The title of this collection, Percy Shelley for Our Times, might hardly surprise readers already acquainted with Percy Shelley’s ideas and works. Even after two hundred years since his passing, Shelley’s name still evokes the enduring power of art and artists, the commitment to justice and equality, and the tireless uprising against oppressive systems. He imagined, for instance, an ethical environmental relation between humans and our planet, becoming the “first celebrity vegan” and a source of inspiration for the creature’s diet in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.¹ Through his precocious consideration of women’s rights and gender equality, he composed what has been called the “first feminist epic.”² Even more influential was his commitment to nonviolent protest as a vehicle for political and social change, which culminated in the composition of The Mask of Anarchy, one of the first modern and memorable expressions of peaceful mass resistance.³ The poem notably influenced the English social reformer and animal rights activist Henry Salt, whose own teachings on Shelley would make a significant impact on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.⁴ Furthermore, Shelley’s writings have continually galvanized readers, thinkers, authors, activists, and translators throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.⁵ The Mask of Anarchy, for example, has aided Shelley’s global popularity as an anthem used in the Tiananmen Square protests (Beijing, 1989), the Arab Spring protests (Tahrir Square in Cairo, 2011), and, more recently, a British Labour Party rally (Glastonbury, UK, 2017).⁶ Several workers’ movements, including the Chartists and American labor union activists in the early 1900s, turned to Shelley’s early poem, Queen Mab, as a primer for working-class education and uprising.⁷ The German anti-fascists Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin all took cues from their Shelley-inspired philosophical mentors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in looking to the transformative social and political potential of Shelley’s lyrics. In popular culture, moreover, poems such as “Ozymandias” and Adonais have inspired multiple band titles and song lyrics; references and allusions to Shelley in recent TV and film series have appeared in AMC’s Breaking Bad, Apple TV+’s Dickinson, and HBO’s Succession.⁸ Given his influence on prominent individuals, audiences, and social justice movements around the globe, including the poetry that continues to rouse and speak out against state violence, fascism, and hatred, Shelley is no doubt an artist and thinker for our times. He will remain “contemporary” because he repeatedly and indefatigably interrogated, however imperfectly, many of the structural injustices that manifested in his own age, which continue in many ways more than two hundred years later in ours.

Yet, perhaps unexpectedly, Percy Shelley for Our Times does not center its argument on the importance of Shelley’s writings for our specific moment in time. It does not contend, through a strategic presentism, that Shelley imagined a future like ours or anticipated the political, social, and philosophical questions of our own age. Had we framed our argument using such a proleptic model, we should have done no more than to occlude the fact that, in the past two centuries, Shelley has been emphatically pilloried as much as praised. Placing the poet on such a pedestal would have further intensified Shelley’s divided reception history, overlooking, for example, the multiple scandals that surrounded his personal life as well as the harsh, if hasty, dismissals he has received as an idealist (William Hazlitt), an “ineffectual angel” (Matthew Arnold), and an “adolescent” (T. S. Eliot) in no small part for his politics and religious beliefs.⁹ More recently, his privilege as a white, affluent, and European-born author has been central to criticisms regarding his inability to grasp the actual, everyday struggles of racial, gender, and class inequities.¹⁰ Furthermore, basing this book on a “contemporary” Shelley tied to the bicentenary of his passing could not possibly predict or address the needs of ages and audiences to come. How would this “bicentenary Shelley,” that is, anticipate his future tercentennial or quadricentennial counterparts?

Rather than focusing on Shelley’s sense of foresightedness, Percy Shelley for Our Times explores an author who thought and wrote in even more farsighted ways. The volume discusses the relevance of Shelley’s ideas to such topics as the aims of Black protest, Indigenous resistance to broken treaties, versions of nonbinary sex-gender, the possibilities of environmental rewilding, and the ethics of disability and ageism, to name only a few. In doing so, the book points to a greater vision of Shelley’s – one in which intergenerational and intercultural audiences connect and speak with one another. Through our assemblage of authors and chapters, we argue that Shelley conceived a model of relationality that conjoined and collapsed notions of time and space. As an arch poet of relation, Shelley honed a methodology that repeatedly draws from the interconnections and relationships among peoples, times, places, and fields of knowledge. Our contributors think variously about these relations: as unconventional models of kinship, the difficulties of collective exile, alternative forms of posthuman and nonbinary being, lyrical and hymnic ensemble, intergenerational and intercultural caretaking, genealogies of intellectual influence, political expressions of artful mediation, and global networks of intimacy and communication.

