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...stated thus: Thou shalt believe Hume, Pulos, and skepticism / Thou shalt not set up Kant, Wasserman, and idealism. Duffy resurrects C. E. Pulos' 1962 The Deep Truth: A Study in Shelley's Scepticism and reanimates it with Peter de Bolla's 1989 Discourse of the Sublime to deliver a more Byron-like, skeptical Shelley who consistently exemplifies in major as well as minor works his infamous unholy trinity by being a democrat, philanthropist, and atheist in all his creations. Much as Byron said of Milton--he closed as he begun--Duffy's Shelley is characterized by "a lifelong engagement with the discourse on the natural sublime" (189). Marriage of skeptical mind and sublime matter (including Alps, Italian ruins, volcanoes, and revolutions) produces a new, provocative reading of Shelley's politics and poetry in which his intellectual growth does not entail political apostasy as any sign of maturity, particularly any abandonment of the idea of revolution; nor does it require any embrace of Platonism or Kantian idealism. Duffy instead offers a portrait of the young and old artist alike as a curious but consistent kind of euhemerist enthusiast, as a vigorous humanizer and demystifier of the experience of sublimity. In Shelley, men make gods, not the reverse, and atheism and skepticism turn the liminal encounter with divinity into a fully human problem, a lesson on the power of ideology and the necessity of reform. By daringly rejecting theism even in the face of the sublime, Shelley earns his claim as a major contributor to what Duffy's mentor Peter de Bolla distinguished as discourse on the sublime: we don't just see the sublime everywhere at play in Shelley's thought, we see him thinking critically about sublimity as a crucial cultural and political problem. If, for Byron, time made the word 'Miltonic' mean sublime, for Shelley the word sublime can instead mean Necessity, but only if enough of the intellectual elite doubt first, and then imagine greatly. Duffy's Shelley thus echoes both the elitism and skepticism more strongly associated with Byron. The Shelleyan revolutionary poet operates firmly in the model of the intelligentsia: though for the people, he is not of them. However, Duffy ultimately argues that Shelley comes to purify Byron's skepticism of its debilitating pessimism by remaining a political philanthropist, even in Childe Harold's post-Napoleonic Europe, when much of the left was embittered and stymied by the defeat of the revolution. Of all Shelley's trinity of values defiantly registered in that alpine inn, however, "democrat" grows hardest to reconcile with the tenor of any truly revolutionary sublimity. By the time of Prometheus Unbound's "people-monster" Demogorgon, Shelley also, and this is Duffy's crucial point, has unchained unavoidable revolutionary violence, while freeing sublimity from the rock of faith.
Duffy's Shelley is nothing if not consistent. Those hoping for a figure who grows up by growing out of earlier beliefs and principles will be disappointed. Neither a central pivot from materialism to idealism nor a gradual disenchantment with revolutionary politics colors the bold...
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