The Recent Radicalization Of Young Men in The United States Of America

 

 

 

 

Sophie Kemp considers the recent and ongoing radicalization of young men in the United States.

There is a story my mother often tells about the day the towers came down.

A cloudless blue day in September. I was five years old—a few days into my very first week of kindergarten. My youngest brother had been alive for less than one year. A fat and happy baby. It was around the first time he ever crawled. She said this was something that gave her hope. That a terrible thing could happen but that babies were continuing to crawl, finding their unsure and beautiful footing in the world. Babies like my brother. Babies that were wanted by their parents. Babies that would grow up with all the comforts of the American upper middle class: summer camps and ski lessons, grandparents with condos in coastal cities, and family vacations to quiet, remote parts of New England.

I am in the cohort of people who are the youngest to have any memory of 9/11 at all. I remember it in the way that a child remembers childhood. It is all a dull flicker. Something about wearing a purple shirt to school that day. A blue headband. The click of the VCR in the teak living room of my childhood home. A white house with black shutters on a quiet suburban street. A vague memory of my mother crying—my aunt worked down the street from the towers, and no one had heard from her in hours. She would be fine. She would take a cab from the Financial District to the Irish part of the Bronx. I would not know any of this until I was much older.

I do not say any of this to imply that the fall of the towers in September 2001 is at all the same as Trump’s second inauguration. I do not mean to say that when I watched Donald Trump become president again on the television in Lower Manhattan this past week, a 10-minute walk from the World Trade Center, I felt like the world was ending. Trump is of course a direct by-product of 9/11, of the Iraq War, of two decades of American realpolitik in the Middle East. But that is not why I bring it up.

I am bringing this up because of what has become of very young children, specifically men, who were born into this political climate.

My brother and I are both adults now. I am pushing 30; he is pushing 24. He is bright and kind. He is intense like me, but much more soft-spoken. He was a child when Trump first entered the public consciousness as a political threat. He was a college student when the pandemic hit. He has not and will never vote for Trump. He is perfect to me. I do not feel this way about other men his age. This is what I would like to talk about: American masculinity. I would like to talk to you about these men, who are in the cohort that is slightly younger than me, and what has become of them now that they are adults.

~~~~

I think the best way to describe it is a kind of rot.

It’s so easy to backslide into if you are bored and hateful. Something about the ancient Greeks. Because of Mesopotamia. How thousands of thousands of years ago, civilization began to take shape around hierarchy. A father and his wife, his children, and their slaves. An eye for an eye—if you throw your enemy into the Euphrates and fill his pockets with rocks and he somehow survives, you will be tossed in too. There is a fantasy about all of this: a man sits in some sort of olive grove, looking out at the Aegean, and discovers a new fact about the triangle. A wife sits at the table brushing her daughter’s hair, perfect and subservient. Empedocles and how he jumped into Etna because he knew he would be reborn a god. “You’re not reborn as a god,” declares the fascist writer Bronze Age Pervert. “Maybe there’s a girl waiting. Her pussy is warm and inviting.”

 Bronze Age Mindset (2018) is a fascinating document because it is very boring and stupid. If you don’t know what it is, I am happy for you. It is a self-published pamphlet by a Romanian American man. It is a little dated at this point. It has become a skeleton key for a kind of anti-intellectual irony–poisoned fascist guy. I have never finished it, because I would rather actually read the Stoics and because I am not an idiot. I would not recommend reading it, not just because the vision it presents of masculinity is apocalyptically evil, but also because it is completely brain-dead. But I’d like to bring it up because of the seductive vision it presents to young white men: This your world, and it always will be. Hierarchy in the time of antiquity allowed us to make great intellectual leaps. A woman—your woman—should always be available to you. Let her pussy be warm. Let your cock be rock-hard. Let everyone who is not a beautiful, virile white man bend to your will. Eat big plates of meat. But you probably know all this already—these visions of masculinity have been reported to death. They are not surprising, nor are they even subversive. Andrew Tate. Jordan Peterson. Nick Fuentes. They all promise the same thing: a man liberated from the shackles of girlbossery. A return to the hierarchy of the family.

This is appealing to young men ages 20–29, nearly half of whom voted for Trump, for a variety of reasons. None of those reasons are particularly satisfying to me. One friend I asked said it had something to do with the way talk of consent has been codified into the American education system. This friend, in his mid-thirties, said that when he was in high school, there was still a prevailing sense of ownership among men, that sexism was allowed and encouraged (he also mentioned that during this time he often did things like try to suck himself off while watching Mind of Mencia)

Another friend, a woman my age, said that we have too much choice now, that many people need to be told what to do, and some people would like it if we went back to the way it was done in the past, where just men did this. The pandemic also probably had something to do with it. A third friend, a man in his mid-twenties, said that Trump went on Nelk, Theo Von, and Adin Ross. That he came off as approachable, “a guy you want to get a beer with,” and this is enough for a man in his very early twenties to make a decision about whom to vote for.

What I do know is that we are in an era marked by a crisis of masculinity that is neither warranted nor deserved. That young men feel very alienated. That they are very online. That there is a paradigm shift away from what has been true for the past 60 years: boy leaves home; boy reacts against his parents’ puritanical values; boy becomes some sort of a leftist for a little while, has some sort of romance with American communism for a little less than a decade; boy gets job; boy maybe becomes Democratic rank and file; boy maybe becomes a centrist with a soft spot for social issues.

What I have been seeing lately is something more like this: boy comes of age on the internet; boy has access to a cosmos of information; boy goes in chat rooms where boy talks to girl; boy goes on early YouTube and hears slurs; boy hits puberty; boy enters global pandemic; boy games while teacher teaches; boy engages in a slurry of content that makes boy feel alienated from female peers, from nice, well-meaning Gen Xer parents; boy enters particle accelerator; boy is spewed out the other side vaguely conservative; boy meets other like-minded boys who validate his feelings about woke SJWs, that they are the machine and must be raged against. For girls, it is like this: I want to be liked by men; I do what I can to recreate myself in their image. I am troubled by all of it.

