Some Ideas about the Imagination (excluding Kant)

For those of you writing on imagination and the power of the imagination, the brief discussions below might be helpful. It offers a few quotes from some the key thinkers of the 17th and 18th century and from the Romantic era tracing the evolution of the imagination from tied to the production of images and memory to something more like the grand creative center championed by the Romantics (and still thought of that way by us).

Concepts of the Imagination

Hobbes

Time and Education begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory begets Judgment and Fancy; Judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the Ornaments of a Poem. The Ancients therefore fabled not absurdly in making memory the Mother of the Muses. For memory is the World . . . in which Judgment . . . busieth herself in grave and rigid examination of all the parts of Nature . . . Whereby the Fancy, when any work of Art is to be performed findes her materials at hand and prepared for use (“Answer to Sir William Davenant’s Preface before ‘Gondibert’” in Volume 4 of The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by William Molesworth).

Locke

The dominion of man, in this little world of his understanding, being muchwhat the same as it is in the great world of visible thing; wherein his power, however managed by art and skill, reaches no farther than to compound and divide materials that are made to his hand; but can do nothing towards the making the least particle of new matter, or destroying one atom of what is already in being. The same inability will every one find in himself, who shall go about to fashion in his reflection from operations of his own mind about them (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, chapter iii, section 2).

Hume

[Unlike memory,] the imagination is not restrain’d to the same order and form with the original impressions . . . [it is however] governed by the fixed laws of association, and when not governed by such laws, dangerous. [This dangerous imagination is that which is capable of producing such absurdities as] winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants (from Treatise on Human Nature)

David Lowenthal, writing on Hume’s idea of memory:

Remembering the past is crucial for our sense of identity: . . . to know what we were confirms that we are.  Self-continuity depends wholly on memory; recalling past experiences links us with our earlier selves, however different we may since have become.  ‘As memory alone acquaints us with the . . . succession of perceptions’, Hume reasoned, ‘tis to be consider’d . . . as the source of personal identity.  Had we no memory, we never shou’d have any notion . . . of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person.’ (The Past Is a Foreign Country, 197)

Burke

. . . the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination; and to this belongs whatever is wit, fancy, invention, and the like. But it must be observed, that this power of the imagination is incapable of producing anything absolutely new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses (from “Of Taste” in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful)

Wordsworth

Imagination . . . has no reference to images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition, governed by certain fixed laws . . . [Wordsworth discusses examples from Virgil, Shakespeare and himself to show how imagination changes external objects by adding or subtracting properties from them] . . . Thus far of images independent of each other, and immediately endowed by the mind with properties that do not inhere in them, upon an incitement from properties and qualities the existence of which is inherent and obvious. These processes of imagination are carried on either by conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses, and thus enabling it to react upon the mind which hath performed the process, like a new existence.

I pass from the Imagination acting upon an individual image to a consideration of the same faculty employed upon images in a conjunction by which they modify each other . . . [for example]

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Wonder to all who do the same espy
By what means it could thither come, and whence,
So that it seems a thing endued with sense,
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself.

Such seemed this Man; not all alive or dead
Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.
Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether if it move at all.

In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are all brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of the indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison . . . Thus far of an endowing or modifying power: but the Imagination also shapes and creates; and how? By innumerable processes; and in none does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number,—alternations proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers . . .  As I do not mean here to treat this subject further than to throw some light upon the present Volumes, and especially upon one division of them, I shall spare myself and the Reader the trouble of considering the Imagination as it deals with thoughts and sentiments, as it regulates the composition of characters, and determines the course of actions: I will not consider it (more than I have already done by implication) as that power which, in the language of one of my most esteemed Friends, ‘draws all things to one; which makes things animate or inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects with their accessories, take one colour and serve to one effect.’ The grand storehouses of enthusiastic and meditative Imagination, of poetical, as contra-distinguished from human and dramatic Imagination, are the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of Milton; to which I cannot forbear to add to those of Spenser. (“Preface to Poems, 1815”)

Coleridge

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (From Chapter 13, Biographia Literaria)

Shelley's Heroic Poet

A Short Video of a Skylark "skylarking"

 

To a Sky-Lark

(first part based on John L. Mahoney's "Teaching 'To a Sky-lark' in Relation to Shelley's Defense")

From Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821)

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion . . . Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters . . . A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. (922-923)

Contrast between

• the skylark (sky, flight, ascendency, purity, joy, transcendence) and
• the human condition (earth-bound, languor, annoyance, sadness, pain, death)

The logic or rhetoric of the poem—emotions: is it mere gush? A spontaneous overflow?

Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight . . . A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. (923)

Stanzas 1-6 (lines 1-30):

• the poet’s emotional greeting
• celebration of the bird and its song

Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life . . . (927)

• The poet’s struggle to describe the bird, the song, and the experience

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. . . What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship-what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave-and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. (926)

Stanzas 7-12 (lines 31- 60):

• Develops the opening invocation to the skylark in an excited but carefully constructed unit of questioning: “What thou art we know not” but then tries to know
• How does he try to describe the experience?

Stanzas 13-21 (lines 61- 105):

• Review
  • First part—address to the bird
  • Second part—struggle to understand it
  • Third part—final prayer (plea) for inspiration
• The poet asks Teach us what sweet thought are thine
• The contrast between the bird and the human: Is this breach permanent? Or does the poem suggest that we can learn even “half the gladness” of the song and that others will hear our song?

. . . poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar . . . The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination . . . (924)

The Consolation of Shelley’s Adonais

Concluding verses of Prometheus Unbound

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;                           [4.570]
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
   To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
   Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;                             [4.575]
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Keats' Odes

Listening to Keats' Odes 

Below are some recent readings of Keats' odes, which remain immensely popular with readers and listeners. Cumberbatch's reading, for example, has nearly 800,000 views.

Benedict Cumberbatch reads Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale."

Ben Whishaw reads Keats' "To Autumn."

Some Notes and Questions on "Ode to a Nightingale"

Conflicted nature of human life

• the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy
• intensity of feeling/numbness of feeling
• life/death
• mortal/immortal
• the actual/the ideal
• separation/connection.
• Move from concrete to abstract
• concrete imagery and sensual language
• becomes symbol
• Stanza 1
• reverie while listening to an actual nightingale sing
• feels joy and pain, an ambivalent response
• what words express his pleasure and what express his pain
• which words express his intense feeling and which his numbed feeling
• What qualities does the poet ascribe to the nightingale?
• Real bird > Symbol but of what?
• pure or unmixed joy,
• the artist, with the bird's voice being self expression or the song being poetry,
• the music (beauties) of nature
• the ideal.
• Stanza II. move into a world of imagination or fantasy
• alcohol: what are the effects alcohol has; which one or ones is the poet seeking?
• drinking and of the world associated with wine is idealized
• The image of the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" is much admired. Does it capture the action of sparkling wine? What sounds are repeated? What is the effect of this alliteration? Do any of the sounds duplicate the bubbles breaking? Say the words and notice the action of your lips.

• Stanza III. real world pulls him back from imagined world
• What is the effect of the words "fade" and "dissolve"? why "far away"?
• What kind of world does the poet live in?
• What is the relationship of the bird to the world the poet describes? See line 2.
• Characterize the real world which the poet describes. By implication, what kind of world does the nightingale live in? (is it the same as or different from the poet's?)
• Stanza IV. Turn to fantasy again
• What does it mean to choose “Poesy”?
• He contrasts this mode of experience (poetry) to the "dull brain" that "perplexes and retards" (line 4); what way of approaching life does this line reject?
• In line 5, he succeeds or seems to succeed in joining the bird. What’s it like being with the bird?
• Stanza V.
• cannot see in the darkness, he must rely on his other senses. What senses does he rely on?
• Even in this refuge, death is present
• What words hint of death?
• Do these hints help to prepare for stanza VI?
• Was death anticipated in stanza I by the vague suggestions in the words "Lethe," "hemlock," "drowsy numbness," "poisonous," and "shadowy darkness"?
• What season is it? What significance might we attach to that?
• Stanza VI. Distance from the nightingale
• yearns to die, a state which he imagines as only joyful, as pain-free, and to merge with the bird's song.
• The nightingale is characterized as wholly blissful--"full-throated ease" in stanza I and "pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!" (7-8).
• mixed nature of reality and its transience suggested by the contrasting phrases "fast-fading violets" and "the coming musk-rose"
• What does the speaker realize about death at the end of the stanza?

