Reading Shelley's Interventionist
Poetry, 1819-1820

Shelley in 1819—not to mention England in 1819—generates extraordinary legacies for artistic and critical history. Among them has been the question of what constitutes the phenomenon we call interventionist, committed, politically engaged art and criticism. A number of approaches to Shelley's 1819 have emphasized the distance between apparently activist poems--The Mask of Anarchy, for example—and what is deemed Shelley's High Style: presumably aestheticist, representationalist poetry of the "lyric I."¹ Some recent analysts of the grounds and processes of engagement find that the Mask and kindred poems successfully, even courageously forego canonical lyric privilege, building or gesturing towards real-world community. Others assess Shelley's interventionism as good-faith (or even bad-faith) failure; they contend that the activist poetry ultimately reveals a baleful formalism and lack of immediate practical consequence that unites it with Shelley's more evidently idealist art. Much of interest has been said on both sides and in between, but it's worth noting that, for understandable reasons, a good deal of this criticism proceeds implicitly or explicitly from Marxian-derived premises that have had great impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of "commitment." And probably because of yet again-renewed attention across the Humanities, during the last several years, to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, these Shelley-interpretations have frequently been in dialogue with, or dependent on, Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

	Response
		Kaufman's subtle, dialectical negotiations of "retrojection" and radical genealogy are just right for this complex topic, a form of literary history that brilliantly illuminates the importance of the Shelley-Brecht "line."

The retrojection (the analogizing, arguably anachronistic application to Shelley) of Marxian, Marxian-inflected, and Frankfurt rubric has, with a few exceptions, proceeded without awareness of a remarkably direct literary trajectory that runs in the opposite direction: from Shelley right to the charged debates of the Frankfurt School and artists alongside it. In a further twist, one of the other great figures of twentieth-century commitment, Jean-Paul Sartre, writes his 1947 manifesto of engagement in the immediate aftermath of 1930s and '40s Critical Theory and adjacent artistic constellations. By 1962 it will fall, as if in historical spiral, to an older Adorno to re-represent his and others' positions when he belatedly answers Sartre's "Qu'est-ce que la littérature?" In its German original, "Commitment" (as the relevant Adorno essay is known in English) bears as its title precisely the term for Sartre's doctrine itself, since the same word—engagement—is historically used in German (brought over from French, a few centuries ago) to designate the phenomenon at issue. If space permitted, there'd be a complicated story to tell about Shelley's place in Sartre's literary politics, though Shelley has only the briefest of cameos in "Qu'est-ce que la littérature?" (Sartre actually had been prone to worrying, in his earlier correspondence and notebooks, that Shelley had a greatness, and more troublingly, a handsomeness, that had been denied to Jean-Paul.²) But on to the Germans...

	Response
		In Shelley's Satire the comparison is based on recognizing that both Shelley and Brecht are satirists, who thus share certain rhetorical stances, weapons, and assumptions. It was Walter Benjamin who argued that Brecht was a satirist in the (satiric) tradition of Marx himself ("Brecht's Threepenny Novel," Reflections 202). Of course the two writers are ultimately separated by the immense gulf of a century of crucial historical difference. Dialectical historical readings of both must take place across this inevtiable divide. With that said, "Skepticism toward Shelleyan hope and idealized 'freedom' in general is a useful antidote for some tempting historical oversimplifications of our present. By the same token, Brecht can help us to appreciate what is truly strange, characteristically Romantic in Shelley's satire: its admixture of represented violence and hope" (Shelley's Satire 104).

A few critics have briefly discussed Brecht's interest in Shelley. Steven Jones's illuminating Shelley's Satire expands this body of commentary, not only by offering nuanced interpretation of Brecht's recourse to The Mask of Anarchy for his 1947 satire "Der anachronistische Zug oder Freiheit und Democracy," but also by remarking the importance of Brecht's 1938 translation of, and essay on, Shelley's Mask (103-105)³. In a footnote, Jones gestures toward the significance of a crux somewhat beyond the limits of his own study, though happily consonant with it (183-84 n.24). This crux has otherwise been virtually ignored by historians of literature, poetics, and critical theory. Jones notices that one of Benjamin's posthumously-published, extremely influential Baudelaire essays (written in 1938) presents a one-stanza quotation and two-sentence analysis of—along with a gnomic reference to—an apparently unpublished Brecht translation of lines from Shelley's rollicking, "Satanic," anti-Wordsworthian satire Peter Bell the Third⁴. Jones also observes that Peter Bell the Third's famous line about Hell being "a city much like London" reappears in Brecht's 1941 poem "Nachdenkend über die Hölle" ["On Thinking About Hell"].⁵ In fact, these materials are part of a larger cache, which plays a fascinating role in both Modernist art and Critical Theory.