~~~~

All of this, of course, comes back to sex as a power exchange. A way to subjugate and to be subjugated.

Not long after it became clear that Trump would become our 47th president, Nick Fuentes posted a video where he said this: “Your body, my choice.” Then he laughed maniacally. There it was on my phone, there it was on X, nestled between fascist VSCO girl memes and YouTube links to emo songs. It is an expression that is too awful for me to even fully unpack. That a man should have the right, ordained by god, to tell me what to do with my body. To say that in this new world order, we will return to hierarchy, that a man on the internet can laugh and make fun of me and the decision whether or not I should have the right to terminate a pregnancy. I guess this makes me a lib. But when I heard Fuentes say this, my main thought wasn’t anger; it was not fear either. My first thought was that I felt seduced by it. Like that kind of control over my body, by someone evil, felt like a relief. My second thought:  These young  men feel so pathetically small and alienated that this is how they think they can get their power back.  And no one should ever have that kind of power over someone.

This more than anything feels like the prevailing pathology of men in this cohort. They feel small. They are looking for a way to get their power back. They do not deserve that power, obviously, but they do feel entitled to it. And women, to an extent, are enabling it. They are enabling it in the kind of sex they are having, in asking for things that they shouldn’t ask for. They are enabling it by mud wrestling with other women, by being a “pick-me girl,” by letting men say terrible things to them and remaining submissive about it. It is a brand new way to be anti-establishment: to be kind of trad.

And how could that not be seductive, to an extent? To be told what to do. If young men crave hierarchy, it would only be natural that women would too. That all these ideas would circle each other, have the snake eat its tail, let the oil circle the drain. I am seduced by it. There was one time recently when I was wearing a prom dress at a bar and I let a man say something despicable to me and I liked it. Because I am exhausted by a certain kind of politics around consent. So are many other women that I know. It becomes very easy to backslide into this way of thinking, dangerously so.

~~~~~~

Not long after the towers came down, Susan Sontag wrote a brief essay for The New Yorker  about how we got there.  “The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures […] is startling, depressing,” she wrote. “[T]his was not Pearl Harbor. […] Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy.” This is how I feel right now, thinking of the swirl we are living in since Trump was elected for his second term. That there was an inevitably to all of this. That we were being stupid about all of this. We are living in a new era of Sontag’s psychotherapy, where talking about your feelings always feels like an affront, meant to stay in the past. The liberal urge to therapize feels embarrassing, more fuel to the fire.

But in September 2001, I did not know any of this. I was a child. My grandparents had come up from their wealthy Jewish enclave in Westchester County to sit with me on the back porch. I looked just like my mother. I was a very agreeable child and did what I was told. My brothers were both babies. They played with toys in the dirt. We dumped buckets of water on our heads in a plastic pool. As I mentioned, my youngest brother was learning to crawl. Nearly 25 years later, the children of my generation have inherited the world. All of this, I can see now, was very predictable. We have come of age. I am terrified by how we will mold it.

Sophie Kemp is a writer from Schenectady, New York, based in Brooklyn. She has written for The Paris Review, GQ, The Baffler, and Pitchfork. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.

New Tyrannies by Sophie Kemp. Los Angeles Review of Books, November 14, 2024.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Legacy of Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Bicentary of the Great Radical Writer’s Death

 

 
Friday marked the bicentary of the great radical writer who wanted culture to spark the imaginations of ‘ordinary’ people
 
“Shall rank corruption pass unheeded by,
 
Shall flattery’s voice ascend the wearied sky;
 
And shall no patriot tear the veil away
 
Which hides these vices from the face of day?
 
Is public virtue dead? – is courage gone?”
 
No, not a description of the moral void of contemporary Britain, but lines from Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, an excoriation of the moral devastation wreaked in late Georgian Britain two centuries ago. It was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and published anonymously in 1811, in support of the radical Irish journalist Peter Finnerty, who had been imprisoned for seditious libel after accusing the Anglo-Irish politician Viscount Castlereagh of the torture and executions of Irish rebels challenging British rule.
 
Shelley’s poem was “lost” for nearly 200 years, before a single copy of the pamphlet was “rediscovered” in 2006, and a decade later bought by Oxford’s Bodleian Library, so finally it could be read by the public again. A poem that speaks to our age as much as it did to the Britain of two centuries ago.
 
Friday marked the bicentenary of his death. He was drowned after his boat, carrying him home after visiting his friend and fellow poet Lord Byron in the Italian town of Livorno, capsized in a storm. He was a month short of his 30th birthday.
 
Wordsworth said of Shelley that he was “one of the best artists of us all; I mean in workmanship of style”. He is also one of our most significant political essayists, “the relentless enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority which derives from wealth and exploitation”, as Paul Foot, whose 1981 work Red Shelley helped restore the significance of Shelley’s political work, observed.
 
Shelley’s greatest gift was in the deftness with which he interwove the poetical and the political. Poetry had, for Shelley, of necessity to appropriate a political dimension. And politics required a poetical imagination. That was why, as Shelley put it in a celebrated line from his essay A Defence of Poetry, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
 
Poetry did not stand aloof from the world but sought to engage with it and to transform it. We live in an age in which working-class politicians can be mocked for attending the opera. For Shelley, the measure of high culture lay in the degree to which it could spark the imaginations of ordinary people.
 
Born into landed aristocracy, educated at Eton and Oxford, Shelley seemed destined for a life at the heart of the British establishment. However, he was also born into an age of tumult, a maelstrom, both intellectual and political, unleashed by the French Revolution.That tumult helped Shelley find his voice. And Shelley, in turn, tried to give voice to it. He was, as his most insightful biographer Richard Holmes put it, like his poetry, not ethereal as literary tradition would have it, but “darker and more earthly”.
 
