Shelley’s Georgic Landscape

Abstract

Percy Bysshe Shelley's translation of a fragment from Virgil's Fourth Georgic provides a case study in how his ideas on poetry, language, thought, mind, and metre in the Defence of Poetry are enacted in a densely allusive space. It is a dynamic passage, in which Shelley acknowledges the innovative and experimental poetry-making of Virgil, whilst testing how he himself might 'innovate upon the examples of his predecessors' (Defence 1840: 31). It is also overlooked. 1 I offer here some contextual discussion of Shelley's writing on the philosophy of poetry and language before providing a close reading of the fragment against the original. In so doing, I suggest that the poem is viewed not just as one of the few translations out of Latin by Shelley, 2 but as a creative commentary on the reception of Virgil's Georgics, in which fundamental questions about the nature of poetry are posedand answered. On 17 th December 1812, Shelley began a letter to the publisher and bookseller Thomas Hookham with a criticism: '…The Translation of the Georgics you sent is not precisely in my 1 The brief exception to this is Webb (1976: 329-333), who traces echoes of some of the underwater imagery in sections of Shelley's poetry. 2 Robinson (2006: 115) suggests that 'Latin literature hardly occupies Shelley's translation interests at all', given we have in total only a fragment of Virgil's tenth Eclogue, and a fragment from the fourth Georgic. I would suggest that the opposition of Latin and Greek is unhelpful here. way, but I shall keep it.' 3 A few weeks later on January 2 nd 1813, the opening line to a subsequent letter to Hookham amends this opinion: On reflection I feel rather chagrined that I excepted against the Georgics. I fear it may with[h]old your hand when you would otherwise send me some really valuable work. I assure you that I am quite reconciled to Professor Martyn; Harriet will probably derive some assistance from his translation when she has mastered Horace. 4 The phrase 'in my way' does a lot of work in the first letter. Shelley had not yet written his 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he conceptualises his thoughts on language, poetry, and poets, but a concern with 'the idea and fact of language' 5 was happening at the very time these two letters were written. 6 The translation to which he is responding is revealed in the second letter to be that by John Martyn, who first published The Georgicks of Virgil, with an English Translation and Notes in 1741, ahead of a similar edition of the Bucolicks in 1749. Martyn's version is in prose, and he himself foresees criticism over this choice to avoid a poetic translation. 'I am no Poet myself, and therefore cannot by moved by any envy to their superior abilities' says the Cambridge Professor of Botany; 'The prose translation will, I know, be 3 Jones (1964: 340), original italics. 4 Jones (1964: 347). 5 Keach (1984: 1). 6 On 24 December 1812 (Jones 1964: 343-44) he requested editions from Clio Rickman, bookseller, of three of the 'most important English theorists and ph...