I begin with a particular legacy, with the copy of The Revolt of Islam owned by Arthur Hallam and bequeathed, after his early death, to his friend and fellow-Apostle, Henry Alford. Like Hallam, Alford was a minor poet, but he lived to earn a more substantial reputation as Dean of Canterbury cathedral and as the English editor of the Greek Testament. This book was doubly precious to Alford who revered both Hallam and Shelley, and when he married on 10 March, 1835, he chose it as his wedding gift to his wife, first inscribing on the flyleaf some blank verse lines that explained its special value to him.¹ What was he thinking of, this pious, conventional young clergyman giving into the hands of his bride a copy of The Revolt of Islam, a fiercely anti-clerical poem dedicated to the ideals of the French Revolution? It is true that the poem he inserted into the text himself ends with a warning. Fanny is advised:

                                                                                                                                                      to shun
Only the error's of the poet's creed,
Yielding free duty to his code of love.

But these errors, as Alford must have seen them, occupy a very large part of Shelley's poem. If they are shunned, Shelley's visionary epic becomes a love poem, and it is as a love poem that Alford offers it to his bride. It must have seemed a poem peculiarly appropriate to his own circumstances, for his bride, Frances Alford, was also his first cousin. Alford's mother had not long survived his birth, and for much of his childhood Alford lived in his uncle's house, learning to think of his cousins, amongst them Fanny, as his brothers and sisters. Almost Alford's first memory was of being introduced, as a boy of three, to his newborn cousin, Fanny. In his best known poem, The School of the Heart, Alford celebrates an intimacy with his wife that had its origins in their shared infancy, a time when they lived “Like two babes passing hand in hand along / A sunny bank of flowers.”² He surely chose his wedding present because he recognized the love of Laon and Cythna as prefiguring his own love for his cousin and his bride. It would be more comfortable, though not quite safe, to accept Alford's ignorance of the fact that in the first version of Shelley's poem Laon and Cythna had been brother and sister, and their relationship frankly incestuous, but in any case the revised version only lightly disguises the bond of kinship between them. Alford's decision to give his wife on their wedding day a copy of Shelley's poem urging her to read it, “every page with inly fervent heart,” stands as a striking enough illustration of the problem of transmission that I want to explore.

Incest was a fashionable theme when Shelley began work on Laon and Cythna,³ but we may suspect that its importance for him was prompted by something more than a taste for the modish. The love of a brother for a sister aptly figures the argument that Shelley pursues in his essay “On Love,”⁴ where he insists that love is an emotion that has its origin in narcissism. Love is the instinct within us that, “from the instant that we live and move thirsts after its likeness” (p. 473). There is within each of us “a soul within our soul,” a mirror reflecting back to us our own identity, “Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particulars of which our nature is composed” (p. 474). We are driven to love by our need that this internal image should be embodied in some outward form, that the mirror within should be supplemented by a mirror without, and we might find in the coincidence of inward and outward reflections a delightful repose. “[T]his is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends,” writes Shelley; it is unattainable in life, perhaps, but in art, in the consummation of Laon's love for his sister, Cythna, Shelley can represent such a love as achieved in the perfect blending of “two restless frames in one reposing soul” (The Revolt of Islam, line 2658).⁵ The kinship of the two lovers works simply to enforce their “likeness” one to another, for that likeness is the condition of the consummation that Shelley describes, an ecstatic moment in which recognition of the self becomes indistinguishable from recognition of the other, a moment of plenitude in which we lose all sense of the presence within us of “the chasm of an insufficient void,” our consciousness of which defines on all other occasions our common humanity.

