The Spirit of Classical Hymn in Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"

Twentieth-century critics are often reluctant to acknowledge Shelley's "Hymn" as a hymn because they mistakenly measure it against a vague, and yet unyielding, model of the Christian hymn. Louis Benson offers his criteria for hymn in The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship: "The Literary Hymn may be described as one in which heightened feeling seeks to confine an impression of some reality of religion within the limits of the hymn form [. . . and] in which the spirit of pure devotion, apart from didactic and utilitarian ends, reveals the essential poetry of our infinite relationships" (437). Benson recognizes that literary hymns must reckon with the paradox of confining the infinite, but he suggests that such "essential poetry" must always be revealed through a fixed form. For Benson, the "hymn form" is largely restricted to the four-beat rhythms of short, long, and common meter, exemplified by the eighteenth-century Christian hymns of Watts and the Wesleys (207). An implicit reason for Benson's exclusion of Shelley's "Hymn" from the genre, therefore, is that the poem strays from common measure. But he also regards Shelley's elevated rhetoric, supplicatory attitude, and non-Christian object of praise as irreverent and wholly inappropriate for a literary hymn: "If Shelley's unmoral attitude of artistic elevation had been the standpoint of the new [Romantic] movement, it might doubtless have come and gone with no perceptible influence on Hymnody" (435-36).

Recent critics who conclude, with Benson, that Shelley's "Hymn" is an ironic or anti-hymn, or an ode, and do not take account of the rich, influential "pagan" examples of Homer, Callimachus, Cleanthes, Julian, or even of Spenser and Marullo, often are judging by an ill-defined model of Christian hymn. They contend that because Shelley's atheism is antithetical to the values of the genre he ostensibly embraces, his adoption of hymn suggests a "Satanic" motivation (Fry 9). Paul Fry points to the interiorization taking place between the singer's reliance on the "grace"-bestowing Spirit in the first two stanzas and his burgeoning "Self-esteem" at the opening of stanza 4 as evidence of the "Satanic" overthrow of hymn by the originary voice of the Romantic odist ("Hymn" 36-37; Fry 9). Fry associates the shift from general to personal concerns almost exclusively with the Romantic ode. The ode, he writes, "is never a hymn" (9). Rather, the odist attempts to "recover and usurp the voice to which hymns defer" (9).

In terms of the tradition of classical hymn, however, the internal transition that Fry observes in stanzas 3 and 4 of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" parallels the poem's structural transition from exordium to exposition. "Grace" and "Self-esteem" are complementary and interrelated, as are the "Word" of Zeus and the divine "knowledge" it imparts in Cleanthes' hymn (Cleanthes 16, 44). That is, they are bestowed upon attuned human beings by the divinity praised and are compromised by that divinity's departure. In stanza 4 of Shelley's poem, the singer dutifully celebrates the migratory Spirit of Beauty in the same manner that Julian celebrates his Helios, as a catalyst of the imagination ("To Helios" 140B-C):