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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
Hugh Roberts. Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997. Pp. x+534. $25.00.
"Many of the things we label `skeptical' or `idealist' in Shelley's thought are the different sides of his response to Lucretius" (418). To put it simply (something that often appears difficult for Shelley scholars), Hugh Roberts sees Shelley as creatively poised between poetic and political acts of negating and positing. Just as, in quantum mechanics, an event could be described in terms either of position or of velocity, Shelley's final state is undecidable. Shelley and the Chaos of History is a learned, lengthy exploration of the relationship between "skepticism" and "idealism" in Shelley. These terms gather up, like snowballs, a host of other topics: eros and thanatos, memory and forgetting, pessimism and optimism. They also point to the historical crisis of the romantic period, as Roberts sees it: how to square a potentially endless capacity for revolutionary change (glimpsed in the skeptical Enlightenment and the politics of the French Revolution) and a need for a "therapeutic" philosophy which would soothe the ache of romantic sentimentalism (as Schiller defined it).
Shelley and the Chaos of History proposes nothing less than the idea that the view of Shelley as stuck between skepticism and idealism is a misrecognition of his profound Lucretianism, which bridges the span between Queen Mab and "The Triumph of Life" (411). For critics in favor of links between the earlier and later poetry, Roberts' stimulating and fresh readings of a variety of Shelley's most important works is very welcome. Suggesting, however, that the politics and philosophy of the French Revolution were about potentially infinite revolution would probably come as news to those on the thin end of the wedge of the Eighteenth Brumaire. It also seems less than new that what is being proposed by Shelley is seen to be a version of...
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