Shelley illustrated this model of relationality most powerfully in his rendering of interwoven spheres in Act IV of Prometheus Unbound, a passage that reworks Miltonic cosmology and Shelley’s own earlier thoughts on spatial and temporal crisscrossings in Queen Mab, not to mention “Mont Blanc” and its image of the “everlasting universe of things / [that] Flows through the mind” (1–2 [SPP 97]).¹¹ The second part of a sequence of “two visions,” which begins with Ione’s description of the chariot of light, Panthea visualizes a picture of the cosmos with mighty allegorical import (IV.202 [275]). What seems like a single, elite “sphere” is really, as Panthea dreams it,

We could, on the most literal level, read Panthea’s “sphere” as a universe or galaxy of heavenly bodies, “ten thousand” globes of multiple colors and sizes. But such a reading quickly “collides” with other interpretations because what appear to be orbs as “[s]olid as crystal” are also porous enough to allow sound and light to flow through them. The image of cosmic physicality, for example, might also presuppose the motions at atomic and molecular levels, as Panthea imagines a continuum of matter exhibiting simultaneous micro and macro dimensions.¹² Yet these physical gradations are further complicated by layers of Shelleyan metaphoricity: spheres that embody individuals or independent communities of readers, families, audiences, cultures, nations, and even nonhumans, including animals and environments. Meanwhile, as the orbs flow in “a thousand motions” with “a thousand sightless axles spinning,” they not only spin forward, evolving or progressing, but also move in multiple speeds and directions. These changing distances and varied motions among different figurations and scales of physical matter also belie models of temporality that could be linear, nonlinear, cyclical, diachronic, synchronic, triadic, or otherwise entirely.

Yet this kaleidoscopic image – of scales, persons, ideas, symbols, spaces, times, identities, and even versions of ourselves – is especially consequential because the worlds put into motion are “involving and involved.” Not independent or homogenized systems, the orbs are “involving,” actively partaking of interdependent motions alongside and in tandem with others, while also already “involved,” belonging to this complex operation of difference. They become entangled, enveloping, associating, and divorcing through an agency not directed by human autocrats but rather through an “inter-transpicuous” network of clarity and translucence. What might appear as a single and giant concentric sphere is quickly undermined by a vision of multiple interrelated centers or “axles” through a system that eliminates hierarchies altogether. Each “peopled” orb is enmeshed with the next, each allowing light – like Asia’s – to pass and illuminate others with an unordered rainbow of colors. Like the music of the Platonic spheres, they create tones, words, and wild music together, intoned by individuals, communities, material movements, and myriad trilling relations, offering the potential for a choric roundelay of verse, Shelley’s and many others’, sounded and resounded, addressed and redressed, recited and re-cited across geographies and eras.

Such interconnectedness does not, however, promise one ongoing harmonious chorus; this is not a naive universalist picture of interlinked agreement. The spheres move, after all, with a “self-destroying swiftness,” which anticipates the discordance brought about by collisions, erosions, and disagreements. They roll “intensely, slowly, solemnly” in multiple directions and “whirl over” each other through varied levels of force and affect. Here the tensions, discomforts, and impositions of being together might lead to the possibilities of non-relations, as each orb might change its attachments by opting out or engaging with others. As our authors show, the troubles of sociality include the potential of harmful complicity, “loathsome sympathy,” “sad exile,” “radical suffering,” hopeful despair, and other ambivalences. The orbs model theorizes those relations yet to be – those found in the “lampless deep” of motions, ideas, peoples, and poetries, the phenomena that we cannot yet see or comprehend, with whom and with what we are nevertheless already connected. Even if we cannot see or know those others within the intricate system, the orbs are necessarily “peopled with unimaginable shapes.” With quintessential Shelleyan irony, they already involve those unfamiliar entities that might be emergent readers such as Ianthe (from Queen Mab), communities such as the kindred of Prometheus Unbound’s cave, or alternative beings such as the Witch of Atlas’s “sexless” creation or Shelley’s “pod people.”¹³ By virtue of these associations, then, we become Shelley’s collaborators in these ever-changing mutual relations and non-relations – that is, your involvement in my own, which ties “us” together in all the orbish senses. He thinks of us as those who will not finish but continue a mutual project by reading and writing, speaking, listening, and “hearing,” as Julie A. Carlson writes in her chapter on Shelleyan Black poetics, “differences in common.”