Shelley’s first significant work – The Necessity of Atheism – published in his first year at Oxford, led to his expulsion from the university and strained his relationship with his father to breaking point. Living precariously as an itinerant writer, Shelley found his home instead on the radical edge of British politics, a crusader against moral and political corruption, a campaigner for republicanism and parliamentary reform, for equal rights and the abolition of slavery, for free speech and a free press, for Irish freedom and Catholic emancipation, for freedom of religion and freedom from religion.
 
His political ideals were often contradictory, his revolutionary spirit clashing with his Fabian instincts for gradual, non-violent change. Yet, unlike fellow Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley never abandoned his radicalism, his disdain of authority or his celebration of the voices of working people.
 
His personal life was tumultuous, too. He left his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, who later took her own life, to live with, and eventually marry, Mary Godwin, daughter of radical philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. He was forever trying to find refuge from debt collectors and eventually he and Mary left Britain to live in Italy. Mary Shelley would create, in Frankenstein, one of the great explorations of the contradictions of modernity and of what it was to be human.
 
Despised by the literary and political establishments, Shelley wrote for the working-class autodidacts for whom learning and culture were means both of elevating themselves and of challenging those in power. Fearful of the consequences, his work was suppressed by the authorities, either through direct censorship or through threatening publishers with the charge of sedition.
 
As a result, much of Shelley’s work was published only after his death. The Masque of Anarchy is perhaps the most famous political poem in the English language, written in furious anger after the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when at least 15 people were killed as cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 who had gathered to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of suffrage. Shelley sent it to his friend, the radical editor and publisher Leigh Hunt. But Hunt did not publish it, for to do so would have been to invite immediate imprisonment for sedition. Not until 1832 was the poem, with its celebrated last stanza, finally published:
 
“Rise like Lions after slumber
 
In unvanquishable number –
 
Shake your chains to earth like dew
 
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
 
Ye are many – they are few.”
 
In the decades that followed Shelley’s death, his poetry became an inspiration across generations and borders. Queen Mab became known as the Chartists’ Bible, read aloud at working-class meetings. The Suffragettes’ slogan, “Deeds, not words”, is taken from The Masque of Anarchy. And that final stanza has been on the lips of many who have “shaken their chains”, from striking Jewish garment workers in early 20th-century New York to protesters 80 years later in Tiananmen Square and a century later in Tahrir Square.
 
And most of all, perhaps, it is in his insistence that we question the claim to power of those in authority that we most need Shelley’s voice today. For, as he put it in Queen Mab:
 
“Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
 
The subject, not the citizen…
 
… and obedience,
 
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
 
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
 
A mechanized automaton.”
 
 
Long gone, but speaking clearly to our age – Shelley, the poet of moral and political corruption. By  Kenan Malik. The Guardian, July 10, 2022. 

It is 200 years since the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned at sea at the age of 29. At the time, his life and works were considered scandalous, due in part to his reputation as a sexually liberated, vegetarian atheist, living in a reported ménage à trois. He did not achieve literary fame during his lifetime, but today he is one of the most celebrated British poets.
 
Shelley was writing during what is now called the Romantic period, which lasted from around 1780 to 1840. This was a time of innovative thinking and new ideas which took place in science, industry, the arts, and particularly in literature. Other Romantic writers include William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Shelley’s friend, Lord Byron.
 
Shelley’s notoriety began when he was publicly expelled from Oxford University for publishing an atheist pamphlet. Four years later, he courted scandal again, when he abandoned his pregnant wife and eloped with the 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later the famous author of Frankenstein) along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. His poetry reflected his personal notoriety. In particular, the poem Laon and Cythna was criticised due to its attacks on religion and descriptions of a brother-sister incestuous relationship.
 
