See here (Thanks Isak.)
Man must assert his native rights, must say
We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;
Oppressive law no more shall power retain,
Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,
And heal the anguish of a suffering world;
Then, then shall things which now confusedly hurled,
Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,
And error’s night be turned to virtue’s day –
7 comments:
I am in correspondence with Henry Woudhuysen re this Shelley poem and the pamphlet it's in. HW wrote an article about it for the TLS. I suggested that HW was part of a moment that had secured the privatisation of the poem and had probably ended up contributing to its value, when it is finally auctioned. The auctioneers, Quaritch, say that they 'can't' release it because it will be up to the buyer to decide what to do with it. HW concurs with this in a letter to me, indicating that the buyer wanted to burn it, that would be his or her prerogative. He gave me an analogy with a painting and explained to me that this wasn't like the scandal surrounding the Clare archive as this is 'manuscripts' and it wasn't like the publication or non-publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as that dragged on for years. (These were the analogies, or similar examples, that I gave.) It turns out that HW is the 'owner' of the AE Housman letters and is much exercised by what to do with them.
I have pointed out that it is some historic quirk that the thing we call a poem has on this occasion become tied to one piece of paper. As a result the poem has been corralled while a privileged few, the 'see-ers' mediate it for us. The poem at present 'belongs' to the TLS and HW. (this raises some very interesting Stanley Fish-like arguments about what the poem 'means', don't you think? At present, the poem means very little to me. All I've got are the extracts, the summary, and HW's commentary. HW has a meaning based on another 'text', the one, which as far as we know was the one that the author wanted others to read. His meanings come from that text. Ours from another.)
What an outrage that a poem should be like a painting in an aristocrat's vault, a unique object, viewable only by a self-appointed or co-opted priesthood one of whom or a very small group of whom have access to a stash of money.
Shelley is being recuperated, parcelled up for the owners, the bibliophilic sniffers while an academic at a democratic institution (university college, London of Bentham fame)is colluding with this crap.
See the Guardian letters column, Saturday July 22.
Pah!
o hell, that should read, 'if' the buyer wanted to burn it...
sorry.
Interesting. A poem certainly isn’t synonymous with its particular physical embodiment in the same way that a painting is. If every copy of Ode to a Skylark is burnt, the poem isn’t burnt. I’d say that you can only ‘own’ an ms and/or publication rights. As you indicate, it’s really just an accident that this particular poem has become, for the time being, inseparable from the paper it’s written on. The again, perhaps ‘Mr H.W.’ has memorised it already. But if he hasn’t, I’d still say that even if he does burn the ms he hasn’t ‘burnt the poem’!
So anyway, who technically 'owns' it now?
I should make clear, for litigious reasons, that HW is not saying that he, the overseer could destroy it. It's the buyer who could, analagous to a Japanese buyer of impressionist paintings who once did a bit of destroying.
I was reading Bruno Liebrucks which is absolutely awesome and I wonder - of course no one owns it - that the danger of this poem lies in the fact, in contrast to paintings, so Liebrucks, that written things like poems are sort of kind of more dangerous - for people who are fond of thinking that written things are dangerous - but in fact they are much more lively, have much more life than paintings, for they, according to Liebrucks, contain their content as a possibility, not as an actual one, like a painting where it is fixed. Of course there is to reconsider the concept of art Liebrucks has, but that is not the point here, the possibility of the poem is the problem, it is alive. All the possible contents of the poem can always be evocated as long as there are people there who read it. Maybe I disagree a little with Liebrucks, because I would say also a painting has the possibility od appearances, not only its actuality...anyway I am a little drunk. It is an absolute shame - no, a disgrace it is - that there is so much fuss about this, the poem should be made public and that's all that is to say about that.
Antonia - Have no idea who BRuno Liebrucks is, but will investigate. Yes, do feel free to post commetns when plastered, perhaps indicating this with a (D) sign; alternatively add this symbol to a sober comment if you don't want to be held accountable for it.
Isak - of course, didn't mean to imply that mr HW is just itching to pour lighterfuel over Percy's ms, i woz just usin it as an example.
The poem's fine with me. It's not as profound as I expected Shelley to be. Still here my three units in literary criticism won't go to waste.
The piece is just right for the times.
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