“[A]re we not formed as notes of music are”: Musical Aesthetics, Love, and Politics in Shelley's Lyrics

Until the mid-thirteenth century, music and poetry in Western Europe were compositionally and conceptually unified in the combined art form of the lyric. The poet-composers of various traditions, including the troubadours, trouvères, minnesingers, and native British minstrels, created musico-poetic works in which music and verse were mutually dependent upon one another, though order of composition varied. By the Renaissance, however, the Medieval poet-composers were a myth of a glorified past unity between music and poetry, akin to the Greek conception of mousiké, which poets wanted to revive through a new poetic lyricism that attempted to reunite poetry with its lost sister, music. The aesthetics of the Elizabethan lyric depended upon a fundamental acceptance of a highly ordered universal organization, one that took seriously the idea of celestial harmony, i.e., the music of the spheres. Although, in John Hollander’s phrase, the sky had become “untuned” by the year 1700 as poets concentrated more upon music’s effects on its human hearers than the order of the heavens, the Romantic lyric, though strictly a literary genre, maintained a significant interest in both the aesthetic and formal construction of music. ² The shorter poems of the Romantics, especially those of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, supported—and to a large degree later were seen to define—the predominant expressive view 130of poetry, partially adapted from musical aesthetics, which depends upon an intrinsic relation to music for context and meaning.