Percy Shelley for Our Times defamiliarizes the idea of “our times” by seeing any one moment in time (including this volume’s year of publication) within this intricate system of interlocking physical, metaphysical, ontological, metaphorical, and temporal registers. This means that we must open up any historicist, presentist, or even Romantic transhistorical approach to a much wider purview.¹⁴ Of course, Shelley scholarship is no stranger to contemplating the poet’s temporal creativity, from notions of deep time in Queen Mab to the anticipation and prophecy within Prometheus Unbound to the lyrical ruptures of modernity and “no futures” in The Triumph of Life.¹⁵ Scholars have elsewhere made use of historicism’s thick research on historical difference to understand Shelley’s engagement with post-Peterloo politics and on transhistorical continuities of “mutability” and “eternity” to broach romantic topos as they persist and vary through time.¹⁶ As Will Bowers and Mathelinda Nabugodi have recently asserted in their bicentenary collection of essays on Shelley in European Romantic Review, “[t]he transhistorical conversation in Shelley’s verse reflects a poet who grew obsessed with the interplay of different historical epochs.”¹⁷ Other approaches, such as those that consider modernity’s revolutionary ruptures, examine the lyric’s ability to stop time and to create abrupt social and cognitive change.¹⁸ Our own Romantic-era bicentenary moment has intertwined a deep historicism with a presentist flare: to commemorate what we must remember about Romantic-era poetry while conjuring its authors to speak to young, contemporary audiences.¹⁹ Romantics 200, a joint effort of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Byron Society of America, along with other ventures by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, and Keats House in Hampstead exemplify some of those events, alongside public journalism touting the necessity of the arts and humanities.

Yet, despite the importance of these memorializations, such dialectical schemes fall short of capturing the expansive Shelleyan web of temporal and spatial layerings.²⁰ Shelley’s own historicist methods, which have been discussed by a variety of critics, moved beyond a diachronic coupling of historical moments to engage in an iterative practice of accumulating and intersecting flows of time.²¹ To recall A Defence of Poetry, Shelley writes, “Poets are the hierophants of unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present” (SPP 535). Although he might seem to draw the future and the present into a bipartite relation, however fractured or reversed, the entire passage is framed by the figure of the poet as mirror. This priest already refracts many presents and futures into a manifold hall of mirrors with other images and shadows of time. A poet does not merely illuminate these refractions but is already located as a medium within a network of unordered, unexpected creations of time and space. This understanding of relations ever unfolding reverberates elsewhere in A Defence:

Despite beginning the passage with the metaphor of the acorn, whose growth projects a future of oaks, Shelley quickly overwrites that organic, linear metaphor when he shifts to two other vehicles: a series of veils, then a body of water with all manner of material outpouring. Poetry itself becomes a relational process that is never-ending, which always unveils fresh readings of itself, placing ideas, audiences, and their environments into association. Not simply ever in “pursuit,” as Richard Holmes would have it, of the one perfect poem, Shelley’s poetry may fade or transform, but, as a “fountain” of “divine effluence” that ever develops “new relations,” it swims alongside other currents of its readings and interpretations.²² Similar to the poet ushering in temporality as a hall of mirrors, here the process of unveiling new readings allows all sorts of temporal flows to reconfigure the spaces and communities that populate them.