• Stanza VII. Human mortality => Bird immortality (or song)
• but the bird will die: is this an error? or can we read it another way?
• Is he saying that the bird he hears is immortal?
• or is he saying something else, like "the bird is a symbol of the continuity of nature" or like "the bird represents the continuing presence of joy in life"?
• Deepened “meaning” of the bird:
• Does the bird symbolize ideal beauty, which is immortal?
• Or is the bird the visionary or imaginative realm which inspires poets?
• Or does the bird's song symbolize poetry and has the passion of the song/poem carried the listening poet away?
• Has the actual bird been transformed into a myth?
• Does this one bird represent the species, which by continuing generation after generation does achieve a kind of immortality as a species?
• Hungry generations
• Where is the bird located in this stanza? Do we see a shift?
• Stanza VIII. Identified or separated from the nightingale?
• What delusion is the poet waking from?
• Bird is not a symbol anymore, now the actual bird. The bird flies away to another spot to sing. The bird's song becomes a "plaintive anthem" and fainter.
• Is the change in the bird and/or the poet?
• Is Keats's description of the bird's voice as "buried deep" a reference only to its physical distance, or does the phrase have an additional meaning? It is the last of the death images running through the poem.
• With the last two lines
• true insight or experience (vision) or daydreaming
• the validity of the experience the poem describes, or is he expressing the inability to maintain an intense, true vision?
• transience; a false vision, or true?
• Has the dreamer in this poem changed as a result of his visionary experience? For instance, has his life been improved in any way? has he been damaged in any way?
• What is the tone of the ending?

This Alone Is Life

In our first day of discussion on Byron's Manfred, I was probably a little too dismissive of Byron's text and the character of Manfred. Byron himself referred to Manfred as "too much in my old style." In the same letter to his publisher, he also referred to himself as "a devil of a mannerist," and it's hard not to find Manfred's world-weariness wearying, and his self-centeredness bordering on narcissism exhausting. It is in fact easy to dismiss Manfred and Manfred as overheated, bloated, self-indulgent nonsense, the whinings of an elitist prig who has everything and yet feels everyone is against him, who was born to title, wealth, fame, and luxury and yet acts like a petulant child when the world has the audacity to not bend to his will.

Such a dismissal would be wrong. There is much beauty and power in Manfred, but as many in class noted, that beauty and power seems to come in isolated scenes, brief passages, and even single lines, but that the overall effect was unclear. "My pang shall find a voice," Manfred tells the Witch of Atlas, though what his pang is and whether it does find a voice isn't clear. But it is not a criticism of Manfred or Manfred that his "pang" remains hidden and inarticulate. How many of us know how to name our "pang," and how many of our "pangs" find voices?  Manfred's boast, like so many that he makes, appears to be aimed as much at persuading himself as at persuading others. When Manfred admits to the Abbot, "I could not tame my nature down," he appears at first to be confessing a weakness or flaw, but he soon turns to more conventional Byronic language:

I could not tame my nature down; for he
Must serve who fain would sway—and soothe, and sue,
And watch all time, and pry into all place,
And be a living lie, who would become
A mighty thing amongst the mean, and such
The mass are; I disdain’d to mingle with
A herd, though to be leader—and of wolves.
The lion is alone, and so am I. (III.i.116-123)

Of course, that Manfred begins by seeing social relations as a taming of one's nature, a taming of that which is real and authentic within oneself, suggests that there was never a moment of confession, and yet behind all of the boasts is something like confession or perhaps something like longing and pleading. To Byron's readers past and present the above passage would have been very familiar. First, in countless other Byron texts, the hero/anti-hero is either presented as or presents himself in similar terms. Conrad, the embittered pirate in Byron's The Corsair is described as "Warp'd by the world in Disappointment's school" and as "Too firm to yield, and far too proud to stoop" to social expectations. Second, Byron had used very similar language to describe himself. At the end of Canto the Third of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (published about a year before Manfred), Byron clearly speaking in his own voice bids farewell to his daughter Ada and to English society:

I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd
To its idolatries a patient knee, --
Nor coin'd my cheek to smiles, -- nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.

I have not loved the world, nor the world me, --
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things, -- hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful, or weave
Snares for the failing: I would also deem
O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what they seem, --
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream. (1049-1066)

The arrogance of Byron's speakers just a couple of days ago might have struck me as petulant and ridiculous, and it became easy for me to dismiss this voice of aggrieved genius for the class-inflected privilege it seemed to represent. But to do so misses Byron's great power. "My pang shall find a voice," Manfred boasts, and perhaps part of the pang is the isolation of the thoughtful in a thoughtless world, the outcast we make of genius or even competence, our willingness to disregard the "experts" and to avoid all traffic in ideas. Haven't we all at one time or another, or perhaps most times, or perhaps all times, thought that we "stood among" the crowd "but not of them," and that our thoughts "were not their thoughts"? For many of us, don't we feel that it is through what Manfred calls "superior science--penance--daring--/And length of watching--strength of mind--and skill/In knowledge" (III.iii.115-117) that we have earned the privilege to stand among the crowd but not of them, and that education, reading, reflection, contemplation, hard work, have given us thoughts that are not "their thoughts"?