It is characteristic of Shelley's poems that their motive power is love. The poems drive towards “the invisible and unattainable point to which love tends,” for that point outside which “there is no rest or respite to the heart over which [love] rules” (“On Love,” p. 474) is the only point at which the poem can close. Love is a quest, and the poem can end only when the quest is completed, or abandoned. An elegiac poem such as Alastor takes the second route. It ends when “the passionate tumult of a clinging hope” is exchanged for “pale despair and cold tranquility” (lines 717-18). But Prometheus Unbound ends triumphantly with the reunion of Prometheus and Asia, who prepare to retreat to their cave where they will gaze into each other's eyes and read the “hidden thoughts” that are at once and indistinguishably the thoughts of the self and of the other; and Epipsychidion ends in a breathless proleptic rush, in which Shelley conjures up just such a consummation of his own love for Emilia. At such moments the poems come to rest, Laon and Cythna blending themselves into “one reposing soul,” and the hero of Alastor achieving a condition in which “no mortal pain or fear / Marred his repose” (lines 640-41). When Prometheus and Asia retire to their cave “time and change” will still operate, but only as a topic of conversation. The lovers will remain themselves “unchanged,” and mutability will have dissolved into a murmur, its only function to soothe their rest (Prometheus Unbound, III.iii.10-63). Such repose is offered by the poems as a version of immortality, but it is an “immortality” that, as the final lines of Epipsychidion make explicit, is synonymous with “annihilation.” The “insufficient void” is filled, and without it nothing “urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart.” The presence of that void within us makes it impossible to rest content, but, as the essay “On Love” insists, to rest content is to succumb to a living death, to become the “sepulchre” of oneself.

Love, Shelley would have us believe, can reconstitute the world, but only, it would seem, for so long as it remains unfulfilled, for so long as the point to which it tends remains unattainable. Cythna leads her successful revolution before she is reunited with her brother. Asia is impelled not just by her love of Prometheus but by her separation from him to visit Demogorgon's cave and so unleash the power that will overthrow Jupiter. Laon and Cythna at last consummate their love in compensation for the failure of their revolutionary project; Prometheus and Asia, more happily, are reunited once their project has triumphed; but in both cases love can be fulfilled only when the lovers have escaped from history, for history is a process of change, and those who participate in it do so because they are urged forth by their consciousness of a void within them that demands to be filled. If it seems otherwise in Epipsychidion, that is because this Poem admits a willingness never entertained by the younger, less-disillusioned Shelley to retreat from the world to an island, and to exchange the ambition to change the world for a dream of private joy. When the soul is reunited with its “heart's sister” (Epipsychidion, line 415), it knows at last “respite and repose.” It finds joy, but at the cost of undoing what Timothy Clark has called “Shelley's politics of want.”⁶ The soul is at last freed from stress, but at the cost of obliterating the one impulse that has the power to mold the world to a new likeness, the stress of unsatisfied desire.

Lévi-Strauss follows Freud in identifying the prohibition of incest as the act which initiates human society. The incest taboo is the point of transition between nature and culture, between the static sovereignty of nature and the dynamic process of civilization. The prohibition of incest is crucial because it enforces exogamy, marriage outside the tribe, and hence it institutes the process of exchange on which human society is founded. “The exchange of brides,” as Lévi-Strauss puts it, “is merely the conclusion to an uninterrupted process of reciprocal gifts, which effects the transition from hostility to alliance, from anxiety to confidence, and from fear to friendship.”⁷ To prohibit incest is to abandon a static ideal of self-subsistence for an ideal of reciprocity. It follows that to dream of marrying one's sister is to dream of a return to a state of nature, a happy state where there is no giving in marriage. The builder of the tower where Shelley dreams of taking up residence with his Emilia lived in just such a world:

                                                                                                                                                      for delight,
Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime
Had been invented, in the world's young prime,
Reared it, a wonder of that simple time,
An envy of the isle, a pleasure-house,
Made sacred to his sister and his spouse.

(Epipsychidion, lines 487-92)

To live in such a place is to know delight, but “the calm delight of flowers and living leaves … And semi-vital worms” (Prometheus Unbound, ii.iv.36-8). It is to resign one's place within a world that permits change, that other world that Shelley repeatedly summons into being throughout his career, a world that is the arena for a dynamic interplay of opposing forces, the world so thrillingly invoked in Ode to the West Wind. And it is as well to remember that in that poem the creative tempest of the autumn wind is powered by the wind's separation from his “azure sister of the spring.”

For Lévi-Strauss the prohibition of incest is crucial because it institutes a system of exchange, but for a poet, despite John Taylor Coleridge's suspicions about the Shelleyan menage on Lake Geneva,⁸ the primary objects of exchange are not women but words. In a striking passage at the very end of The Elementary Structure of Kinship Relations Lévi-Strauss connects the two. Rules against incest are, he argues, a branch of the rules of grammar: “women themselves are treated as signs, which are misused when not put to the use reserved to signs, which is to be communicated.” He goes on boldly to suggest that women are the primary signs, and hence that the prohibition of incest is the necessary precondition of the institution of language: “the emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged.” If women are no longer quite like words, this is not because of a change in women but a change in language. Under the impact of scientific civilization the “signifying function” of words has become “common property,” and one unfortunate consequence has been to “impoverish perception.”⁹

Lévi-Strauss rehearses here a thought to be found in Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, where Shelley describes the process by which words “become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts,” a process that ends only when language has become “dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” (p. 482). For Shelley, it is the peculiar business of the poet to resist this process, and the poet resists most forcefully by making new metaphors. The coincidence of thought here between Lévi-Strauss and Shelley is unsurprising. In both it derives from a keen sense of the connection between eroticism and writing, between love and language. That recognition may even be shadowed in the passage I have just quoted, in the use of the phrase “human intercourse,” but elsewhere it is far more explicit. The poet's peculiar function for Shelley is to rediscover the eroticism of language: poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (p. 505). The thought is common enough, but its insistently erotic expression is peculiarly Shelleyan,¹⁰ and one of its effects is to alert us to the full sense of the word “familiarity.” The poet removes the veil of familiarity from the world, and as he does so the world is recognized not as a sister but as a bride. The poet achieves this by constructing a language “vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things” (p. 482). The poet brings into relation through metaphor words hitherto unrelated, that is, hitherto unrelated words are joined together in kinship. The poet's language is defined by such passages as the practice of a kind of verbal exogamy, it effects marriages outside the tribe, “it marries,” for example, “exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change” (p. 505).

We might say, then, that Shelley, like Lévi-Strauss, was interested in incest as the condition of exogamy. Incest, the calm joy of the Ocean-king as he wandered the Aegean isle with his sister and his spouse, remains for Shelley both an origin and a goal. But as an origin it is irrecoverable, and as a goal it is unattainable, and in that resides its value. It creates within us the void without which there would be no motive force to urge us forth “to arrest the faintest shadow of that without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart”; it supplies the want without which “man becomes the living sepulchre of himself.” The prohibition of incest becomes, on this account, a benign defense against closure, a safeguard of that condition of unceasing becoming that is Shelley's version of Godwinian perfectibility, celebrated by him in poem after poem. It sanctions his determination to go on until he has stopped by providing him with the necessary assurance that he never can be stopped.¹¹

This is an attractive account of Shelley's activity, especially for modern readers, and it is in important ways a true one, but it fails in the end to persuade. For there is in Shelley's work, surely, a desire for closure quite as strong as a resistance to it, a desire that the spring heralded by the West wind of autumn be eternal at least as powerful as any recognition that it, too, is just a passing season. Nor are these two impulses in Shelley antithetical; rather, they are alternative reflexes of a single condition.

Shelley's verse is distinctive in its use of two kinds of figurative language. In one, Shelley supplies a series of signs, each of which seeks union with the object he addresses, and each fails, fades into darkness, and its place is supplied by its successor. The poem becomes a shower of fading sparks, propelled forward by its own insufficiency.¹² The other kind is finely described by Empson as “that ‘self-inwoven’ simile employed by Shelley, when not being able to think of a comparison fast enough he compares the thing to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself, or points out that it is its own nature, or that it sustains itself by supporting itself.”¹³ In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley describes how: “Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil / […] The spirit of the earth is laid asleep …” (iv. 263-65). The spirit is a sleeping child, and it is like one. The two parts of the simile perfectly mirror one another in a celebration of the spirit's perfect autonomy. But it is the desire for just such a state, in which the self recognizes its ideal mirror image and self and image can merge in “one immortality / And one annihilation,” that generates the rapid, breathless slippage between signs that characterizes Shelley's alternative mode. The two figurative modes are united in that both express Shelley's rejection of an alternative metaphorical ideal, in which the two terms of the metaphor are bound together both by likeness and difference, the ideal described by Coleridge as “the harmonious reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.” If, as Shelley repeatedly invites us to do, we accept that language and love are intimately connected, and that something more than a loose analogy connects linguistic and erotic practices, then we might say that Shelley's two figurative modes are united in their opposition to the possibility of a stable union founded at once on likeness and difference, by their opposition, that is, to the Christian ideal of marriage.¹⁴ Which brings me back to the oddity that Henry Alford should have chosen to present to his bride on their wedding day a copy of Shelley's Revolt of Islam.