Even with his notions of interlinked being across epochs and places, some might still wish that Shelley’s thinking would have enabled him to recognize more of the oppressions of his own age, to see his own role in hierarchical relations. However precocious he was, Shelley was certainly “involved” with the deleterious complicities and harmful habits of his own times. For one, his seemingly idealistic comment in A Defence, that “[h]igh poetry is infinite,” carries the traces of hierarchical aesthetics, such as his address to “the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers” in the “Preface” of Prometheus Unbound (SPP 209). As Nabugodi argues in this volume, his repeated use of the metaphor of “slavery” evades mention of real, racialized bodies and the Atlantic slave trade.²³ His exhortations for working-class protests often seem to substitute for his own direct political action. His neglect of real women in his life often conflicted with his visions of gender equality; his seemingly equitable views on sexuality were compromised by his ostensible homophobia.²⁴ How, Nabugodi asks, could Shelley have pursued freedom for the Greeks so intensely while largely ignoring the ravages of racial capitalism and settler colonialism? How do we read Shelley and not replicate, in the very voicing of his lines, the abstractions of “tyranny” and “slavery,” those violences of erasure? Can Shelley the iconoclast challenge Shelley the nineteenth-century conspirator by allowing us to give voice to these silences, make timely revisions, and take necessary actions?

However we might believe Shelley addressed, or failed to address, these problems, his model of orbs offers a potential method for working through them. He recognized the significance of his – and our – partial perspectives included among myriad connections between ideas, bodies, or even contradictory parts of ourselves. According to orbish logic, we may still encounter the “Cencis” and “Jupiters” of the world, since we are brought into association, and perhaps even face to face, with all things pernicious as much as beneficent. Nevertheless, though any single orb must necessarily belong within the greater system, it still possesses the power to “roll on” however “intensely, slowly, [or] solemnly” – to move around, to realign, and to change. As we see it, this means that it is possible to reckon with problematic associations through a nonlinear process of understanding and identification, which can then lead to choice, action, and interaction. The intricate layers of these encounters allow us to imagine, reimagine, and, if possible, enact alternative means of coexisting.

On a more meta-poetic level, Shelley’s body of work, with its experimental practices of rereading and revising systems, traditions, plots, characters, and figures, likewise draws on this discerning process of relational assemblage. The iterations of Beatrice, Asia, the Witch of Atlas, the “shape all light,” and even Demogorgon, for example, offer a “contexture” of beings who, while attempting to overthrow gendered oppressive systems, are nevertheless enmeshed within them.²⁵ Through the study of these characters, we can identify various positionalities within harmful social structures. Those differences, small and large, then enable us not only to understand and confront our own positionalities and complicities but also, hopefully, to embody alternative forms of being and becoming. Beyond showing us the complex entanglements of things as they are, the orbs provoke the speculative imagination, the opportunity of learning the art of moving forward, toward, or away, as well as revising and repositioning relations as they are both carried through history and reborn.

