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Mirroring the Future Adonais, Elegy, and the Life in Letters - Critical Essay
Criticism, Summer, 2000 by Michele Turner Sharp
These defenses are important for opening the strategic function of the frail form in the context of the poem. And they stress something that twentieth-century readers readily accept, namely, as Shelley put it in a letter to the Gisbornes, that "the poet and the man are of two different natures" (Letters 310). Shelley's self-portrait in the guise of the frail form, however, brings man and poet together not only through the lens of reading but through the reading that the poem has itself undertaken. In the frail form, Shelley cites his own reading praxis and assumes its burden and guise. First, it brings Shelley into close identification with the dead Keats. As many critics have sketched out, Shelley draws on a similar set of terms and associations to describe both poets. This is important to the poem's purpose, for the ground that Shelley shares with Keats in his earthly woe sets up the potential for Shelley to share his glorious immortality. It is important to remember, however, that the depiction of the frail Keats is, as James Heffernan has noted, a fiction, saying more about Shelley's own concerns than conveying accurate information about the real details of Keats's life or death.(17) In the frail form, Shelley likens himself to the image of what he has himself made of Keats. This is also to say that he faces himself as the figure of his own readerly praxis and the abusive potential that it has made manifest in the poem. Shelley reinforces this interpretation by decking the figure in the withered trappings of the elegiac tradition, in the "faded violets" and "pansies overblown." What the elegiac tradition has become, and what Adonais is, Shelley now becomes.
Adonais discovers and attests to the volatile power of reading in the Romantic era that catches writers in its glare. As Maurice Blanchot explains, the Romantic era writer comes to understand that identity follows from the work, and is established and opened across the circuit of reading. "Before his work exists," the author is nothing, Blanchot writes, and he comes into existence only when his work leaves his hands and enters a public sphere. For Blanchot, as for Shelley, this is a "disconcerting ordeal," for it means that the person of the author belongs in very real ways to readers who may be capricious, bored, partial, or simply ill-formed.(18) As Heffernan has persuasively demonstrated, it is highly unlikely that even Shelley could have believed that Keats had been killed by a hostile review. For Heffernan, Shelley's myth of death by review, and the weak, effeminate Keats that he depicts in his elegy, work to displace onto Keats Shelley's own sense of acute vulnerability about his power and vision as a poet. Viewed through the context of reading and reception, however, Adonais demonstrates, and not least of all in how it uses --or "consumes"--Keats and his works for its own ends, the sway that readers, good and bad, exert over the person of the writer. Keats had not been killed by a review, but both Shelley and Keats suffered in real ways as a consequence of the hostile reviews flying across the pages of Blackwood's and the Quarterly. The honesty and strength of Adonais as a poem lies in how it performs but then submits itself to the disconcerting ordeal of reading. Adonais thus allegorizes the fate of the Romantic writer offered up as written remains to readers whose gaze may cut and splice, rework and revise, the body of work before them, just as Shelley's own poem has done both to his precursors in the elegiac tradition and to the dead Keats. As Shelley figures himself in the frail form, casting himself as a double to the living/dead Adonais, he explicitly offers himself up to the same fate that he wrought upon (for) Keats, and situates whatever measure of immortality is available to poet or poem within the frame of its future reading.
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