In 1936, Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Wili Bredel become the editors of the new, Moscow-based journal Das Wort [The Word]. Das Wort is established, by leftist exiles from Nazi Germany, as a Popular Front, Communist-led "anti-fascist literary journal"; it publishes texts by everyone from Thomas, Heinrich, and Klaus Mann, to Langston Hughes, Hemingway, Anna Seghers, Lukács, Benjamin, César Vallejo, and others. In June 1937, Das Wort publishes The Mask of Anarchy's final 55 stanzas as translated by the Expressionist poet, playwright, novelist and critic, Alfred Wolfenstein, who had fled Germany for Prague in 1934, and who would soon, upon the Wehrmacht's entry into Czechoslovakia, flee to France until it too would be occupied by Hitler.⁶ Back in 1922, the publisher Paul Cassirer—Ernst Cassirer's cousin—had published a slim, gorgeous edition of Wolfenstein's Shelley translations: Dichtungen [Poems] of Shelley. (Wolfenstein had also written a translation-treatment of Shelley's play The Cenci for a 1924 Berlin theatrical production.) The Dichtungen had featured excerpts from Adonais, Hellas, and Prometheus Unbound; the entirety of various shorter works (such as "Alastor," "Ode to the West Wind," and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"); and a number of still shorter lyrics, including "England in 1819." Though Dichtungen hadn't included the Mask, Wolfenstein, in the Dichtungen's Afterword, quoted liberally from it.

	Response
		Again one thinks of Benjamin's cabbalistic angel of history, a useful figurative analog to Shelley's shapes of light and a salutary counterweight to Arnoldian reductionist "angels" (cf. Kipperman.) As Kaufman argues here (and has continued to expand elsewhere), Benjamin's infamous "magic" and Shelley's infamous idealism are both capable of being re-evaluated under a different construction of the aesthetic.

Indeed, Wolfenstein's Afterword to Shelley's Dichtungen is quite an undertaking: he insists on the radical unity of Shelley's work, the ways that the seemingly idealist and activist modes inhere within each other. He specifically transvalues—or bounces off Swinburne's transvaluation—of the Arnoldian "Shelley the ineffectual angel," conceding that Shelley was angelic, provided one remembers the terrifying nature of angelic presence. Bringing together Prometheus Unbound, the Defence of Poetry, the Mask, various Hölderlin poems, and a string of allusions highly resonant for a Left German tradition that tended to think in terms of Promethean assaults on the heavens (from Goethe's work, to Marx's and Engels's lines about the Parisian Communards having "stormed heaven itself"), Wolfenstein maintains that Shelley's "idealism" is best understood as poetry's fierce judgment of a world built on oppression and suffering (Nachwort 87-94).⁷

In January 1938, six months after publishing Wolfenstein's Mask translations, Das Wort publishes a lengthy essay on Shelley by Walter Haenisch. Haenisch had left Berlin for Moscow in 1931, to work on the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, the multi-language Collected Works of Marx and Engels. Haenisch's article on Shelley, less literary and more overtly focussed on particulars of socio-historical context than Wolfenstein's 1922 Afterword, nonetheless shares affinities with it, above all, concerning the unity of Shelley's work. Haenisch treats many of the same poems as Wolfenstein, and, like him, stresses the significance of Shelley's having been primarily a lyric poet—a crucial factor, Haenisch indicates, in Marx's and Engels's championing of Shelley. After discussing various poems in relation to their socio-political contexts, Haenisch suggests that an oeuvre encompassing both Prometheus Unbound and the Mask is at one with the project undertaken in Das Kapital. (Such an idealist-materialist coalition, incidentally, develops a parallel history on the Western side of the Atlantic in the same era, and one of its guiding lights is the Shelleyan [and, as Russell A. Berman has recently shown, the very steeped-in-German-philosophy] radical scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois's Shelleyanism is consciously taken up or shared by a range of figures across Left and African-American culture, extending all the way to veteran Popular Front individuals like Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and the labor organizer Ella Reeve "Mother" Bloor, committed Shelleyans all.⁸)

