Shelley amid the Age of Separations:
Romantic Sociology and Romantic Media Theory

Yohei Igarashi
University of Connecticut

Obscurely through my brain like shadows dim Sweep awful thoughts, rapid and thick. —I feel Faint, like one mingled in entwining love, Yet ’tis not pleasure. —Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1.1.146-149)

As for the material density—if this is understood as not only the number of inhabitants per unit of area, but also the development of the means of communication and transmission—this is normally in proportion to the dynamic density [. . .]. However, there are exceptions, and one would expose oneself to serious error if the moral concentration of a community were always judged according to the degree of physical concentration that it represented. Roads, railways, etc. can serve commercial exchanges better than they can serve the fusion of populations, of which they can give only a very imperfect indication.  This is the case in England [. . .]. —Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (92-93)

1.        This volume, as the co-editors explain in their introduction, foregrounds the connection between new media and forms of social and intellectual organization during the Romantic era in England. While the term “media,” as we now know it, was not available until the later-nineteenth century (Guillory 321), media, multi-media, remediations, as well as media awarenesses and practices, and so on, are nowadays imputed to prior literary-historical periods, including Romanticism. What was or is especially Romantic about multi-mediality, then? Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane’s important essay, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry” adduces the period’s silent reading norms, the ballad revival, and “self-consciousness about the problem of poetry’s medium and the status of its mediation” (246), among other things. Overall, Langan and McLane’s essay makes a forceful case for “Romantic poetry as media theory” (256). Social organization, mentioned in this volume’s introduction, invokes another area of theoretical inquiry: sociology. But the relation between a “Romantic media theory” and a “Romantic sociology” is not immediately evident, even if it seems that it would have been difficult to think about “media” independent of that umbrella, “society,” howsoever imaginary or occult. [1]  Setting out from observations on Percy Shelley, for whom “the problem of poetry’s medium” and social organization are inextricable preoccupations, my thoughts below lead to how Romantic media, in this instance, involve a range of searching desires pertaining to connection—desires that arise from, and at the same time constitute, a modern social imaginary. [2]  Hybridizing a phrase from conjectural historian Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and the title of Nancy K. Baym’s recent book, one could describe the most significant problem for Shelley as “Personal Connections in the Age of Separations.” In Epipsychidion (1821) and elsewhere, Shelley leaves discoverable a certain feeling of social disconnectedness amid heightened medial and infrastructural connectedness and a sense of how the poetic medium, under such circumstances, might model a form of relationality that is neither principally economic nor amatory.

2.        The Shelley revitalized as media theorist in the concluding section of Langan and McLane’s essay—who is prominent even among his contemporaries in “establish[ing] a horizon for thinking the conditions of mediality” (257)—is, after all, simultaneously a sociologist. As Raymond Williams’ “The Romantic Artist” chapter in Culture and Society (1958) reminded us long ago, “what were seen at the end of the nineteenth century as disparate interests, between which a man must choose and in the act of choice declare himself poet or sociologist, were, normally, at the beginning of the century, seen as interlocking interests: a conclusion about personal feeling became a conclusion about society” (30). Williams’ observation tallies with Alvin W. Gouldner’s “sociology of sociology” (358), which notes the affinities between the inaugural, positivist strain of sociology in St. Simon and Auguste Comte, and European Romanticism generally (332-334). [3]  Williams then proceeds in this now textbook account to describe the interrelated social transformations that undo these “interlocking interests” of poetry and sociology from one another, sealing the fate of Romanticism’s poetic brand of “criticism of industrialism” (43). “What happened, under the stress of events, was a series of simplifications” whereby “art became a symbolic abstraction for a whole range of general human experience” threatened by the modern industrial order, and thus, “a general social activity was forced into the status of a department or province, and actual works of art were in part converted into a self-pleading ideology” (47). With the conjuncture of developments responsible for the specialization and marginalization of literary culture in full view, he confesses that “the last pages of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry are painful to read” (47). Williams concludes almost elegiacally that “the bearers of a high imaginative skill become suddenly the ‘legislators,’ at the very moment when they were being forced into practical exile” (47).

3.        From the viewpoint of Williams’ “The Romantic Artist,” poet or media theorist Shelley would at least partly undermine “poet or sociologist” Shelley. In such a psychomachia, the former’s assumptions about the linguistic-poetic medium and his typical handling of it—his style—would only exacerbate the broader social shifts underway “to isolate art, to specialize the imaginative faculty to this one kind of activity, and thus to weaken the dynamic function which Shelley proposed for it” (43). For if A Defence of Poetry (comp. 1821) exalts poetry over the other arts because language is the clearest among “mediums of communication” (513) for thoughts, at other moments Shelley stresses how language, once organized into poetry, is a profoundly unclear medium. [4]  He wavers, as William Keach too has noted, between celebrating “language as the medium of poetry” and a “linguistic skepticism that runs throughout the Defence like a counterplot” (22). For example, in another well-known moment in the Defence, Shelley describes poetic composition as a “feeble shadow of the original conception” (531). It turns out that poetic language can be “a cloud which enfeebles” thought, just as much as the media used by “sculptors, painters, and musicians” that he demotes below those of poets (513). And the obscure poetic style he at times adopts further interposes between composition and audience, as though to overlay the linguistic “cloud which enfeebles” the poet’s conception with another layer of darkness—a “figured curtain” (533)—that could enfeeble normative kinds of comprehension and sympathy typically involved in reception. What good are perceptive sociological theories of modernity when conveyed in an opaque medium made doubly opaque? The embarrassment Williams confesses feeling at the peroration of Shelley’s Defence appears to be an embarrassment in glimpsing Shelley’s writing as an emblem of literary discourse in general, registering and responding to its own declining relevance in ways that served only “to isolate art, to specialize the imaginative faculty” further, caught in a perturbed, self-defeating pattern. [5] 

4.        But perhaps Shelley’s theories of artistic media, including poetic obscurity, play a special role in his poetic sociology. Williams, in another work, Marxism and Literature (1977), opens the way to this possibility as he outlines what a Marxist cultural sociology would look like. Overcoming the tendencies of bourgeois sociology, this sociology of culture would avoid neutralizing complex social and class relations into inert abstractions (“mass public,” “mass communication”) and fully account for imaginative works and the forms they take—all without reducing the imagination to “knowledge” nor the “social forms of language and movement and representation” (139) to categories like “books” (140). This sociology of culture would be “a task distinct from a reduced sociology of institutions, formations, and communicative relationships and yet, as a sociology, radically distinct from the analysis of isolated forms” (140). Briefly, it is “at once a ‘sociology’ and an ‘aesthetics’” (141). Shelley’s writing, on this view, need not chiefly be “self-pleading ideology” on behalf of literary culture, sociopolitically impotent and uncommunicative: it may be those things too, but it is also at once a sociology and an aesthetics, including a media aesthetics, to the extent that it is a sociology awake to the medial facets and specificities of imaginative works. Careful to avoid the theoretical reductions and neutralizations which make poetry a transparent index or deliverer of knowledge or which measure poetry on these grounds—as the prompt for Shelley’s somewhat humorless response, Thomas Love Peacock’s “The Four Ages of Poetry,” satirically does—Shelley’s Defence attempts to account for poetic form and media within a larger “enquiry into the principles of society itself” (511). [6] 

5.        At minimum, the recognition that Shelley is attempting at once a sociology and a media aesthetics clears up certain problems pertaining to his style. We are not dealing with the fetishization of literary obscurity for its own sake, of course, or even an “analysis of isolated forms” or media. The question of whether or not Shelleyan obscurity diminishes his political vision also begins to appear less urgent: as the argument goes, the obscurity of works like Prometheus Unbound (1820) and the actually miniscule supply and demand for many of Shelley’s works—about which William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) provides statistical confirmation (218)—dampen the sociopolitical force of his writing. [7]  But a better way to approach Shelley’s sometimes unclear style dismisses from the outset the assumptions “that a clear style results in a popular audience and that political engagement requires having the most extensive audience possible” (137), as Michael Warner has put it. In Warner’s terms, which happen to characterize Shelley’s predicament very well, “those who write [opaquely] might very well feel that they are [. . .] writing to a public that does not yet exist [. . .] and finding that their language can circulate only in channels hostile to it, they write in a manner designed to be a placeholder for a future public” (130). Better yet, Shelley’s opaque poetry is not only “a placeholder for a future public” but also a set of sociological reflections incorporating, and of course performed in, the poetic medium. Finally, there is more to say beyond the fact that Shelley strategically modulates his style based on his imagined audience, that his poetry can be “exoteric” or “esoteric.” This is certainly the case, as Stephen Behrendt’s illuminating discussion of Shelley’s stylistic decisions shows. Shelley himself reflected on the comparative accessibilities of his works: The Cenci (1819), a work “of a more popular kind” (Letters II:108), the “sermo pedestris” of “Julian and Maddalo” (comp. 1819) (Letters II:196), and the political songs of 1819, all against the obscurity of Prometheus Unbound. [8]  But there is also the question of how Shelley imagines the clarity or unclarity of the poetic-linguistic medium beyond its bearing on the circulation of his works. What comes into view when obscurity is removed from the framework of audience or reception and recognized as a model of sociality?