Together with Mary and Claire, Shelley lived a nomadic existence, moving around the UK and across Europe, before settling in Italy. It is here that Shelley wrote some of his best-loved poems, including Adonais and began his final, unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life. It is also where Shelley died. His sailing boat, the Don Juan, sank near the Gulf of Spezia. All three passengers drowned and washed ashore days later.
 
Angel in death
 
The response to Shelley’s death was phenomenal. A leading Tory newspaper, the Courier, ran an obituary which read: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.” His death became a Romantic myth that steadily grew and his poetry became increasingly popular. His wife, Mary, began this Shelleyan legacy, describing him as an “angel”, a description that endured throughout the 19th century.
 
By 1889, the continued fascination around Shelley’s death meant that his cremation became the subject of a painting; Louis Édouard Fournier’s The Funeral of Shelley. The painting depicts a remarkably preserved corpse on a pyre, surrounded by his friends, including Lord Byron (who in reality went swimming in the sea during his funeral) and Mary Shelley kneeling in the background (she did not attend the funeral at all).
 
Shelley’s heart famously did not burn and was given to Mary. Modern physicians believe it may have calcified due to a bout of tuberculosis. Reportedly, it was found wrapped in a sheet of Shelley’s poetry after Mary’s own death in 1851 and was buried in Bournemouth alongside her.
 
During the Victorian period, Shelley became an inspiration to fellow literary figures, including Robert Browning, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Shelley’s reputation was sanitised to such an extent that even his old college in Oxford forgave his rebellious past and installed a monument dedicated to him in 1893. Sculpted by Edward Onslow Ford, a graceful, angelic Shelley lies on a sacrificial altar, guarded by a weeping woman.
 
Shelley’s Romantic reputation today
 
Interest in Shelley waned in the early 1900s and it wasn’t until the latter half of the century that his writings became respected due to the varied and many far reaching concerns found within them. His complex and fascinating personal life has also been the subject of a number of biographies and a source of endless fascination.
 
Perhaps his biggest claim to fame today is his marriage to the “mother” of science fiction, Mary Shelley. It is known that Shelley assisted his wife with her Frankenstein manuscript and the two had a collaborative literary relationship. This work, alongside the recently popular The Last Man, are certainly wider read than Shelley’s poetry, which are often limited to educational settings.
 
In popular culture, it is mainly through Shelley’s relationship to Mary and other Romantic figures that he is remembered. The 2017 film, Mary Shelley, starred Douglas Booth as the poet. As the title suggests, Shelley’s role is depicted as secondary to that of his wife, whose life is the centre of the story. Doctor Who, the most popular science fiction show in the UK, included Percy and Mary in their 2020 episode The Haunting of Villa Diodati. Again, the focus was placed on the genesis of Frankenstein. Even the popular comedy series Drunk History’s 2016 segment on Shelley identified his relationships with his wife and friend, Lord Byron, as central to his appeal.
 
But the 200th anniversary of Shelley’s death is am important literary bicentennial. International events have been happening over the past year to mark key moments in his life, including #Shelley200. Exhibitions, including at Horsham Museum and the Shelley Conference in London, taking place this weekend, demonstrate the lasting appeal and ongoing interest in his works. For many, Shelley’s legacy lives on.
 
Ozymandias or To A Skylark are a great introduction to Shelley’s poems if you want to read his works.
 
 
Percy Bysshe Shelley at 200 – how the poet became famous after his death. By Amy Wilcockson. 
The Conversation, July 8, 2022.

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley: poet, atheist, and determined opponent of the over-powerful. What would he have made of the dramatic resignation this week by Boris Johnson after weeks of his authority ebbing away? A flight of fancy of course, but an irresistible one for me, whose working life these last days and weeks has been dominated by the disintegration of Johnson’s credibility. All the while I’ve been preparing – in my downtime – to commemorate 200 years since the death of a titan of English poetry and a political radical.
 
Like the outgoing prime minister, Shelley went to Eton, but the common ground stops there. He was a rebel at heart, distrustful of authority, and raged at abuses of power by what he saw as the unaccountable and heartless establishment. Perhaps his most famous poem, Ozymandias, mocks the empty legacy of a puffed-up despot. Meanwhile England in 1819, written in the last year of the reign of George III who had for years been mentally incapable, tells of “Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting Country cling”.
 
The Mask of Anarchy satirises the government of the day as the epitome of anarchy and injustice, and ends with an impassioned appeal for ordinary people to rise up: “Ye are many, they are few.” Shelley was thrown out of Oxford in connection with his essay The Necessity of Atheism, and he strongly believed in poetry as a powerful force for political good. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he wrote. For Shelley, the poetic was political.
 
Part of Shelley’s allure is the people who surrounded him. His wife was Mary Shelley, daughter of another political radical, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, generally recognised as the mother of British feminism. At the age of 18, Mary wrote Frankenstein, an astonishingly mature work about the hubris of an irresponsible inventor who creates the first of a new race but denies its human needs – with catastrophic consequences. At this time, Percy and Mary were living and travelling with Lord Byron and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont, a formidable ménage of literary creativity.
 
Shelley’s politics were progressive, as were his political attitudes towards women. He was an ardent supporter of female emancipation and of gender equality, and had a profound respect for the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. His personal relations with women were less respectful. Shelley abandoned his 19-year-old wife, Harriet Westbrook, and their two children in 1814 to elope with the 16-year-old Mary. Two years later Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in London. In the two years before he died – a dark and difficult time when Mary endured repeated miscarriages and the death of their small son – he wrote tender poems about Jane Williams, the wife of his friend Edward. Whether this infatuation would have led anywhere will remain unknown; Shelley and Edward both drowned off the coast of Liguria in north-west Italy on 8 July 1822 after a violent squall hit their small boat. Shelley’s body was identifiable only by the collection of Keats poems found in his jacket pocket.
 
They all died young, these second-generation Romantic poets – Shelley at 29, Keats at 25, Lord Byron at 36. As I was growing up, it was Keats’ work that was the most compelling – a yearning and eager poetry that had a youthfulness about it, much of it focused on the process of desire, and with an aesthetic wish to capture and fix desire through art. But Shelley fascinates through his complexity – his reformist zeal is matched by a strong sense of personal gloom and pessimism, which he works through in his poetry, using nature as a counterpoint to his human suffering. If Keats was a first love, Shelley is a mature one.
 
A few weeks ago, a group of us went on a visit to the Italian resort of Lerici, where Percy and Mary had their last home in the Casa Magni before his untimely death. Shelley was haunted by visions of himself – a doppelganger he saw from the balcony of the Casa Magni – and in a park next to the house we listened to readings of his poetry by, among others, the poet laureate Simon Armitage, and imagined him there. In a few weeks’ time, we will go to the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome, where Shelley and Keats are buried, to commemorate him once again.
 
Ozymandias, “king of kings”, left no legacy whatsoever; the opposite is true of the man who created him.
 
 
‘For him, the poetic was political’: how Shelley stands tall as a great Romantic poet.  By Reeta Chakrabarti. The Guardian. July 8, 2022.  

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Percy Bysshe Shelley, clothed in black, lies on the branches of the funeral pyre; his pale face might be sleeping, his hair is swept back, his hand has fallen to his side. He still has on his leather shoes. Like the “blithe spirit” in “To a Skylark”, he is ready to transcend his physical form. Smoke billows across the barren wastes of Viareggio, Italy, the sky is autumnal and overcast and the sea in which he drowned is a blade of silver on the horizon. To the left we see a watch tower, a waiting carriage, a bare and solitary tree and, in the foreground, three Heathcliffian figures: Lord Byron, his necktie blowing raffishly in the wind, Byron’s “bulldog” Edward John Trelawny, and the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt, clutching a white handkerchief. Behind them the poet’s widow, Mary Shelley, kneels in prayer. The scene might be a mockery of the central tableau in her novel Frankenstein, where the creature the scientist has pieced together is stretched along the bench, waiting to be jolted into life.

 
 
