ABSTRACT
Contemporary critics of romanticism have frequently recorded lyrical poetry’s proclivity for transgression.4 Comparing the Shelleyan visionary lyric with the treacherous entry of Milton’s Satan into Eden5, Michael O’Neill remarks that the lyrical genre challenges epistemological and moral limits. This analogy indicates a critical consensus about the Romantic lyric as ‘a test of boundaries’6 and disrupter of singularity. These deconstructive impulses, according to Tilottama Raj an, disclose the ‘unitary voice as an illusion and [force] us to question the idea of the speaker as a unified person’.7 Alternatively, O’Neill conceives of Shelley’s lyric as granting ‘interplay between what Nietzsche calls “the lyric genius and the allied non-genius’” .8 Romantic lyrics wish to be a closed representation of a monologue conducted by a single mind, but constantly expose that at some level they exist as
1 JKP, 1, p. 323. 2 SPW, 72, pp. 529-31. 3 GS, p. 288. 4 M. H. Abrams offers a useful account o f the lyric’s rise to critical credibility. See Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. 1953. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 84-8. Stuart Curran describes the lyric as one of Romanticism’s most protean literary forms. See Curran, Poetic Forms and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 180-2. 5 Michael O’Neill, “‘The Bounds o f Air Are Shaken:” The Shelleyan Visionary Lyric,’ Shelley 1792-1992, ed. James Hogg. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. (New York: Edward Mellen, 1993), 1. 6 Paul H. Fry, The Poets Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 190, hereafter PC. 7 Tilottama Rajan, ‘Romanticism and the Death o f Lyric Consciousness,’ Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 196-7. 8 Michael O’Neill, “‘All Things Seem Only One”: The Shelleyan Lyric,’ in SBR, p. 128.