At its core, Shelley’s work elicits multidisciplinary, multimodal ways of reading, seeing, and listening. Perhaps the most direct example would be to reconsider Shelley’s famed syncretism as a pointed cross-temporal and cross-spatial mash-up, layering multiple legends, cultures, and religious stories from polychronic and polyvocal spaces and times.²⁶ If we look back at the many linguistic and national cultures Shelley read from as well as the many artists across the globe influenced by his work, we foresee many more branches and fruit that such cross-pollination might yield. We might continue to identify the most basic and important practice within Shelley scholarship as placing disparate forms of knowledge in his writing into conversation. For instance, work by Colin Carman on the queer ecology of the Shelleys posits a necessary but fraught relation not between human subject and Romantic natural object but amid an intimacy with the nonhuman world that speaks to queer forms of love.²⁷ Carlson’s paradigmatic essay on Shelleyan simile offers a grammar of relation for both sympathetic affect and new political friendships.²⁸ More recently, Bysshe Inigo Coffey has examined the gaps, fractures, and limit-points within Shelley’s poetics as arising from his philosophical and scientific understanding of materiality’s own brokenness.²⁹ Both Richard Sha and Mark Lussier work through Shelley’s interdisciplinary erudition to reveal a poet with the heart of a scientist, imagining a biochemical physics of waves and dynamism at the heart of a materiality that might inspire new thoughts and new ways of peaceful living, a politics of health and ontology Timothy Morton has likewise investigated.³⁰ Shelley’s interest in polyamory arose through his reading of comparative sexualities in the classical world and religions across Europe, intertexts that refracted the strictures of monogamy through diverse affective and familial relationships. Indeed, the tradition of Shelley the “skeptical idealist,” or the empiricist turned Platonist, only begins to intimate a thinker working in comparative religion, language, and philosophies at once.³¹ As textual scholars have long claimed, Shelley’s own representation has been remediated by the public press of his day, booksellers, friends, biographers, artists, and editors, including Mary Shelley, in myriad and conflicting ways, with much new work to come on Shelley’s publication practice, manuscripts, and affiliations that shaped the circulation and suppression of his work.³²

Moreover, rather than narrating Shelley scholarship through any theoretical agon, as Arthur Bradley’s has done between deconstructionists and new historicist scholars, we might approach it instead as iconoclastically transiting fields.³³ For poststructuralist critics remind us that non-relation is also a form of relation that Shelley considers in poems about withdrawal and antisociality. Similarly, the “deconstructionist Shelley” really constitutes a connection between disruptive poetry and revolutionary politics, such as Forest Pyle’s “kindling and ash” of an aesthetics that burns through ideology’s coercive power.³⁴ From Paul de Man’s contingent violence of language in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life to Orrin N. C. Wang’s disfigurement as the revolutionary politics of modernity, linguistic deconstruction that resists the monumentalization of meaning or history does not simply reveal a politics to deconstruction but ironically convenes a community around those very ruptures, or non-relations, of sovereignty, history, and language.³⁵

Other cross-temporal or cross-epistemological nodes of Shelley scholarship can be found within the denizens of “Red Shelley,” who resituate different echelons of class-based wealth as systemic forms of power necessarily tied to sympathy and community affect. Marxist Shelleyans such as Terence Hoagwood find in Shelley’s protest a resistance to stadial histories and to all forms of totality that would prevent other forms of economic, existential, and phenomenological living.³⁶ More recently, Greg Ellerman has revived “Red Shelley” through a “serious rethinking of [the] relations among work, wealth, and nature.”³⁷ Other scholars preoccupied with questions of hierarchy and equity in Shelley’s work likewise draw from the varied knowledge systems embedded in his poems. Andrew Warren considers Shelley’s aristocratic class position and the psychological and affective dynamics of Romantic egotism as a means to critique the imperial and racial dynamics within his works, while Kai Pyle’s Ojibwe translations and analysis of the canonical “Ode to the West Wind” recontextualize the poem’s received meanings in order to reveal the power and flexibility of the Ojibwe language.³⁸ Work on populist Shelley by Graham Henderson’s website similarly draws our attention to the networks of people and social movements created by Shelley’s most pointed public resonances outside the academy.³⁹ Likewise, Camila Oliveira elaborates how musical reverberations of “Ozymandias” upend progressivist, ruling-class histories through the circulation of the poem’s popular resistance to history written by tyrants.⁴⁰ In reminding ourselves of this scholarly work, we must continue placing this “academic Shelley” into the other public orbs that concern him.

As we see our reading and writing as part of Shelley’s great connection-making conversation, we have organized Percy Shelley for Our Times around the shapes that our relations, and others like them, might take. This framework also includes holding space for those subjects yet to be acknowledged and written. Our first set of essays considers forms of kinship that connect Shelley to intergenerational Indigenous and disabled communities. The next group tackles Shelley’s views on abolition, slavery, and racialized Blackness from three different perspectives. The importance of affect to social change launches our next set of essays on the ambivalences of empathy, hope, and exile. As exile often happens in Shelley’s writings within alternative landscapes, caves, or wilderness, our next two essays reconsider Shelley’s thinking about the associations between humans and nonhuman ecologies as well as his understanding of interrelation between forms of nonhuman being and nonbinary gender. Our final selections meditate on art’s role as the ultimate agent and medium of change across the strata of relational being.