So in 1937 and early 1938, Brecht and Benjamin are reading this Shelley-discourse in a journal they're both associated with and for which Brecht, in fact, serves as a principal editor. In June 1938, Benjamin joins Brecht in Svendborg, Denmark, where the two work together for several months, sharing ideas and manuscripts. In July, Brecht writes and gives to Benjamin a group of essays intended for Das Wort; there is substantial evidence that Brecht talks through the essays with Benjamin as (or just after) he drafts them.⁹ Some of these essays, which take issue with Lukácsian realism and defend the critical value of experimental art, have been familiar to Anglo-American readers since 1977, when they appeared in Aesthetics and Politics.¹⁰ Brecht went ahead and submitted the essays to Das Wort, which never published them.¹¹ But in addition to fears about rocking the Orthodox boat, the other editors of Das Wort may also have declined to publish Brecht's essays in order to protect Brecht himself. If so, they had good reason; which is to say, this story's materials get grimmer: a few months after Das Wort had published Walter Haenisch's January 1938 Shelley essay, Haenisch became one among legions falsely accused, amidst the general insanity in Moscow, of "Trotskyite" and/or "Social-Fascist" espionage. Haenisch was denounced and executed as a "people's enemy."¹²

	Response
		The most telling absence in Brecht's translation of the Mask are the most blatantly "idealist" passages in Shelley, the lines on the allegorical Hope and the symbolist Shape, from what is arguably the crux of Shelley's original poem. --- --- --- Kaufman's response to the response: A full consideration of adjacent Brecht texts, not possible here because of reasons of space, would establish that the omission of the Mask's dream-frame and its more "idealist" vocabulary expresses Brecht's immediately tactical rather than final approach to the question of poetry's "idealism." This is a matter on which Brecht himself will provide extraordinarily interesting evidence when he offers an unexpectedly positive reception, in the immediate aftermath of his reencounter with Shelley, of what is undoubtedly a go-for-broke case of lyric "idealism": Wordsworthian lyric aura. In Brecht's own eyes, his own more-than-a-century-later situation certainly separates him from certain aspects of Shelley's style, and perhaps above all from aspects of Shelley's diction; but Brecht elsewhere readily concedes that he has his own, necessary poetic "idealism," and that the dream-frame or dream-vision in general is far from anathema to his conception of a committed, engaged, and/or interventionist aesthetic.

One of these unpublished Brecht essays of July 1938—which unfortunately isn't included in Aesthetics and Politics,¹³ and which has never appeared in translation—is "Weite und Vielfalt der realistischen Schreibweise" ["Range and Diversity of the Realist Literary Mode"] (Werke 22.1: 423-434 and 22.2: 1035-1037nn.).¹⁴ The essay's central exhibit is Brecht's quotation, translation, and analysis of 25 stanzas from Shelley's Mask. (The crackling translation's almost absolute literalness departs intriguingly from Wolfenstein's Das Wort translation of the Mask the previous year.¹⁵) The "great revolutionary English poet P.B. Shelley," Brecht claims while beginning his translation-commentary, demonstrates how a vital fusion of aesthetic experiment, speculative imagination, and song may lead to, rather than away from, critical mimesis of the real (the latter being virtually synonymous, throughout "Weite und Vielfalt," with commitment) (Werke 22.1: 424-425, 430, 432-433; emphasis in original: "den grossen revolutionären englischen Dichter P.B. Shelley").