6.        If, per Williams, “a conclusion about personal feeling became a conclusion about society” for Shelley, and such conclusions about society integrate theories of imaginative media and the forms they take, it makes sense to begin with one of his conclusions about a personal feeling. The essay fragment, “On Love” (comp. 1818) sets out from a specific premise about social dissimilitude in similitude. The superficial, visual resemblances between the speaker and his addressees belie a profound disjunction between them:

I would like to consider these lines not in the context of, for example, sympathy (and its difficulties) or Shelley’s expatriation, but rather from the assumption that an additional problem shapes these reflections: the problem of a community whose individuals coalesce by virtue of some similarities yet find themselves growing apart. The scenario nominally involves one speaker and a yearning for potential interlocutors or lovers, but it senses a larger social transformation wherein those imagined as belonging to the same group or social framework—defined by geographical area, nation, etc.—lack what Shelley refers to as that “something in common.”

7.        Shelley’s fragment engages in sociological discourse concerning the separation of individuals in the specific context of modern societies defined by the division of labor. He joins Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society as well as French positivist thought, all of which variously theorized how the division of labor impacted social and class relations. For example, Ferguson observes,

As John D. Brewer and others point out, Adam Smith, David Hume, and John Millar were more sanguine about the division of labor, believing that commercial interdependence among individuals would ultimately facilitate social cohesion (in anticipation of Émile Durkheim’s notion of “organic solidarity”) (17-22). [9]  Still, Ferguson worried that while individuals increasingly had many occasions to conduct business, the more crucial “bands of affection” that guarantee the integrity and overall health of the society were relaxing. Specialization and repetitive tasks circumscribed the perspective of individuals and therefore slackened, or worse, would totally dissolve the affective-social ties constituting the national body. Likewise, Comte, who studied Ferguson (Jones xiv), concludes in his “Considerations of the Spiritual Power” (1825-1826) that “the necessary result of this constantly developing specialization is that each individual and each people is habitually confined to a more and more limited perspective, and inspired by interests that are more and more particular” (211), thereby diminishing their sense of a collective life. Shelleyan love—the “[thirst] after likeness” (504)—is a feeling specific to a modern social structure viewed from this sociological vantage.

8.        Appealing as it might be to dwell on how the Romantic era’s variety of written media—literary works, books, letters, newspapers—occasioned contact between individuals and formed networks (perhaps on the analogy of today’s social media), media in this period did not only bring people together, nor did the density of communicative networks necessarily mean a greater overall sense of affective contact or transfer. Shelley’s fragment hints at this fact insofar as the otherwise similar “external attributes” and an existing, underlying sense of connection or togetherness are what heighten the pathos of the lamented “interval” and “greater distance” he feels. More to the point, routine contact and more regular communication practices can and did aggravate, rather than alleviate, the feeling of social atomization, or even cause it in the first place. Here is Ferguson’s republican version of this thought: “The members of a community may [. . .] have no common affairs to transact, but those of trade: Connections, indeed, or transactions, in which probity and friendship may still take place; but in which the national spirit, whose ebbs and flows [. . .] cannot be exerted” (208). Later, Durkheim posits that a more concentrated form of social organization, arising from improvements in communications media and transportation infrastructure, as well as from urbanization, is the very cause of the division of labor. “The number and speed of the means of communication and transmission” (what he calls “material density”) meant that “similar occupations located at different sites over an area enter into fiercer rivalry” (Division of Labor 209); this evolutionary mechanism, in turn, drove the creation of newer, narrower specializations. [10]  Durkheim emphatically puts it this way: “We state, not that the growth and condensation of societies permit a greater division of labor, but that they necessitate it. It is not the instrument whereby that division is brought about; but it is its determining cause” (Division of Labor 206). Now, “material density,” according to Durkheim, should ordinarily correspond, as it did in France, with “dynamic” or “moral” density, which he defines as the shared feeling of a collective life, where “individuals [. . .] are effectively engaged not only in commercial but also moral relationships with each other” and “live their life together in common” (Rules 92). But not so in England: “Roads, railways, etc.”—and one has to include those objects and practices put under the heading “media”—“serve commercial exchanges better than they can serve the fusion of populations” (Rules 93). [11]  Communicative connectedness in England developed, as did the division of labor and commercial interdependence, without an attendant sense of large-scale sentimental social coalescence; networks of communication and transportation, far from only connecting people, were at the same time the very cause of “the interval between us” felt by Shelley. [12]  With respect to analyses of Romantic or other media, one might say that ideally they would observe the distinctions between (say) sibling relationality versus one’s connection to a milliner or a solicitor—the latter are “connections, indeed [. . .] in which probity and friendship may still take place”—rather than reduce the complex dynamics of each interaction by incorporating them all into, or even positing in the first place, flat networks of affective circulation on the basis of communicative frequency or density.

