Red Shelley

by Paul Foot

Red Shelley by Paul Foot is a gripping exploration of the life and works of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, presenting a vivid portrait that intertwines his passionate creativity with his radical political ideas. Foot delves into Shelley's rebellious spirit, shedding light on his defiance of social conventions and his commitment to revolutionary ideals. The biography captures the turbulence of Shelley's personal life alongside his poetic achievements, offering readers a rich and engaging narrative that brings the poet's complex character and enduring influence to life.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography, History, Politics, Romanticism, Literary Criticism

294 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1980

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the upper and middle class white boy poets of the early nineteenth century: Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Coleridge etc, for me there has only really been one that mattered: Shelley. Paul Foot has eloquently reminded me why. It was Marx who allegedly said that if Byron had lived he would have become a bourgeois reactionary (like Wordsworth), but if Shelley had lived he would have remained radical and been in the vanguard of socialism and revolution. This may come as a surprise to some who may be used to reading the Shelley they find in the anthologies and peddled by the Shelley society. Foot looks at all of Shelley’s writing and shows that his prose is as important as his poetry and that his views were truly radical for the time. He also expressed his anger eloquently. Take the beginning of The Mask of Anarchy, for me his most important poem, where he reacts to the Peterloo massacre. Castlereagh is the prime minister of the time and Shelley was in Italy:
I
As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.
II
I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

III
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Foot deals with a number of aspects of Shelley’s thought. His atheism is pretty straightforward and stayed with him throughout his life. Those who have tried to tame Shelley have tried to argue he moved towards religion in later life, but Foot deals with this effectively. His republicanism is again incontrovertible. Foot also deals with his attitude to women and his attitudes to reform and revolution. Shelley was always aware of injustice. This is from a pamphlet called “Address to the people on the Death of Princess Charlotte”:

“Thus much the death of the Princess Charlotte has in common with the death of thousands. How many women die in childbed and leave their families of motherless children and their husbands to live on, blighted by the remembrance of that heavy loss? How many women of active and energetic virtues—mild, affectionate, and wise, whose life is as a chain of happiness and union, which once being broken, leaves those whom it bound to perish, have died, and have been deplored with bitterness, which is too deep for words? Some have perished in penury or shame, and their orphan baby has survived, a prey to the scorn and neglect of strangers. Men have watched by the bedside of their expiring wives, and have gone mad when the hideous death-rattle was heard within the throat, regardless of the rosy child sleeping in the lap of the unobservant nurse. The countenance of the physician had been read by the stare of this distracted husband, till the legible despair sunk into his heart. All this has been and is. You walk with a merry heart through the streets of this great city, and think not that such are the scenes acting all around you. You do not number in your thought the mothers who die in childbed. It is the most horrible of ruins:—In sickness, in old age, in battle, death comes as to his own home; but in the Season of joy and hope, when life should succeed to life, and the assembled family expects one more, the youngest and the best beloved, that the wife, the mother—she for whom each member of the family was so dear to one another, should die!—Yet thousands of the poorest poor, whose misery is aggravated by what cannot be spoken now, suffer this. And have they no affections? Do not their hearts beat in their bosoms, and the tears gush from their eyes? Are they not human flesh and blood? Yet none weep for them—none mourn for them—none when their coffins are carried to the grave (if indeed the parish furnishes a coffin for all) turn aside and moralize upon the sadness they have left behind.”

I could add similar quotes on Ireland and on other subjects: Shelley’s prose surprises. So does his poetry. This is called A Ballad and wasn’t published until 120 years after his death. I wonder why?

A woman came up with a babe at her breast
Which was flaccid with toil and hunger-
She cried- “Give me food and give me rest
We die if I wait much longer-

The poor thing sucks and no milk will come;
He would cry but his strength is gone –
His wasting weakness has left him dumb -
Ye can hardly hear him moan.

The skin round his eyes is pale and blue –
His eyes are glazed – not with tears –
I wish for a little moment that you –
Could know what a mother fears.

Give me a piece of that fine white bread;
I would give you some blood for it –
Before I faint and my infant is dead –
O give me a little bit.

Shelley didn’t stop at the observation of poverty, he wanted to know why people are poor and what could be done about it. He even developed a form of what became known as The Labour Theory of Value and talked about liquidating landed wealth and privilege in his notes on Queen Mab. This is Shelley asking what freedom is from The Mask of Anarchy:

“Thou art not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.