In addition, both Byron's and Manfred's open embrace of their isolation and loneliness reminds us that they didn't choose isolation and loneliness, a recognition that adds immense poignancy to Manfred's encounter with the phantom of his beloved Astarte at the end of the second act. The action of the play (if it can be called action) has seemingly turned on a series of refusals and rejections, and readers are left to struggle for an answer to what ought to be a simple question (at least dramaturgically)--what is Manfred's motivation? What does Manfred want? From the beginning of the play, it is clear that he wants to see Astarte, his beloved who has died and for whose death Manfred feels some responsibility. Putting aside what some readers find to be most interesting (i.e. the prurient autobiographical elements in the play), Manfred's desire to see Astarte is the longing that is at the center of the play. In light of the above passages, which focus our attention on the speakers' loneliness and isolation--their sense of living in a world that is beneath them, that misunderstands them, that they cannot understand themselves--Manfred's longing to see Astarte becomes less a stage of grief and more a desire for community and likemindedness. "Speak to me," Manfred pleads repeatedly with the Phantom of Astarte, "though it be in wrath," as if the silence of the grave is the silence of Manfred's people-less world. It matters little what she might say, only that she speaks, only that she in dialogue provides him with a community. "I know not what I ask, nor what I seek," Manfred admits, but "I would hear yet once before I perish/The voice which was my music" (II.iv.132-135). The desire to hear her voice, to engage in conversation, suggests that what Manfred wants is a presence and a present, a living now in contrast to the dead past and the equally dead future. She speaks, but only to assure him that his life is at an end. In response to his pleas for condemnation, forgiveness, and assurance, she offers only, "Farewell."

Like Manfred, we might all be ready to invoke high-mindedness and the desire to avoid the taint of the world's ignorance and hypocrisy when the world seems so perversely opposed to its own interests. "I have not loved the world, nor the world me/But let us part fair foes" seems a perfectly logical response to a world that not only has failed to recognize our genius, but which appears to want to embrace all that is opposed to superior science, penance, daring, length of watching, strength of mind, and skill in knowledge. At this particular moment, and this posting covers our class discussion of Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Byron's response to the world's judgment, hypocrisy, and indifference seems less like the petulant whining of a spoiled elite and more like the only path available.

Of course, it isn't, and Byron's friend Percy Shelley offers us another path. It is, in comparison to Byron's ostentatious resignation, a more difficult path. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley sought to make sense of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which began with revolutionary hopes of liberty for all and ended with, as summarized by one of the spirits in Manfred, "repairing shatter'd thrones,/Marrying fools, restoring dynasties,/Avenging men upon their enemies" (II.iii.62-64). Shelley, through the figure of Prometheus, imagines a very different response from Manfred's. Prometheus, of course, is the mythical Titan who steals fire from Mount Olympus to give to humans and for this act is chained by Jupiter, his adversary, to a mountain where he undergoes a variety of torture, physical, mental, and emotional. "No change, no pause, no hope" (I.24) is how Prometheus describes his fate at the beginning of the play, "pain, pain ever, for ever" (I.30). Shelley's play opens with Prometheus angrily denouncing Jupiter, lamenting his torture, and concluding with the wish of seeing Jupiter crushed. But just on the verge of further denouncements of Jupiter, Prometheus pauses:

And yet to me welcome is day and night,
Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn,
Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs
The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead
The wingless, crawling Hours, one among whom
— As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim —
Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood
From these pale feet, which then might trample thee
If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.
Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin
Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven!
How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror,
Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief,
Not exultation, for I hate no more,
As then ere misery made me wise. The curse
Once breathed on thee I would recall. (I.44-59)

