Rosa Karl: Paradoxe Paradiesschöpfung: Untersuchung zu einer Ethik und Rhetorik des Un-Vernünftigen in den Texten Percy Bysshe Shelleys

• Rolf Lessenich

Readers have always been intrigued by the confusing number of paradoxes in Shelley’s texts which can create chaos, especially seen in A Defence of Poetry (MS 1821), his polemical answer to Thomas Love Peacock’s very Neoclassical attack on the Romantic poets in The Four Ages of Poetry (1820). For a modern scholar who, like the present reviewer, reads Shelley’s texts in the light of his Romantic Platonism, Blake’s Romantic Gnosticism, and the constant threat of Byron’s Romantic Disillusionism, such contradictions pose no major problems in either Shelley’s texts or life. With his ranking of the esemplastic imagination over reason and mere fancy, Shelley’s answer is intentionally chaotic, disjunctive, freely associative, and ecstatic, parading illogicality and paradox against Peacock’s rationalism. Neither Shelley nor Keats were representative of fin-de-siècle aestheticism, and Shelley’s polemical declaration of the autonomy of art only seems to contradict his Orphic myth of the poet as lawgiver. After all, both poets stood in the tradition of Platonic kalokagathia, which combined beauty with truth and ethics, at least as long as the disillusionism caused by political and personal catastrophes did not overpower them as it did in Shelley’s very last poem, The Triumph of Life (MS 1822). Following the shock of recent exile and the death of two of his and Mary’s children, Shelley interrupted his work on his Platonic drama Prometheus Unbound (1819) at least five times, giving expression to despair and doubt – Romantic Pyrrhonism as opposed to Romantic Platonism.