Keats-Shelley Journal Feature: Suzanne Barnett

This post is the fourth in a series presenting blog publications from the authors featured in the latest volume of the Keats-Shelley Journal, Volume LXV. In these short pieces, authors reflect on their recent work and dialogue with other scholars in the discipline. Below is a Q&A with Suzanne Barnett addressing her article “Epipsychidion as a Posthumous Fragment”. This series is curated by Lindsey Seatter, for the Keats-Shelley Association of America Communications Team.1. In your article, you expand on Marjorie Levinson’s taxonomy of Romantic-period fragments by adding “imaginary fragment” to the list of categories. How do you think expanding our understanding of the fragment genre deepens our grasp of Romantic-era writing? Can you think of any other works that Levinson did not include in her taxonomy but fall within the boundaries of a fictional fragment?What came to mind immediately upon reading your question was not a literary text but the fake ruins of eighteenth-century landscape architecture—not Wordsworth’s organically ruined cottage but a structure that is built to be semi-destroyed, to present the fiction of a ruin. In terms of literary texts, however, I would be interested to think about the fragmentary nature of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), which Levinson does not address (because of course her excellent The Romantic Fragment Poem focuses on, well, poems). The opening conceit of The Last Man is similar to that of Epipsychidion (1821): in both, an editor introduces the text as the tale written by another, non-living author. In the case of Epipsychidion, the fictional author of the “present poem” has died before he could complete the “longer one” to which Epipsychidion was merely the “dedication,” while in The Last Man, Lionel Verney technically hasn’t even been born yet. The editor (or “decipherer”) has compiled the “scattered and unconnected” and “obscure and chaotic” pieces she gathered in the Cumaean Sibyls’s cave in December 1818 despite the fact that the story will not end until 2100. And in fact Verney’s story never truly ends for the reader because we do not learn his ultimate fate; his narrative ends as he prepares to leave Rome for parts unknown, and he leaves only a fragment of his story. As Levinson persuasively argued, there’s something inherently Romantic about the fragment, so considering how authors of all genres play with the idea of the unfinished, the scattered, the cut-short, and the splintered helps illuminate the often fragmentary nature of Romanticism itself.2. You argue that with Epipsychidion Shelley builds bridges over time by making connections to Dante, Plato, the Golden Age of the classical pastoral, the epithalamium, and to his own body of work. How do you think this poem, published nearly 200 years ago, speaks to today?As a teacher and scholar of Romanticism, naturally I think Shelley still “speaks” profoundly to us today, beyond the grave, just as the protagonist of Epipsychidion did (and does). Ultimately, I read it as a poem about disillusion, about seeking an unattainable ideal that will always fall apart…which sounds terribly 2017 as I type it out. I don’t think I agree with Donald Reiman’s note in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose that “the poem is essentially about the role of poetry as the most appropriate object of human desires” (372) because, in my reading, it’s too grounded in human relationships—messy, sexy, sometimes beautiful, but often disappointing—to be that baldly allegorical. If in The Last Man Mary Shelley was looking forward two hundred years to the twenty-first century in which humanity would fall, her husband was looking backwards over all those bridges over time to models of (small-r) romantic love that seemed less complicated than his lived experiences, which perhaps contributed to his later disavowal of the poem— he wrote to John Gisborne that “The Epipsychidion I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno,” and in a letter to Charles Ollier he claimed that the poem was “a production of a portion of me already dead; and in this sense the advertisement is no fiction.”