The volume begins with a chapter that brings Shelley in relation to First Peoples through Nikki Hessell’s searing and beautiful meditation on the forsaken promises of England’s sovereign in 1819 and the broken treaties in Canada and the United States during the early nineteenth century. Arguing that “Shelley’s poems are […] actually about Indigenous autonomy and honoring the treaties of 1819 and beyond,” Hessell reveals that an “Indianized Shelley” has inspired North American Indigenous authors and peoples across generations. With incisive readings of authors such as Too-qua-stee (Cherokee), James Roane Gregory (Yuchi and Mvskoke Creek), John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), and Joy Harjo (Mvskoke Creek), she shows how they have drawn on the language of Shelley’s works as a lexicon for the legal, affective, and performative failures of England’s monarchy and of the incipient US republic. Hessell finds “resolute, patient, and community-minded” orientations toward alternative models of kinship and community – and the dream of building them despite the insistence of patriarchal property and inheritance. The subsequent chapter by Fuson Wang pays attention to a neglected population within Shelley studies, the aging and disabled, by revealing a Shelley who likewise builds kinships across all living beings. Through a trenchant rereading of Shelley’s final poem, The Triumph of Life (and with a brief and equally powerful nod to Shelley’s neglected prose fragment, “The Coliseum”), Wang challenges the enduring notion that Shelley primarily championed the season of budding spring, of youthful idealists and hopeful optimists, proposing instead that Shelley crafts an “intergenerational theory of disability” as well as a hitherto unrecognized “ethic of constant care.” According to Wang’s claims, “the youthful speaker (in The Triumph of Life) deliberately chooses a partner in the old, disabled ruins of what was once Rousseau,” thereby grounding the chapter’s broader claim that “the coming [Shelleyan] revolution must be at once young and old, firm and infirm, able-bodied and disabled.”

Yet, for all his sensitivities and allyships, Shelley’s work is nonetheless haunted by his failure to address racial politics directly – namely, the Atlantic slave trade – and his complicity with the Eurocentric and “Enlightened” civilization that underwrote such a system of racial tyranny. Three essays in this volume each differently reckon with Shelley’s complicated attitudes regarding slavery and race. Nabugodi’s chapter lays bare the tensions between racial politics and Shelley’s liberatory poetics, including his philhellenic bias, his abstractions of “slavery,” and his missed opportunity to condemn the Atlantic slave trade. As Nabugodi helps readers comprehend the complexities of Shelley’s embeddedness in his own moment, she shows how the work of criticism is also always bound up in one’s own time by relating the personal account of her experiences as a Black woman scholar working on Shelley. In the end, Nabugodi shows us firsthand the inherent dangers and exclusions of Shelleyan relation-making. Yet re-visionary ends are not altogether foreclosed once we truly understand that “‘our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts’ [Shelley’s phrase] have developed in symbiosis with centuries of racialized slavery and colonial exploitation.”

