The Bodleian Library has belatedly made Shelley’s ‘Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things’ available to all – and it’s dangerously seditious stuff
Shelley’s poem has escaped. For the past nine years, his “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things” has been held in private hands, not freely available. Some context: in 1811 Shelley was 18, at Oxford, when an Irish journalist, Peter Finnerty, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for libelling the secretary of state for war, Lord Castlereagh. Finnerty’s articles revealed the horrors of a war against the French in the Netherlands and accused Castlereagh of trying to silence him. The case caused a stir, a campaign was kicked off by Sir Francis Burdett and Shelley wrote the 172-line “Poetical Essay” in praise of Burdett as a fundraiser for Finnerty. It appeared on 2 March 1811, then disappeared from view until July 2006, when Professor HR Woudhuysen announced in the TLS that the poem had “come to light”.
The problem was that it only came to light for Woudhuysen, the owner of the poem and a handful of people permitted to read it. I campaigned for the poem’s release, unsuccessfully trying to raise the ire of the Eng Lit community, or the interest of the BBC. The Guardian, to its credit, reported the situation in full.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment