Friday, August 17, 2018

'Thin Sewn with Profit or Delight'

Some writers are unreadable. We first try as teenagers. Decades pass. And then, out of guilt or cussedness, we resolve to read them again. We set aside a quiet moment, settle on the couch, adjust the lamp and seize up like an engine without oil. Sentences, words, syllables congeal into impassable sludge. We close the book and put it away until the next doomed session.

One such for this reader is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose name is still cavalierly coupled with Keats’. Shelley is the template for every subsequent narcissist who fancied himself a bard. No, poets are not “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” thank God, and I’ll take Johnny Mercer over Shelley when it comes to skylarks. A Marxist professor once tried to set me straight. He made the case for Percy the People’s Poet. No thanks. Shelley and his wife are still hacks and life is short. Charles Lamb agreed, with qualifications. On this date, Aug. 17, in 1824, more than two years after Shelley’s death, he writes in a letter to Benjamin Barton:

“I can no more understand Shelly than you can. His poetry is ‘thin sewn with profit or delight.’”

Lamb concedes that one of Shelley’s sonnets is “conceived and expressed with a witty delicacy,” but adds: “For his theories and nostrums they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend ’em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in ’em. But for the most part ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of ’em--Many are wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Sh----y.”

“Miching malice and mischief” is typical Lamb playfulness and fooling around. About “miching” I wasn’t certain. It’s an old word and the OED gives an alternate spelling, mitching, and a meaning that mutated over time: “Originally: pilfering (obsolete). In later use: skulking, lurking; playing truant. Formerly also (occasionally): pretending poverty (obsolete).” The Dictionary also notes that mitching is etymologically related to the more familiar mooching and mooch.

4 comments:

Nige said...

All true, but Ozymandias is surely a very fine sonnet.

Montez said...

Both criticism and adulation of Shelley's body is heavily infected with politics and biographical oddities. In my view, when Shelley is bad he is very bad. Good work is there, however. I have never read a decent challenge to Prometheus Unbound as a work of stupendous beauty.

Foose said...

"...impassable sludge." Yep, you nailed it with Shelley. I had exactly the same experience. I think his status persists due to the notoriety of his personal life and approved political views rather than any intrinsic literary merit.

Although, yes, "Ozymandias" is rather good.

The Sanity Inspector said...

Shelley is like Johnson, in that the memory of the artist keeps his works alive, rather than the more normal vice versa.