As we acknowledge Shelley’s silence on Atlantic slavery, we then consider the possibilities of reading Shelley to work toward an anti-racist future. In their chapters, both Carlson and James Chandler reflect on these opportunities by turning mainly to philosophers, activists, and artists of color who have been inspired by Shelley’s own ideas and poetics. Carlson, in particular, looks to those “poet-legislators [who] work the streets as well as universities in efforts to better realize and manifest social justice.” Turning to Fred Moten’s poem “barbara lee,” which Carlson reads as “the most explicit engagement with Shelleyan poetic legislation by a Black radical US poet-philosopher that [she] know[s],” she meditates on Moten’s concepts of ensemble and relays to imagine a diverse future of “generativity” where Shelleyan notions of relationality, or “associationism” in Carlson’s phrasing, are “a key method for tying unlearning to pro-Blackness.” This imperative implicates all scholars in the ivory tower; it involves all the difficulties of turning out the insiders and “inside songs” onto “choric” and “collective” expressions. The call for turning “insiders outward,” as Carlson voices it, “entails substantial revisions to career, success, scholarship, activism, classrooms, interpersonal relations, and perceptions of self.” In Chandler’s subsequent meditation on “Radical Suffering,” he lays out another significant “ensemble” by tracking a genealogy of Shelleyan thinkers from Gandhi through King via Salt, connecting Shelley to the Indian freedom and American civil rights movements. Through a reading of Prometheus Unbound, Chandler argues that what appealed to these thinkers and activists was Shelley’s “ambitious staging of the radical love that subtends nonviolent revolution,” which also necessitates radical suffering. The revolutionary subject, in his reading, absorbs pain and suffering in an act that deconstructs the binary between direct action and passive suffering. Chandler connects this type of affective political activism to Shelley’s varying uses of genre and form, as each “rhetorical variation” acts differently but in relation to Shelley’s “signature practice of producing a literature of immanent critique.”

These accounts of Shelley’s use for pro-Blackness as well as his silences in confronting Atlantic slavery are followed by three essays that consider the problems as much as the possibilities of Shelleyan dispositions to change: empathy, hope, and exile. As Chandler’s essay contemplates Shelley’s model of taking on the suffering of colonial violence, Alan Richardson’s piece conversely considers Shelley’s staging of dark empathy in The Cenci as he discusses what happens when empaths use their sensitivities for harm and control, including securing tyrannical family and state power. Reading Shelley through an analogical view of contemporary ideas about mirror neurons – those neurons that help us imitate the behaviors we observe in others – Richardson traces Shelley’s sophisticated understanding of sympathy, revealing how fellow feeling works in pernicious ways, while also teasing out of the darkness of Shelley’s tragedy “unconstrained, selfless compassion.” As a counterpoint to these explorations of suffering and dark empathy, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud revisits the tensions between hope and hopelessness in Shelley by giving us a new understanding of the aims of his “ineffectual” idealism. With provocative readings of “England in 1819,” The Mask of Anarchy, and The Revolt of Islam, Cohen-Vrignaud probes the dyadic ties between “hope and despair.” He tracks the wavering between these two affective states as a powerful back-and-forth movement to keep us going, literally and figuratively. For, to despair, in his reading, means to spare some hope in the toggling between a wished-for future and an undesirable present. All the while, Cohen-Vrignaud attends to the prospects of inter-relational times and spaces, which are created by “the sublime power of language to produce effects beyond the intentions of an author and the possibilities of one moment.”

Omar F. Miranda’s chapter treats another affective paradox related to political and social change: the “sad exile” of being at once sorrowful yet steadfast in the struggle “through and beyond the traumas of displacement and dispossession.” Reading Prometheus Unbound, he tracks the multiple representations of Prometheus, Asia, and Demogorgon, who all survive their physical and figurative exiles individually and mutually as both a mode of dislocation, on one hand, and a form of resistance and recalibration, on the other. Miranda argues that exile and revolution in the drama are inextricably tied together not as a single or one-time event but rather as a protracted and enduring set of experiences. By newly understanding the play’s action as the ongoing withdrawal from Jupiter’s system, Miranda reveals “sad exile” to harbor the ambivalent yet re-visionary possibility of seeing things from afar and anew – through “everyday self-inquiry and critical distancing […] that will continue to ensure the redeemed society’s mutually determined rewards and livelihood.” As Miranda argues that remaining in exile demands an exile from oneself and inured environments, Ross Wilson focuses on the necessary distances and differences between humans and the natural world in a refreshing reading of Shelleyan eco-social poetics. Closely studying Shelley’s thoughts on rewilding, including how the natural world regrows and “overgrows” the remains of human civilization, Wilson shows how Shelley’s environmentalism challenges recent cultural theories that give exclusive priority to the nonhuman. With readings of current ecological rewilding movements in the public press alongside incisive analyses of Epipsychidion and Adonais, he contends that Shelley’s poetry repeatedly exposes the intertwining relations of the human and natural worlds, namely that nature’s resurgence and rewilding grow alongside the traces of humanity.