At the same time that he translates and analyzes the Mask, Brecht also translates nine stanzas from Part III of Peter Bell the Third, which apparently remain unpublished throughout Brecht's lifetime.¹⁶ Brecht immediately gives his Mask essay-translation and the Peter Bell translation to Benjamin; Benjamin copies out the Peter Bell stanzas, preserving them in the pages we know as the Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project.¹⁷ As already mentioned, Benjamin also quotes, and briefly comments on, Peter Bell's "Hell is a city much like London" stanza in his "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"—an essay whose manuscript Brecht in turn reads and copies out portions of for the fragments he's writing on Baudelaire.¹⁸ The Brecht-Benjamin interchange, amounting almost to collaboration, is so intertwined that it's hard to tell the order of influence among these July and August 1938 writings. Limits of space allow me to say here only that a shared set of subsequently-celebrated images and ideas appears in Brecht's Shelley essay, Benjamin's Baudelaire essay, and then Brecht's Baudelaire meditations and later poetry.

More remarkable still is an extended passage on Shelley and Baudelaire in the Passagen-Werk; based on Brecht's translation of the nine Peter Bell stanzas, it's clearly the fuller version of the super-compressed but better-known comparison of Shelley and the French poet that Benjamin offers in "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire." In the Passagen-Werk entry "Zur Bilderflucht in der Allegorie" ["On image-flight in allegory"], Benjamin more extensively develops the comparison of Shelley and Baudelaire. The remarks gesture toward a sense of how the two poets' particular approaches to allegory illuminate the mode's modern fate in general:

The incisive effect [of Peter Bell] depends... on the fact that Shelley's grasp [Griff] of allegory makes itself felt. It is this grasp that is missing in Baudelaire. This grasp, which makes palpable the distance of the modern poet [Baudelaire] from allegory, is precisely what enables allegory [in Shelley] to incorporate into itself the most immediate realities...—Shelley rules over the allegory, Baudelaire is ruled by it. (Arcades 370, translation slightly emended; emphasis in original translation ["grasp"]); Das Passagen-Werk I: 468 [Gesammelte Schriften vol. V.1: 468] (emphasis in original ["Griff"])

Benjamin says a good deal more, but his point isn't to proclaim Shelley the greater poet. He implies instead that a turn in modernity and the history of aesthetic "aura" has made Shelley's critical allegoresis unavailable to Baudelaire. Baudelaire is too distanced from—from what? Benjamin's answer is that Baudelaire feels himself too distant from auratic distance itself; the auratic distance linked to lyric poetry and aesthetic autonomy is, to put it differently, what generates the allegoresis that Shelley can still undertake. The rest of Benjamin's analysis is well known: Baudelaire's intermittently critical triumph will be to make lyric poetry sing—severely and intensely—its own apparent impossibility in the age of art's mechanical or technical reproducibility.

While this is not the place for full-scale treatment of allegory's crisis in Baudelaire (and Benjamin's ideas about allegory's career in modern poetics thereafter), a few words are in order. Allegory is of course the charged term whose modern reprioritization over symbol stems in no small measure from Benjamin's 1928 study of the German play of lamentation, the Trauerspiel.¹⁹ For Benjamin, allegory's initial point of departure is that it represents the broken, ruptured truth of attempts at prematurely "symbolic" reconciliation. Hence allegory signifies its own necessarily non-identical—thus potentially critical and constructionist—character. Suffice to say here that the Passagen-Werk section about Shelley, Baudelaire, and allegory is one of the key instances where Benjamin articulates his formal theory (of allegory's proto-critical and constructionist nature) together with an historical instance of a lyric poet whom Benjamin and his circle definitely regard as progressive and committed: whom they regard, indeed, as den grossen revolutionären Dichter.²⁰

The 1938 matrix of Shelley, Baudelaire, and allegory generates two trajectories that presently concern us: towards the later art of Brecht, and the philosophical aesthetics of Adorno. Brecht, already having brooded over the poetic kindling, finds it reignited when, in his already-strange Los Angeles exile, he belatedly learns (in 1941) of Benjamin's suicide at the Spanish border. The news contributes importantly to the devastating Hollywoodelegien [Hollywood Elegies] and texts bound chronologically, thematically, and formally to them (some of which are gathered in the Werke's Gedichte im Exil section). It's rarely been noticed that, among these texts, not only "Nachdenkend über die Hölle" ["On Thinking About Hell"] is indebted to the figure that that poem calls "mein Bruder Shelley." In fact, the larger groupings of related poems and drafts—which include three texts explicitly focussed on Benjamin's suicide—are saturated with themes, directly-translated quotations, paraphrases, and images from Shelley: especially from Peter Bell and the Mask, but from the Defence of Poetry and other texts as well.

