Byron and Islam

Through a Shellyan Lens: The Life (and death) Of John Ono Lennon

Creativity - The Shelley Perspective

Let me take you back to the city of Florence in Italy, in the year 1819, to discover the poet Shelley walking alone by the banks of the river Arno. But before I tell this story, which I think goes to the heart of creativity, let me explain that my interest in Shelley is not so much textual or literary but in his life and work as a human resource. Though we're talking about the writing of Shelley's greatest short poem, his 'Ode to the West Wind', I want to approach it from a biographical angle, bringing out the qualities of perseverance, self-renewal, and hope that it exhibits.

OK, so we're talking about Shelley's greatest short poem, his 'Ode to the West Wind'. 'It's a nature poem', you'll say (if it's been badly taught to you at school). 'Is it hell !' you'll reply, if you've encountered any of the modern approaches to his work, which stress its origins in a deeply felt personal and political struggle. Several months before, armed cavalry had attacked a crowd of people demonstrating for political reform in Manchester, killing 11 and wounding 600. It was a bitter demonstration of the political impasse in Britain, and Shelley, as a democrat, was appalled, and bitterly conscious of his own failure to make any difference to the situation. On top of this, he had noticed his hair was beginning to go grey - his youth was ending, with no sign of his political hopes being achieved.

The personal factor involved the death of his three-year old son in Rome some six months previously. Shelley and his wife Mary were now childless, which had created a deep sense of tension between them. Mary however, was pregnant, and imminently expecting a new child.

There was something in the air that autumn; Peterloo had created a political and creative ferment, and artists and writers were each responding in their individual ways. John Keats had recently completed his intensely felt poem 'To Autumn', William Blake was seeing spirits and drawing his visionary heads; Shelley's writing output was attaining prodigious levels. But at that point, in the forest, his mood was sombre …… in the notebook he kept with him he began to write, beginning to get to grips with his situation:

'Twas the 20th of October,
And the woods had all grown sober,
As a man does when his hair
Looks as theirs did, grey and spare'.

A fairly downbeat opener - incorporating a reference to his greying hair. But then he rebelled against his own feeling of depression:

And this is my distinction, if I fall
I shall not creep out of the vital day
To common dust nor wear a common pall
But as my hopes were fire, so my decay
Shall be as ash covering them. Oh Earth
Oh friends, if when my has ebbed away
One spark be unextinguished of that hearth
Kindled in…..'

It's breaking up, it's still self-absorbed, but he's arriving at the language of the finished poem. He's also made a technical advance, absorbing the Italian terza rima rhyme scheme into his fragment - something that he could do because of his close study of Italian poetry in the years since he arrived in Italy.

What broke his self-absorption was a visit, shortly after he wrote this, to the Uffizi gallery in the city, where he saw the statue of Niobe, trying to defend her child against the avenging deities Apollo and Diana (she had unwisely insulted their mother, and they were exacting revenge). He wrote a long description of the statue in his notebook, including the lines: 'there is no anger - of what use is anger against what is known to be omnipotent ? There is no selfish shrinking from personal pain ….' It was a clear example of using a source to fortify and strengthen a piece of creative work, for the finished poem had almost completely lost the self-pity of the early drafts, and had a 'deep autumnal tone' that came I believe from that statue in the Uffizi Gallery.

I was interested to find, in an American design magazine, the phrase 'visual artists constantly add to their creative reservoirs with concepts and images ….' because this idea of a creative reservoir has always informed my understanding of Shelley's poem.. Some years ago I found a description of nineteenth century French novelist Alphonse Daudet's understanding of the creative process: 'in the case of all creators there are accumulations of sentient force made without their knowledge. Their nerves, in a state of high excitation, register visions, colors, forms and odors in those half-realised reservoirs which are the treasuries of poets. All of a sudden, through some influence or emotion, through some accident of thought, these impressions meet each other with the suddenness of a chemical combination'.

In Shelley's case it was the wind rising in the wood some days later, bringing a gathering storm over Florence that gave him the central image he needed to unify everything that had gathered in his mind. In a beautiful piece of technical achievement, he combined Italian terza rima with the English sonnet form, giving himself an ideal structure to capture the fluidity of the West Wind. By the time he finished the poem he knew he had overcome the difficulties with which he had felt himself overwhelmed, as was shown by the Greek sentence (from a Euripides play) he scrawled beneath it: 'By virtuous power, I, a mortal, vanquish thee, a mighty god !'

In a sense we all come up against seemingly impossible problems, dead ends, and creative blocks, which ultimately, if they're not solved, can bring people to a suicidal state of mind. That's part of the genius of the poem - it created a sense of renewal from exactly this kind of situation.

So the process of the poem's composition adds up to a list of 'creative principles' - we see:

* the value of intense focus or concentration (in his preoccupation with Britain's political problems and his personal troubles);

* the value of keeping a notebook;

* the value and significance of the opening response (in his first fragment - by no means great poetry but useful as a creative opener);

* the value of applied technical knowledge (in the development of his second fragment, dependent itself on previous research);

* the value of continuing self-education (in the influence of the statue of Niobe on the overall tone of the work);

* the value of cultural cross-fertilisation (in his use of English, Italian, and Greek influences);

And finally, the value of that mysterious moment of crystallisation, when 'impressions meet each other with the force of a chemical combination'.

So to put it simply, build up your reservoirs, concentrate, and, from somewhere, that magic instant will come !