Examining another relation between the human and the nonhuman, Kate Singer’s essay considers Shelley’s attempt to think before the “Error and Truth” of Enlightenment humanity, and before the binaristic split between the white male bourgeois Human and those not included in that definition of humanity. She traces his iconoclastic resistance to and exile from normative categories of gender, race, and the human in a reading of The Witch of Atlas, with its double creation of Witch and the Witch’s “sexless” creature. Singer points to Shelley’s radical understanding of gender and sex beyond the male-female binary, as she considers the poet’s commentary and critique on the dimorphic gender-sex systems circulating in the discourses of his day. Positioning the poem as his reply and reconception of Mary Shelley’s queer creature in Frankenstein, Singer makes the argument that Shelley conceived of a continuum of gender and sex, one in which the gendered and racialized alterity of the Witch’s creature is embraced and prioritized, even though it may be imperfectly imagined.

The last two essays consider the vast Shelleyan sense of poetry as a medium of communication and as a support for the humanities. Drawing on the feminist materialist philosopher Karen Barad, Mary Fairclough’s chapter discusses Shelley’s farsighted views of poetry as a medium that can operate without the necessary interventions of mediation. In her incisive argument, “Shelley abandons the opposition we see in his early sonnets between material medium and evanescent subject and instead produces an account of dynamic matter that reconstitutes models of time and space and promises to do away with mediation altogether.” In laying the case for what she calls Shelley’s poetic cutting, where poetic sounds and materiality might rework the mediation of textual medium into closer relations between poetry and the bodies its words touches, Fairclough contends that Shelleyan poetics collapse the distance created by both time and space, tracing the poetical possibilities of “solidarity and fellow feeling” in the construction of new audiences and new worlds. In her argument, “Shelley is for our times because he is of our time.”

The volume concludes with Joel Faflak’s meditation on Shelley’s resounding belief in poetry as an antidote to the ongoing diminishment of the humanities within the academy. Reminding readers just how the “humanities” was born through the rhetoric of crisis (in the mid-twentieth century), Faflak argues that poetry’s unique empathies, neologisms, and ever-emergent concepts can easily perpetuate uncertainty in the academy’s investment in the arts and critical thought even when it asserts its primacy over systems of institutional power. In part because poetry, according to Shelley’s Defence, will always instigate more poetry and in part because poetry creates aesthetic “happenings,” Faflak doubles down on the resources we might find in lyrical breaks, new language, and new associations for words bequeathed to us. For Faflak, the Shelleyan poem “itself as a mode of consciousness, apostrophe, however painful, is able to sing, maybe even to redeem and silence the pain.”

While each of the following chapters stands impressively in its own right, they all propose so much more as an assemblage of twelve essays, especially in light of the framework within which this collection is already involved. Percy Shelley for Our Times only begins to adumbrate Shelley’s poetics and praxis of relationality: Shelley imagining his predecessors, imagining us, imagining him, envisioning the future orbs that speak back to and repeatedly redraw their own spinning and changing systems. As Martin Luther King, Jr. later affirmed in drawing on the “interrelatedness of all communities and states”: “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”⁴¹ All the while, these essays also point to that lampless deep of non-declarations and non-relations, which betrays how much is yet to be shared, related, created, or resisted. We thus bequeath this collection to what will necessarily exceed and extend us: the ever-emergent, ever-evolving, ever-revolving receptions that will continue to refuse reification by any one individual or group, historical environment, or scholarly predisposition. How, we wonder, will poetry’s languages, forms, and materialities continue to unveil and refract across times and spaces? And how might generations to come further interrogate Shelley’s, and our own, making of meaning through language, ideas, art, kinships, conversations, and more? For, in the vastness of orbish intricacy and gradation, we are more than bystanders of circumstance: we set the multitudinous possibilities into motion, awaiting as much as activating what carries on in the immeasurable beyond of being in, of, and for our times.