Now, That’s a Very Difficult Poem to Read --

 

" That’s the terror of every bourgeois radical. That's the nightmare that they have: they wake up sweating in the night [laughter]. All the Labour MPs, all the reformers, they wake up and think, 

“My god, have we unleashed The Mob by what we’re doing?" [Laughter.] 

"Shelley! You’re preparing the sea of blood! 

Remember what Godwin said? 

Perhaps that’s what’s gonna happen. 

The Mob! We’ve got to watch out for The Mob! 

The Mob aren’t intelligent!” 

And all these prejudices sank in to the ruling class mind, that sensitive, intelligent and ruling class mind, the one that doesn’t go along with his class’ ideology. 

But then that sort of person comes to some other ideology, some reforming or radical ideology, and then he finds he’s worried about what he unleashes. Just like the people who 40 years later read Felix Holt. 

Nice, radical bourgeois people read George Eliot, read Felix Holt and thought "Oh it’s the nightmare! The mob, the election riot and Holt who is shot through the shoulder and then put in prison, by the way, for leading the riot in the first place." [laughter]. 

And that sort of idea is in some of Shelley. 

People aren’t — They aren’t Perfect. 

And they don’t have ideas which are pure. 

And there’s some part of Shelley all the time forging its way out, here and there, in some of his poems. You know, there’s a passage in The Mask of Anarchy where he says the answer to violent oppression is to fold your arms when the yeomanry come next time.

He’s talking to the people that had been MOWED DOWN at Peterloo! 

Women and children, murdered at Peterloo. 

And he says, “Next time, fold your arms resolutely, thinking about the laws of England, the good old laws of England. 

Stand there and talk about the law of England, and stand there and let them mow you down and then maybe everything will be all right but whatever you do, don’t unleash yourself.” 

 And that was one part of him. Of course, there was another side of him, the side that I talked about already, the side of him that says, “Yes. You’ve got to get them [laughter]. You’ve got to move and get them.” 

There are two sides to his personality, constantly coming out. 

Shelley wrote a whole series of letters to a woman called Elizabeth Hitchener when he was a young man. He had a long correspondence with her. 

And I’ll just read out one section of it but this is typical of his other side, a side that was different from the reformist side, the side that was worried about The Mob. 

There was another side to him as well. Shelley wrote: 

“They may seethe and they may riot, and they may sin at the last moment. 

The groans of the wretched may pass unheeded till the latest moment of this infamous revelry (of the rich), till the storm burst upon them and the oppressed take ruinous vengeance on their oppressors.”

“Ruinous vengeance”? What the hell is that? 

That’s Felix Holt saying exactly what you shouldn’t do! [laughter]. 

In Shelley’s poem Swellfoot the Tyrant, which is a wonderful poem, which has been sneered at by a lot of people who think it isn’t funny, what he has, is a lot of pigs. [laughter]. 

The pigs are snorting away and doing everything they are told and then suddenly the pigs turn into people and all the oppressors, all the priests and the parasites and speculators and industrialists and people of that kind and commercialists, they turn into pigs. And the pigs turn into people. And then you have a fantastic scene at the end of the poem in which he has the pigs driven out and killed. 

What happened to all this talk that "Oh,you must never take people’s lives, that you mustn’t be a retributionist and you mustn’t seek revenge? 

And then he goes completely out of school, and now he’s ultra-left in his attitude to what they should do to the pigs : "Get them out, drive them out, pin them down and stick them in the back! Anything! Just get them!" 

When Shelley is aroused to fury by what he sees going on around him, you see a very different attitude to violence. 

And really it comes to a climax, this division, this contrast between the way in which he thought about revolutions and oppressions and the mob: all these things come to a climax when he writes Prometheus Unbound. 

Now that’s a very difficult poem to read. I have lots of people who’ve come up to me since we had the meeting at Skegness last year and they say, 

“Well, I tried to read this thing, this Prometheus Unbound, but it is very difficult to read.” And so it is. 

It is very difficult to read. But the most important thing about it in my view, is that it brings that contradiction — between his Fear of The Mob and The Need for Revolution — to a head and forces it through to some kind of conclusion.

 

Peterloo Massacre: A turning point in UK history? - BBC Newsnight