Just as significant, in these poems, are Brecht's very complex treatments of tonal register, his stereoscopically-introduced-and-mutually-dissolving images, and a syntax of deceptive ease and elegance whose unreeling builds rather than releases tension.²¹ All of which, Brecht signals time and again, come in no small part from that Romantic source, Brecht's "Bruder Shelley," who seemed to have found political militance inseparable from lyric impulse and aesthetic autonomy. It is not overshooting the mark to say that Brecht's almost too-terrible decision—to write wartime elegy that could be taken for bitter satire, and vice versa—should count as powerful, and intriguingly late Modernist, evidence for the acute readings various critics have offered of Peter Bell the Third's historical originality: its relentless insistence on thinking modern lyric and satiric impulse together, and on thinking both in relation to modern poetry's ways of taking history's measure.²² It seems barely necessary to add that Brecht's efforts reinvent, via Shelley, exactly the critical possibility Benjamin had seen as only fitfully available—almost against itself, certainly less definitively than in Shelley, and perhaps, Benjamin had thought, for what had been its historical endgame—in Baudelaire.

	Response
		"Shelley-infused" usefully expresses a certain kind of intertextuality in literary history that goes beyond "influence"--how (in the culinary sense of infused oils) something of the material "essence" of one poet's work can be captured and transmitted through another's work even in the absence of obvious allusion.

Brecht gives the Shelley-infused poems to Hanns Eisler, who works with the Hollywoodelegien and who then, one Los Angeles night in October 1942, sits down at the piano and premieres these impossible lieder for an audience consisting of Brecht, Hans Winge, and Herbert Marcuse. Brecht only ups the ante by testily noting Eisler's distressing tendency, when Eisler "speaks about, [though] not when he composes" the settings, to drop the elegies' significance down a rhetorical or formal-stylistic notch (Bertolt Brecht Journals 257-258).²³ That's a fantastic micro-dispute to consider, since Eisler, far from undertaking a wholesale genre-stripping or programmatic levelling of still-too-high and auratic elegiac verse, instead so virtuosically runs Schubertian and Schumannesque lieder, French chanson, and Schönbergian twelve-tone composition in and out of one another, that it is hard to miss the settings' recognizably Modernist tour de force of newly-achieved form and voice. It's as if the (proto-post-Modern) "levelling" holistically occurs in what Brecht hears as Eisler's irritatingly interpretive-judgmental comments, so that the work itself can then move on to enact its real, critical desideratum: Modernist virtuosity in the exploration, coordination, and imaginative synthesis of extremely diverse literary-musical materials and dauntingly various stylistic currents. Brecht acknowledges as much when he rather bluntly insists, against Eisler's alleged murmuring about the poems' mere occasionality or jottedness, on the Hollywoodelegien's compressed monumentality and gravitas: "these are full-scale poems" and "in fact the compositions are probably really important as music too" (Bertolt Brecht Journals 238).²⁴

On the page and in Eisler's settings, the poems exert a profound influence, across at least three continents, on late Modernist poetry and, to a lesser degree, music composition. Indeed, with their complicated reception-histories, the Hollywoodelegien and the poems immediately connected to them testify to the unexpectedly continued, vibrant existence of late Modernism, well into the era commonly called post-Modern (and in which Modernism is framed as canonical or reactionary object of critique).²⁵ The very fact of the elegies' Modernist aesthetic and declaredly critical-Romantic lineage, which for Brecht seems indissolubly linked to the poems' unblinking view of commitment's unexpected paths in art and life, would appear substantially to reconfigure recent periodizations and style-characterizations of post-Modernism and its much maligned antecedent.