The fullest exploration of Shelleyan eroticism by a successor is not to be found in Alford's poetical works, but in a poem written by Tennyson, a college friend of Alford's, probably in 1829. The Lover's Tale was to have been the last and the longest poem in Tennyson's volume, Poems, 1832. In the event, and despite the protests of his friends, he decided to withdraw it at the last moment, when the volume was already in proof, and did not finally publish it until forty years later.¹⁵ In 1832 the poem was a fragment in three parts. The first describes a walk taken by the poem's speaker, himself a poet, with the cousin whom he loves. In 1832 the speaker is unnamed, but when the poem was at last published he is identified as Julian. Julian walks with his cousin, Cadrilla, through a gorgeous landscape, intent on finding the perfect occasion to declare his passion, but all day long he defers the moment, until the two sit down together on the shore of a small lake. Happy and inattentive, Julian listens to the sound of his cousin's voice; only gradually does the import of what she is saying force itself upon him. Cadrilla has received a proposal of marriage from Lionel, a friend of both cousins, and she has accepted. His dreams shattered, Julian faints, and knows nothing until he awakes to find Lionel tenderly ministering to him. He stutters out his congratulations and hurries away, retreating into the nightmare world described in the poem's second and third parts, a world in which reality and hallucination merge, as do marriage and funeral, two rituals which become, in Julian's unhinged perception, giddily confused.

Julian and Cadrilla are Shelleyan lovers, each the mirror image of the other. Tennyson follows Shelley in locating the origin of Julian's love in narcissism, but he confesses it more flagrantly than even Shelley dared. Julian looks into Cadrilla's eyes in order “To worship mine own image, laved in light, / The centre of the splendours.” He may add that this idol of himself is “all unworthy / Of such a shrine” (1.63-67, 1832 edition), but the gallantry serves only to underline the egoism. He dreams, in a passage even more awash with Shelleyan echoes than the rest of the poem, of a consummation of his love, but the consummation he imagines is a penetration of the self by the self, the consummation enjoyed by “the rose,” when:

          drunk with its own wine, and overfull
Of sweetness, and in smelling of itself,
It falls on its own thorns—

(1.265-67)

Unlike Laon and Cythna, Julian and Cadrilla are only cousins; their consanguinity remains within respectable bounds. But this serves in Tennyson's poem only to make possible a specularity more perfect than even Shelley conceived. The two were born “On the same morning, almost the same hour” (1.192), the children of two sisters. Cadrilla's mother dies in childbirth. Immediately afterwards, Julian's father dies, so that now the two babies can share a single mother and a single father, and may be laid together in a single cradle, less cousins than a miracle of nature, identical twins of opposite sex.

Julian loves Cadrilla as his mirror image, but to see oneself reflected in a mirror, to recognize oneself, is inevitably to recognize the otherness of that self, and Julian is by no means willing to admit the otherness of Cadrilla. That unnerving moment when the infant for the first time sees itself in a mirror and responds to its reflection “in a flutter of jubilant activity,” can occur as early as the age of six months,¹⁶ and so it is fitting that Julian's nostalgia should focus most fondly on the time before his memory begins, on the time that he can know only from the reports of others, who can describe to him how:

                                                                                                                                                      we slept
In the same cradle always, face to face.
Heart beating time to heart, lip pressing lip,
Folding each other, breathing on each other,
Dreaming together (dreaming of each other
They should have added), till the morning light
Sloped through the pines, upon the dewy pane
Falling, unsealed our eyelids, and we woke
To gaze upon each other.

(1.252-60)

He is nostalgic for the time before he can remember, because that is the time when he could not know his separateness from Cadrilla, the time before he had learned to distinguish himself from his reflection. He looks back to his infancy, which is, as Tennyson famously knew, the time before language. In In Memoriam he defines the infant as one who “has no language but a cry.”