`For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy home.


`Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude--
No -- in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.”

Although Shelley argued for universal suffrage, he also warned that the granting of it would not solve the problems we faced as power and privilege would remain. How right he was.

His approach to marriage was clear. This is from The Revolt of Islam:

“Well with the world art thou unreconciled;
Never will peace and human nature meet
Till free and equal man and woman greet
Domestic peace; and ere this power can make
In human hearts its calm and holy seat,
This slavery must be broken”

And this:

“Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air,
To the corruption of a closèd grave!
Can they, whose mates are beasts condemned to bear
Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish, dare
To trample their oppressors? In their home,
Among their babes, thou knowest a curse would wear
The shape of woman--hoary Crime would come
Behind, and Fraud rebuild Religion's tottering dome”

His approach to society is clear in Men of England:


Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
…
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
…
Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap:
Find wealth—let no imposter heap:
Weave robes—let not the idle wear:
Forge arms—in your defence to bear.

There is much more in this and similar vein in The Revolt of Islam, Queen Mab, The Mask of Anarchy, Swellfoot the Tyrant and Peter Bell the Third.

Foot does not hero worship or idolize Shelley; he delineates his faults and inconsistencies. What he does do though is show that at heart he is a radical who believed in radical solutions (for the time) to society’s problems. Some of those solutions would still be radical for our times sadly. For me there is only one of that group of poets who stays with me and that is Shelley.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Foot has done a fantastic job in this book of correcting our historical view of Shelley.

He describes the historical background to Shelley’s writings, putting them very much in context and brining the man to life as a real person. Shelley was an atheist before Darwin, a feminist before Pankhurst and a Marxist before Marx (they called them ‘Levellers’ in those days.)

Foot describes how Shelley was alternately adopted by the Socialists and then abandoned by them and how he was idolised but very heavily censored by the aristocracy.

But most of all, Foot has a deep love and understanding of the poetry, and with many examples he shows how Shelley’s ideas and passions are expressed and developed in that wonderfully lyrical language of his.

To confess a bias, Shelley was already my favourite poet before starting this book but I now feel I hardly knew him before.

If you like poetry, this book is a must.

[Diane Gaunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great interpretation of Shelley as revolutionary socialist, drawing from many sources both positive and negative. Concise and accessible. Fascinating and rousing stuff!

[Ainsley kerr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did you know Shelley was a red?! Like a full bore, bleeding heart, commie, pinko comrade? ME EITHER! And why? Because literary critics basic choose to ignore his biting material critique of capitalism, imperialism and the crown. Anyway Paul Foot and Percy Bysshe Shelley are both legends and this book was super fascinating.

[Garry Nixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shelley and Socialism! Those were the days... Nice to see that Mask of Anarchy still pops up regularly in our national discourse.

[Antenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah tells the anecdote of how, as a punishment at school, he was given Shelley’s famous poem, “The Mask of Anarchy”, to analyse. When he informed the teacher of his inability to understand it, she cruelly branded him “stupid”. This should have put him Shelley for life, except that years later he came across a copy of Paul Foot’s biography “Red Shelley”, which made him a great admirer of the poet overnight.

This book makes it clear that the poem was inspired by the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in which hundreds were injured, a few even killed, as sabre-wielding mounted soldiers tried to break up a crowd of many thousands demonstrating to demand parliamentary reform, which did not commence until twenty years after Shelley’s death. As the member of a wealthy and privileged family, who had developed a keen sense of the injustice of inequality and the need to redistribute wealth from the “idle rich” to those who actually work to produce goods, Paul Foot probably felt an affinity with Shelley.

With no particular love for C19 Romantic poetry, I had failed to appreciate the serious ideas behind it in Shelley’s case, although I have to admit that his rational arguments impress me most in his written prose. Expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet on atheism, he wrote, “Supposing twelve men were to make an affidavit…. that they had seen in Africa a vast snake three miles long… that…eat nothing but Elephants, & that you knew from all the laws of nature, that enough Elephants cd. not exist to sustain the snake – wd. you believe them?”

