2024 Shelley Conference

By Elspeth Askew, St. John’s College, Oxford

On June 28 and 29, I was delighted to attend the 2024 Shelley Conference – my first – celebrating the bicentenary of the publication of Posthumous Poems. Not strictly being a Shelley scholar myself, I was anticipating getting lost in the finer details of the speakers’ arguments. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the variety and accessibility of the topics discussed. While I cannot offer an account of every wonderful talk at the conference, allow me instead to take you through the highlights of my experience as a first-time attendee.

The first day began very much on-theme with speakers exploring how Shelley has lived on through his work: in his extensive manuscripts, the non-endings of his poems and, intriguingly, the symbolic transplantation and literary regeneration of a dying zucca plant. Before lunch, the extent of Shelley’s affective power was revealed to us. We learned that his influence took both the embodied form of Shelley’s decaying corpse, as well as the more abstract form of the collaborative grief of the “interpenetrative minds of the Shelley circle.”[1]

Acoustic concerns dominated post-lunch talks. Alongside revelations about Shelley’s surprising role in inspiring Russian music were thoughtful reflections on his arboreal soundscapes and my own musings on the role of silence in sympathy-creation in “Julian and Maddalo.” During the final panel of the day, Nora Crook contended that the same poem’s accessibility rendered it perfect to open Posthumous Poems. Meanwhile, Valentina Varinelli lamented Mary Shelley’s decision to place her husband’s translations at the end of the collection, despite, Will Bowers maintained, them being imbued with the same liveliness of direct speech as in “Julian and Maddalo.” Day One closed triumphantly with the launch of volumes five and six of the Longman Annotated edition of The Poems of Shelley.

The second day dove straight into discussions of the cheap pocket editions of Shelley’s work and his literary relationships with contemporaries Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Leigh Hunt. This was followed by an exploration of Shelley’s belief in the economic value of the individual, a call for greater cognitive ecopoetic engagement with Shelley’s work and a journey into the universal implications of rhythm in “Mont Blanc.” In a particularly intriguing series of talks, we were then invited to consider how external landscapes and life forms reflected the internal workings of Shelley’s mind, from the ever-shifting sands of his mental state in “Julian and Maddalo” to the restless idealism of his skylark in “To a Skylark.”

After a magnificent lunch spread, we were introduced to the recently published Percy Shelley for Our Times, which was well-received by critics and audience alike. Ross Wilson then delivered a thought-provoking keynote on “What is a Posthumous Poem?” The lecture uncovered further questions about the lifespan of art, the effects of art’s mechanization and whether one can live a posthumous existence before death, as Keats famously claimed of himself. Thoughts soon turned to more trivial matters, with a raffle, drinks and dinner marking the end to a highly successful conference.

It will be interesting to see whether the same critical concerns of influence and collaboration, the environment, intertextuality, internationality and materiality feature in the next Shelley Conference. What is certain is that Shelley scholarship is very much alive and evolving with the pressing issues of today.

Notes

[1] Merrilees Roberts, “Affective Choice: Mary, Jane and Percy’s collaborative grief in ‘The Choice’ and lyrics to Jane Williams,” (paper presented at Shelley Conference, Keats House, June 2024).

 About the Author

Elsie is a second-year English DPhil student at St John’s College, Oxford. She studied for her Bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Exeter with a dissertation on anthropocentrism in animal poetry of the long eighteenth century. Her Master’s dissertation, also completed at Exeter, explored the role of silence in three Gothic texts. After two years of teaching English in a secondary school and studying for her PGCE, Elsie decided to pursue a Doctorate. Her current thesis considers the relationship between absence and anthropocentrism in early-nineteenth century texts and artwork about the last man on Earth.