9.        Thus it is not only, in Wordsworthian terms, that “the increasing accumulation of men in cities” and “the uniformity of their occupations” caused “a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifie[d]” (Lyrical Ballads 294). At the same time, as Wordsworth and Shelley probably grasped, “the rapid communication of intelligence,” along with “the increasing accumulation of men in cities,” were themselves responsible for the material concentration (i.e., “material density”) that led to a greater division of labor and the monotonous “uniformity” of each kind of work. Wordsworth’s depiction of his reading audience as those in a state of “savage torpor” (294) is a precise allusion to Smith’s figure of “the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations [. . . and who] has no occasion to exert his understanding”: as Smith describes him, “the torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment” (II:782). [13]  This kind of “torpor,” then, led to yet more craving after “the rapid communication of intelligence” for stimulation. Clearly, the issue in Romantic media is not exclusively or primarily the fact of connectivity: instead, the main problems are the historically specific sense of disconnectedness in concentration/connectedness (recall Ferguson’s identification of “intercourse after the bands of affection are broken”), and the possibility of connection amidst a pervasive, historically specific sense of disconnectedness (a big issue, among others, to which Romantic “poets or sociologists” addressed themselves). In this light, seemingly unremarkable lines from Romantic poetry become legible as compressions of significant questions about social structure: lines like “greetings where no kindness is” (“Tintern Abbey” 131) or “some inane and vacant smile” (The Cenci 3.1.277) come first to mind, but there are countless others. Not mere complaints about personal encounters with hypocrisy from social life, they together also form a poetic-sociological topos, a “charged semantic figure” (Goodman 7), marking the non-exchange of affects that bind and matter the most, amidst a present characterized by an intensified communications environment.

10.        In response to the estrangement between individuals, felt to be yawning to the point that the ties constitutive of society were in danger of dissolution, Shelley in “On Love” proposes or wishes that love is an original psychic human principle that might reconstruct “community” (503). Colored by necessitarian doctrine, Shelley’s essay would like to believe that what Ferguson diagnosed as the broken “bands of affection” might be healed, and a social reintegration realized, by the magnetic, attractive force of “love,” a force as natural and universal as gravitation. [14]  Shelley counters Smith’s own irreducible psychic principle, the “trucking disposition”: a “certain propensity in human nature [. . .] the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (I:25). Nevertheless, Shelley eventually intuits the inadequacy of love to the problem of sentimental dispersal-in-interconnectedness in a modern social order. He does so most vividly in Epipsychidion. His own disavowal of the poem—“it is a production of a portion of me already dead” (Letters II:262-263)—is arguably based on some recognition that his own brand of love resembles the ties of interdependence characteristic of modern commercial societies:

“[D]ifference without discord” rehearses an unmistakable signature of a social system made up of specialized parts working in harmonious concert, about which Epipsychidion is otherwise trying to articulate a critique. Nearby, to give one example, he criticizes the practice of monogamy on the grounds that it is like monotonous, alienated labor (“Narrow / The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, / [. . .] One object” [169-72]). Yet like later readers of Smith, Shelley perhaps grasps the uncanny similarities between sympathy or love and the solidarity that issues from commercial dependencies—that love itself may be said to love (“[thirst] after its likeness”) exchange. [15]  Let us not forget either those awkward lines that specify the speaker as property owner (“This isle and house are mine” [513]), and Emily as, dissimilarly yet essentially in this insular division of labor, the housewife. For one thing, then, Epipsychidion reflects back at Shelley, when he is most intent on adumbrating how love works, not the mirror image of the “ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely” (“On Love” 504) but an image of a modern social system of enmeshed complementary labor, to which he has been at pains to imagine an alternative.

11.        But there is another problem, this one from the other direction. Epipsychidion intimates that love is equally in peril of lapsing into a morbid fusion of identities. As the poem hastens to an end, he writes:

Shelley comes close to what Durkheim will describe as “agglutination” (Division of Labor 50). In arguing that “organic solidarity” based on complementarity ensues from the division of labor, Durkheim warns against this kind of sameness, which would presumably bring to a halt the dynamic system of differences he is outlining. Explaining how individuals imagine and internalize others in society (“images”), Durkheim explains that “when union derives from the similarity between two images, it consists in an agglutination” (50). Unlike the division of labor, wherein “they remain outside each other and are linked only because they are distinct,” in this kind of psychic and social lumping “they fuse completely, becoming one” (50). The implication for Epipsychidion is that this “scheme of life,” and this Edenic couple, would reproduce a social structure that, in swerving away from networks of interest, and in order to maintain true “bands of affection,” would veer into the other problems of homogeneity and social stasis. It seems possible too that Shelley writes himself into a recognition of his revamped society for the strikingly regressive vision that it is: a pre-commercial, pre-industrial, pastoral societal phase recognizable from Enlightenment stadial and conjectural histories. Lastly, the poem here concludes with figures of discrete but united individuals, but such figures gradually give way to the repetition of singularity (“One [. . .] one [. . .] one [. . .]” etc.). Evocative of the tyranny of “one will” on another, these final images are finally continuous with the masculine impositions exemplified by mesmeric control and Coleridgean voluntarism, both of which consistently troubled Shelley (Leask 60). It is not clear which would be worse for Shelley: love reduced to organic solidarity or to the agglutination of subjectivities.

12.        But it is significant, then, that the poem also occasions in Shelley a serious consideration of how poetry might simultaneously be a communicative medium and, at the same time, not one. Epipsychidion begins and ends by viewing itself as a species of communication that may be “sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers” but “to a certain other class [. . .] incomprehensible” (“Advertisement” 392). That is, for select readers, poetry is a medium insofar as it conveys thoughts and feelings. Then again, for others, poetry is only tenuously, or perhaps not at all, a medium, remaining an “incomprehensible” interceding object; as in the lyric he appends to his “Advertisement,” these readers will be “Quite unaware of what thou dost contain” (393). Shelley frames Epipsychidion with reflections on how poetry may have an inbuilt capacity to transmit or not to transmit, a semantic on/off switch—or, the capacity to elicit something between these two poles of contact, perhaps like Keatsian half-knowledge, depending on the reader. Such modes of interaction, as can occur in relation to and around poetry, are also figured at the start of “The Sensitive-Plant”:

“Leaves” elsewhere in Shelley’s work stand in for pages and his own writing generally, so his description of the sensitive mimosa plant conjures the materiality of literary works as opened and closed books. But at a further metaphorical remove, the one relevant here, his lines suggest that literary works can be semantically “open” at some moments and to/by some people, “closed” at other times and to/by others.

13.        In short, poetry can be clear or cloudy or dark, and everything in between. But might not poetry, for this very reason, model a form of interaction fit for “The Age of Separations” (Ferguson 175) then, and perhaps also now? Whatever else Epipsychidion has to say, it raises the question of how interactions might tend more toward the poetic. It is not as though Shelley is proposing that reading—literary reading—is how society actually works; rather this is how a society, of two or the totality, would be more bearable. Interactions would have the potential of connecting individuals in immersive, intersubjective relations, as in that of poet-audience or “stranger relationality” (Warner 74-75) among readers; such relations involve, but are not finally reducible to, dependencies of exchange and often surpass them toward a different kind of imagined solidarity. At the same time, individuals would be buffered against the intersubjective encroachments dramatized by Epipsychidion, in the same way that mediatedness and the potential for cloudiness, like an opt-out clause, allow readers to curse a work’s obscurity and shut the book, or have unintended responses or different responses than other readers, or altogether avoid reading the work—or, as the case may be, leave bottles filled with knowledge or poetry unopened. Such a vision never takes hold, failing to overcome the rule of communicative clarity in modernity or the priority of specialization. But it is worth appreciating Shelley’s attempts—as poet or sociologist or media theorist—at imagining a different basis for sociality. Something like: good “figured curtain[s]” make good neighbors.