Growing up against the background of the French Revolution, and coming from a wealthy Whig, anti-Tory, anti-government family probably exposed him to liberal ideas from an early age. His support for “the unfriended poor”, was based on his observation of the suffering caused by the enclosure of farmland and the squalid working conditions of the Industrial Revolution. His ideas went beyond a verbal attack on the arbitrary power of kings, and the cynical use of the Established Church as a tool of social control. He saw before many others that giving people the vote would not in itself solve the injustice of major inequality. This required “the levelling of inordinate wealth, and an agrarian distribution of the rich, uncultivated districts of the country”. Many of his ideas still seem surprisingly, and depressingly, relevant (and unachieved) today.

Shelley’s advocacy of free love also heaped opprobrium on his head. Paul Foot possibly lets him off too lightly, in underestimating the extent to which this argument was used by men as an excuse for “free sex” and treat women badly or disregard the pain that it can cause. Although Shelley genuinely seems to have supported “feminist” views, to believe in equality for women and to respect their intellects, as in the case of his second wife Mary Shelley, his abandonment of his first wife Harriet, who ultimately took her own life, is troubling.

Paul Foot admits to a certain inconsistency in Shelley. For all this radical poetry, “Let the axe/Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall”, he was terrified by the physical violence of an angry mob. His attempts at being a political agitator in Ireland, or an agent raising money for the Tremadoc dam projects, which he imagined leading to a “perfect, idealistic society” for the workers, came to nothing. Since the latter provoked an unsuccessful assassination attempt on him (only his dressing gown was shot through with bullet holes), Shelley’s fear seems justified. At least Shelley’s “bitter satires” were read most widely amongst working class readers.

He ended up in Italy, furious over the 1819 ban on his political writing, although at least he escaped imprisonment for it, unlike some of those prepared to print his work. Isolated and often depressed, spending more time with Byron who had no interest in interfering with property and rank, than with any oppressed Italians, Shelley continued to write, producing his most famous “Ode to the West Wind” shortly before his accidental drowning.

There may be some small excuses for my previous neglect of Shelley. The late C19 saw what Paul Foot calls “an orgy of cultured Shelley-worship”, which stressed his “belief in freedom” and “lyric” poetry, censoring out all the controversial atheism, feminism and extreme views. In the 1930s, Shelley was savaged by the influential critic F.R. Leavis, for his “sloppy metaphors”, for plagiarising Shakespeare, and for his inability “to grasp something real” resulting in poetry which had “little to do with thinking”. But from what I have just seen of Shelley’s poetry, it is full of ideas and beliefs which make it worth reading, even if the language used tends to be excessive or lacking in discipline by some critical standards.

[Cian · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most important books I've ever read. Shelley was at once a leveller, reformer, feminist and tireless revolutionary. He was not just an agitator. He was perhaps the most eloquent agitator of all time. That identity propelled his poetry to what it is - his politics and prose at once the yang and the yin of his creativity, his practical reality and the substance of his unending faith in humanity, and its innate natural goodness despite what kings, priests and statesmen have ingrained as 'natural' human behaviour in the general psyche since the first ages of agricultural and iron.

His ideals propelled his work. Though this inseparable fact of Shelley was purposely, and maliciously conceited and censored by the establishment academia and the so-called Shelley Society in the century and decades since. Refusing to accept his politics with his poetry, for they were shills of the oppressive time that was his context, and the contexts ever since. Where Shelley has become more and more relevant. For he was a man ahead of his time.

In the end he did all that he could, as did Mary Shelley. Beset by terrible personal tragedy, and throttled within the confines of the tyrannical oppression and the poverty of their day, the misery that Shelley perceived and unleashed in empathetic poetic introspection of the species and society, they did all that they could do. And that is enough.

For as he said himself, genius does not invent it perceives, and so he perceived, studied and sought to amend through his writings the terrors and the sufferings of his day. In both England and Ireland he sought to inspire woman and man against the despicable overlords, the common enemy of all, and that which they would steal of the bodies, minds and nature of man and woman. What might have being said best of Shelley himself - the poet and the political agitator, the champion of the multitudes of England and the Irish poor, was that - 'true genius soars above the sphere of momentary applause, so did the unsullied mind of Shelley rest its claim upon the justice of the cause which it determined to advocate', and so he did, and did so with the greatest poetry I have yet read.