Shelley did a great deal to mythologise himself, but the public’s myth of Shelley, which began with his funeral, and Louis Édouard Fournier’s 1889 painting – copies of which, said WB Yeats, hung on the wall of every art class – bears little relation to the reality of the event. When Byron died fighting for Greek independence in 1824, England collapsed into the kind of mourning we would not see again until the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but Shelley’s death aged 29 in July 1822, like that of Keats in 1821, was not at first regarded as a national tragedy. Before he was sanctified Shelley was dismissed – if he was spoken of at all – as an atheistic, anti-establishment, vegetarian anarchist who believed that a poem was a radical instrument. “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned,” reported The Courier when the news reached England. “Now he knows whether there is a God or not.”
 
 
Setting sail from Livorno on 8 July, Shelley’s sailing boat got caught in a squall off the Bay of Spezia. When he washed ashore on 18 July his hands and face had been eaten by dogfish; he was identified by the edition of Keats in his pocket. The decomposing body was buried in the sand before being dug up for the cremation, which took place on 16 August. Rather than being a blustery day, the combined heat of the sun and the fire, wrote Trelawny in his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, “was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy”.
 
Trelawny, who was prone to exaggerate, described how the corpse, doused in more wine than Shelley had consumed in his lifetime, “fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull… fell off; and as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled and boiled as if in a cauldron, for a very long time.” “Is this a human body?” Byron apparently declaimed. “Why, it’s more like the carcass of a sheep.” Women were excluded from funerals and so Mary Shelley stayed at home while Hunt, the last person to see his friend alive, was too distraught to leave the carriage. So it was only Byron and Trelawny who watched Shelley burn. When it was over, Byron went for a swim and Trelawny grabbed the heart from the flames and passed it on to Hunt, who reluctantly gave it to Mary. She kept it on her writing desk for the rest of her life.

It suits Shelley’s self-image to see him as a lonely sailor in a storm, but he was not alone when his boat went down; he was accompanied by his friend Edward Williams, whose own body was cremated the day before. The two men had been to visit Hunt who had just arrived in Italy with the aim of starting a journal called The Liberal. Williams and his common-law wife Jane had been living with the Shelleys in a former boathouse called Casa Magni in Lerici, where the sea came up to the front door.
 
The previous month Mary, having already buried three of her four children, nearly bled to death during a miscarriage. “No words can tell you how I hated our house & the country about it,” she recalled of that time. Casa Magni had become a personality to be feared and Shelley, addicted to laudanum and infatuated with Jane Williams, had started to hallucinate. In one vision he saw a naked child rising from the water, his hands clasped in joy. “There it is again!” he told Edward Williams, pointing to the sea. “There!” In another vision he saw Jane and Edward covered in blood, and in another a man with his own face was strangling Mary. He would be happiest, Shelley told a friend, if the past and future could be obliterated and he, Jane and her guitar could simply float away in a boat.

 
During Shelley’s lifetime, it was Byron – flash, cynical, and satirical – who was in the ascendance. The Corsair – dashed off, Byron bragged, between dinners – sold 10,000 copies on the day it was published, while Shelley’s print-runs never exceeded 250. The transformation from infidel poet to “ineffectual angel” (the term is Matthew Arnold’s) began with the publication of Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828) and Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858). Hunt, the first critic to recognise the genius of Shelley and Keats, reminded the reader that not only was Shelley “a baronet’s son” with the taste and manners of his rank, he was also too fine for this world.
 
By the 1860s Walter Bagehot would describe Byron’s verse as “a metrical species of the sensation novel” and Shelley’s “as a serious and deep thing”. If Byron was a melancholy dandy, Shelley was an instrument of spontaneity. “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,” Shelley wrote in “Ode to the West Wind”. A self-playing instrument, the lyre (whence “lyric”) is the quintessential metaphor for Romantic inspiration, and “for the poet to yield himself to and be borrowed by the wind”, as Merle Rubin puts it, “is almost the Shelleyan stance”. So when Will Ladislaw (the idealist modelled on Shelley) explained in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) that a poet was a recipient of external and internal impressions, he was singing from Shelley’s songbook:
 
  To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with a finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion – a soul in which knowledge passes instantly into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
 
 
In 1891 Shelley was fictionalised again as Angel Clare in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and in 1893 Edward Onslow Ford’s lavish marble reclining sculpture The Drowned Man was put on display in University College, Oxford, the alma mater from which the poet had been expelled 80 years earlier for publishing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism.
 
