language needs to be revived and kept alive. It argues that while he recognizes in his own terms the problems inherent in the relation of words to thoughts and things, his writing is shaped by his working as an artist against, as well as in knowing submission to, what he calls ‘the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself’ (.PP, 504).