That is, Brecht's late enterprise entails the non-parodic revivification of an ostensibly passé, auratic, "lyric-aesthetic" poetics, a revivification Brecht in part accomplishes by returning to the Shelleyan-Baudelairean imperative that lyric critically reimagine itself. Though not exactly hermetic, Brecht's negative-sideways, backward-forward path towards post-auratic aura effectively identifies lyric vocation with—or as fuel for—Marx's old "ruthless critique of everything existing," which in its turn casts a cold eye upon lyric's critico-political pretensions. Brecht's structuring of this fruitful and constitutive tension between aura and protopolitical critique amounts, astonishingly enough (since it's after all Brecht that we're talking about), to a reconjuration of Left Enlightenment aesthetics from elegy ash. Recognition of such a project in his later poetry should begin to unsettle long-standard accounts of how Brecht (or Benjamin, for that matter) alternately models an exchange-value Left cynicism, and a mechanical-reproductionist, exhibition-value "Avant-Gardist anti-aesthetic" (both of which, in solidarity with radically-intended post-Modernist art and theory, oppose themselves to a more auratic, Romantically-derived Modernism).²⁶

Meanwhile, Benjamin's reflections on Shelley, Baudelaire and allegory will serve as one of several seeds for Adorno's attempts, after Benjamin's death, critically to preserve and reanimate his friend's work, and to reassess earlier disagreements (including Adorno's and Benjamin's disagreement over the quality of Brecht's Shelley translations themselves).²⁷ In a gestural shorthand, sometimes explicitly and more often by implication, Adorno writes the Shelley-Bild into and underneath a key series of texts: "Lyric Poetry and Society," "Commitment," "Parataxis," Aesthetic Theory.²⁸ He effectively coordinates Brecht's and Benjamin's Shelley with a range of resonance and correspondance that includes Benjaminian angelicism, storm-images for allegory, and projection of "critical" lyric. This Shelley participates in what may be Adorno's own most enduring legacy, the attempt to uncover and work out a crucial distinction between aesthetic and aestheticization.

Impelled by Benjamin's thinking about allegory, Adorno finds an anti-essentialist, anti-aestheticist constructivism at the heart of Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and the Kantian Critical Philosophy as a whole, which, Adorno suggests, remains surprisingly central to Marxian dialectics and kindred efforts in critical thought. Underlying Adorno's Kantian account is the aesthetic's quasi-conceptual and thus quasi-social quality. The aesthetic (with lyric traditionally at its apex), while looking like conceptual-objective, "useful," content-determined thought or activity, only "looks like" them, only mimes them at the level of form. Aesthetic thought-experience in some way precedes conceptual-objective, content-and-use-oriented thought; in that sense, the aesthetic is "formal" because, rather than being determined by, it provides the form for conceptual, "objective" thought or cognition. Aesthetic thought-experience remains "free" (at least, relative to more properly conceptual thought) from pre-existent concepts or cognitive rules. In the Kantian lexicon, this makes the aesthetic a site of "reflective" rather than "determinant" judgment. The aesthetic, then, serves as mold or frame for the construction of "cognition in general," as Kant puts it.

The aesthetic serves also as formal and imaginative engine for new, experimental (because previously non-existent) concepts. With its quasi-conceptual and quasi-social character ("a mist, a light, an image"; "all...empty air" [Mask 2.103, 121]), the aesthetic can provide a prerequisite of critical thought by offering formal means for developing new (not even necessarily utopian) concepts. Such concepts may bring to light presently-obscured aspects of substantive social reality (aspects of society not already determined by society's own conceptual view of itself). The operative notion is that thought determined by society—by society's own concepts of itself: status-quo, reigning concepts of society—can never give a satisfactory picture of that society. This finally resolves into a fundamental strain of Adorno's aesthetics, to which Shelley contributes far more than an undersong, and that can be expressed as follows: Lyric experiment helps construct and make available the intellectual-emotional apparatus for accessing, and to that extent helps make available the social material of, "the new" ("the new" here being understood ultimately as the not-yet-grasped features of the mode of production and, in fact, of all that is emergent in the social). This constructivist theory and practice sees that experiment in lyric—lyric as experiment—helps make new areas of the modern fitfully available to perception in the first place. Constructivism by itself guarantees neither progressive subjectivity nor commitment to emancipatory politics. But this construction of perceptual or cognitive capability is prerequisite to such subjectivity, critical thought, and commitment.²⁹

There's one last, decidedly formal piece to this constructivist puzzle of Shelleyan commitment. Adorno hints that that piece is called "Keats." But it'll have to wait for the panel on "Keats's Interventionist Odes of 1819."³⁰