What would have happened to Shelley’s reputation had he died an old man in Surrey rather than a young man in the Tyrrhenian sea? If dying young was proof of sensibility, doing so in the Mediterranean was a guarantee of deification. Was Shelley’s best work behind him in 1822? Now recognised as the heir to Dante and Milton, Shelley gave us some of the loveliest lyrical poems in the language (“To a Skylark”, “Ode to the West Wind”, “Ozymandias”); “Adonais”, the elegy to Keats read by Mick Jagger in the concert at Hyde Park after the death of Brian Jones; the dramas, “The Cenci” and “Prometheus Unbound”; the conversational poem “Julian and Maddalo” and the sublime “Epipsychidion”. But it is “The Masque of Anarchy”, written in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre in August 1819 when cavalry charged at campaigners for parliamentary reform in Manchester’s St Peter’s Field, for which he is best remembered.
 
 
Paul Foot, whose book Red Shelley (1981) turned the poet from a representative of the Romantic imagination to a mascot of the left, could recite the whole of “The Masque of Anarchy”, as could his uncle, Michael Foot, and his three sons. Jeremy Corbyn did recite it – or at least its final stanza – in front of a crowd of 120,000 at Glastonbury Festival in 2017:
 
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.
 
The same lines were chanted in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution in 2011, and at the Poll Tax marches; “The Masque of Anarchy” is not only the greatest protest poem in English but in any language. 
 
 
What would have happened to Mary Shelley had her husband been around for the next 50 years? She had more peace as a widow than as a wife. “We have now lived five years together,” she wrote in 1819, “and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy.” Before Shelley fell in love with Jane Williams there had been Sophia Stacy, and before that there was Emilia Viviani, and Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont. Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, was 15 when she met him, 16 when she married him, 18, and pregnant with her second child, when he abandoned her for Mary, and 21 when, pregnant with her third child, she drowned herself in the Serpentine in December 1816. Two months earlier, Mary’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay, also in love with Shelley, had swallowed a fatal dose of laudanum. Loving Shelley was lethal because Shelley idealised love. The notes to “Queen Mab” outlined his philosophy: “Love withers under constraint… Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed.”
 
 
Shelley learned his doctrine of free-love from the radical philosophy of Mary’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin’s anti-marriage, anti-ownership treatise, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, paved the way for the Romantic experiment in communal living, and Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died giving birth to Mary Godwin, took on for her daughter and her generation a legendary status. When Shelley and the 16-year-old scion of these two extraordinary figures ran away together in 1814, they assumed they would win Godwin’s approval; he had, after all, raised his daughter to be “a philosopher” and “a cynic”. But in the time-worn fashion of fathers, Godwin was appalled by what he saw as the poet’s seduction of his daughter. It was not Shelley, however, who had seduced Mary, but Godwin who had seduced Shelley. Poor Harriet Shelley realised this straight away: “The very great evil that book has done is not to be told,” she said of Political Justice. Meanwhile, Harriet saw that Mary had “heated [Shelley’s] imagination by talking of her mother [and] going to the grave with him every day”. Despite being disowned by Godwin, Mary and Shelley scoured the pages of his writing for guidance on how to lead their future lives, which were to be spent in voluntary exile in Italy with no home, no income, no certainty.
 
Two hundred years after his death, Shelley is no longer stigmatised, mythologised, or even, beyond being chanted at protests, much read or understood. He was a revolutionary poet, but his sense of revolution involved an expansion of the concept of love which came from deep inward reflection. “We want,” he explained, “the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life.”
 
Perhaps he will be cancelled and disappear from the university curriculum, and future generations will not hear what Shelley had to tell us about tyranny and freedom and how best to live. Or perhaps he will be read again, closely and carefully, in his full complexity. Shelley was “emphatically”, as William Rossetti put it, “the poet of the future” and it is to Shelley’s sonnet, “England in 1819”, that we might turn when we consider the “old, mad, blind, despised and dying” Vladimir Putin:
 
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

 

The last days of Percy Bysshe Shelley : It was 200 years ago that Shelley drowned, aged 29 – but his poems of tyranny and freedom speak to our own darkening age. By Frances Wilson. The New Statesman, July 6, 2022.