Prometheus begins nearly in joy ("welcome") only to turn to his hate and his desire for revenge ("trample thee"). As Prometheus is imagining trampling the prostrate Jupiter, something curious happens. He pauses on the word "disdain," and then rejects his revenge fantasy with a simple utterance, "I pity thee." That revenge fantasy, the imagining of his nemesis Jupiter as "a prostrate slave," is a very Shelleyan moment. In "A Defense of Poetry," Shelley claims that imagination is the salvation of the world, and not just the Romantic creative imagination, but our ability to "imagine intensely and comprehensively," to put ourselves "in the place of another and of many others." "The great secret of morals," Shelley writes, "is love; or a going out of our nature," and therefore the "great instrument of moral good is the imagination." Prometheus, in imagining Jupiter's punishment, also imagines Jupiter's pain and suffering. Not disdain but pity is what the sympathetic imagination counsels. In the very next sentence, Jupiter, the "cruel King" only a few lines before, is now seen in an extraordinary act of sympathetic imagination as "undefended," vulnerable and at risk, his soul "cloven to its depth with terror." Faced with even the imagined suffering of another that might be brought about by his words ("curse"), Prometheus decides to "hate no more," and seeks to recall the curse. For all practical purposes, by line 59 of the first act, the play is over--Prometheus is unbound, because through his sympathetic identification with suffering (the same sympathy that was at the foundation of his "crime") and his rejection of hate he has removed Jupiter's power over him. Later in the first act, after Prometheus hears his curse, he responds, "Were those my words . . . It doth repent me . . . I wish no living thing to suffer pain" (I.302-305). The truth of this moment is sadly familiar, played out in countless personal and national traumas, both in the inflicting of pain and suffering and in the transcendental acts of pity and forgiveness that is their response.

The rest of the play works out the consequences of Prometheus' sympathetic imagining, but not before letting us see the extent of pain and suffering that Jupiter attempts to inflict. The furies who visit Prometheus tempt him with the suffering and wrongheadedness of the world, the kind already rehearsed in Manfred and from which Manfred turns away to a life of isolation. But Prometheus offers us another model. The last Fury to visit Prometheus details the seeming impossibility of improving the world:

FURY: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.

PROMETHEUS: Thy words are like a cloud of wingèd snakes;
And yet I pity those they torture not. (I.621-633)

The Fury offers a compelling and remarkably timely (or timeless?) assessment of the world where "all best things are thus confused to ill," where hope for change is simply absurd in a world where the "good want power," and the "powerful goodness want." This view of the world looks very similar to Byron's, where knowledge leads to despair and suffering to nihilism. Interestingly and provocatively, though, Prometheus is touched by the "suffering" of those who do not understand that others suffer. In other words, Prometheus pities those without imagination, or those who cannot sympathize (or even see) the suffering of the world. The Fury is so confounded by Prometheus' response that he gives up and leaves.

At the conclusion of the play, Demogorgon, the spirit of fate or necessity that drives change in the world, summarizes the difficult Shelleyan way:

This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. (IV.554-578)

Confronted with a world too ignorant and foolish for our efforts, a world worthy only of our disdain, Byron offers us brooding exile and isolation. Shelley offers us an impossibly difficult alternative: "To suffer," "To forgive," To defy," "To love and bear," "to hope," all in the infinitive to suggest that these actions are ongoing and timeless and also never finished. Prometheus doesn't forgive Jupiter after he is unbound and freed from suffering. Prometheus is unbound and freed from suffering after he forgives Jupiter. Prometheus never stops defying Jupiter, but he does stop hating him.

At the end of the sonnet "England in 1819," Shelley imagines that all of world's evil and despotism are "graves" from which a glorious spirit "may/Burst to illumine our tempestuous day" (13-14). The conditional "may" and the belatedness of this imagined triumph (after twelve lines of brutality) are in Prometheus Unbound transformed into present tense, "Love . . . springs/And folds over the world its healing wings," but it is a present that can only be brought about through struggle and failure, the wreck of hope that will be graves out of which Hope may burst to illumine our tempestuous day. To counter "Destruction's strength" and the "disentangled doom," we have "Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance," which are repeated like incantations and spells. Gentleness, virtue, wisdom, and endurance. Suffering, forgiveness, defiance, love, and forbearance. Hopelessly Romantic? Perhaps, though, there is little that is romanticized or of present comfort in Shelley's long arc of history argument, especially now when that arc seems more like a death spiral or at the very least perversely indirect. But as John Stuart Mill describes in his autobiography, life is not about achieving all that one desires--he imagines that possibility and realizes that if all his goals were achieved overnight he would fall into despair. Rather, our home is with infinitude, to paraphrase Wordsworth, with something evermore about to be. To suffer, to forgive, to defy, to love, to bear, to act with gentleness, virtue, wisdom, and endurance. I repeat these words as if they were incantatory and talismanic, needed now to bar the pit over Destruction's strength. To suffer, to forgive, to defy, to love, to bear--this is difficult; this is alone life, joy, empire, and victory.