The Lover's Tale is a wordy poem—even in its unfinished state it extends over more than a thousand lines—but its wordiness is produced by Tennyson's employment of two tactics, both of them derived from Shelley. First, as in Epipsychidion, a recognition of the inadequacy of language itself generates a spate of words. Julian denies that his love can be “cabined up in words and syllables,” and insists on the futility of language in a massively sustained burst of eloquence. He is driven to eloquence in his anxiety to celebrate speechlessness, for the love to which he aspires is perfectly available only to the speechless infant. It is because his love cannot be spoken that Julian can only defer the moment when he will declare himself to Cadrilla, and it is that deferral that produces the poem's second tactic, for it generates the landscapes that occupy so much of the text. As he walks along, every object that he sees becomes a fetish, a substitute for the passion that he cannot speak. The landscape is charged with his own erotic yearnings. Because it is denied any other expression, his love overflows, flooding the world, transforming each and every object in it into the sign of an unspoken thought, into the kind of sign of which poems are made. Like Alastor or Epipsychidion, the first part of Tennyson's poem can be understood as a sequence of metaphors, organized by the fact that the breathless array of vehicles with which we are presented have each a single tenor, Cadrilla, Emilia, the heart's sister, and propelled forward by the inadequacy of any possible vehicle to adumbrate a truth which is defined by its being ineffable. In the second and third parts of the poem, Tennyson, still following Shelley, explores the nightmare that is as intimately connected to the dream as the shadow to the object that casts it. His model now is the madman's speech in Julian and Maddalo. Julian is deprived of his love object, deprived of the one referent that made sense of all his words, and in consequence his language runs mad: the literal and the figurative, reality and dream, merge, blur and intermingle. It is a poetic language lapsed into chaos, but chaos of a peculiar kind, of a kind, as Shelley puts it in Julian and Maddalo, “such as in measure is called poetry.”

The Lover's Tale is an encyclopaedic set of variations on Shelleyan themes, but there is something odd about it. Julian's plight is presented sympathetically, and yet throughout the poem verges on parody. The poem is a prime example of what John Bayley has described as the “implicit humour” of Tennyson's poetry, a humor that derives from a covert sense that the poems are “sending up their own subject matter.”¹⁷ There is a brutal comedy in Tennyson's poem that lurks, as it were, beneath its surface. Julian is driven mad by the discovery that the woman of his dreams had dreams of her own, and that his own love, quite perfect because unspoken, has been found wanting in comparison with that of a lover willing to express his love in the public and no doubt conventionally approximate language that, on such occasions, is the only alternative to silence. Julian remains a Shelleyan poet, but his rhapsodies are consistently undercut by Tennyson's awareness that, precisely because of the unspeakable intensity of his emotions, Julian is not at all cut out to make Cadrilla an ideal husband, and that on the whole she will be a good deal better off with Lionel. In The Lover's Tale Tennyson rehearses the defining features of Shelley's erotic poetry flamboyantly, enthusiastically, but not quite seriously.

“Cousins are almost the same as brothers,” writes Trollope in The Vicar of Bullhampton, “and yet they may be lovers.” Detached from its context, the sentence reads as though Trollope were recommending such marriages for the added erotic frisson to be gained by flirting so close to a taboo. In the same way, Alford's gift to his bride might be perversely misconstrued as an invitation to her to savor the imminence of the all-but-incestuous consummation of their love. “The idea of cousinly intimacy to girls is undoubtedly very pleasant,” Trollope writes, but he adds, “and the better and the purer is the girl, the sweeter and pleasanter is the idea.” He wrote sympathetically of such marriages not at all because he expected consanguinity to generate an added erotic intensity, but because he recognized the erotic instinct as the most powerful and hence most dangerous of human emotions, and believed that in a marriage that grew out of familiar attachment there was every chance that the erotic instinct would be properly chastened and subdued. Henry Alford seems to have shared Trollope's view of the matter. He looked forward to sharing with his wife “a lasting quiet joy,” and added: “for nothing can be lasting that is not quiet.”¹⁸

And yet he chose, as the token of his love, his treasured copy of The Revolt of Islam, and the gift seems to me symbolic. It exemplifies the peculiar difficulty that confronted the Victorian poets in their dealings with their Romantic inheritance. It was not a legacy that they felt free to disclaim, for—and in this they were unlike their Romantic precursors—they were grateful children, and they honored their poetic parents. But their legacy included frankly subversive material, of which Shelleyan incest is as good an example as any, that challenged them to find some means of accommodating it within their own more cautious, less impetuous negotiations with the received ideas of the reading public. The poem that Alford wrote on the flyleaf of the book begins: “Beloved, to whose wedded hand I trust This treasure of sweet song. …” He entrusts the book to her, but he trusts too, in the other sense, trusts that somehow, as she reads, his wife will transform Shelley's subversive visionary epic into a paean to quiet, domestic joy. He seems to ground this unlikely confidence on the fact that, before it belonged to him, the book had belonged to Arthur Hallam: “Blessed eyes / Have looked upon its pages.” Alford trusts that the gaze of his dead friend will have disinfected the book of its “errors” and reconsecrated it to the service of religious and moral values of which Shelley would surely have been surprised to find himself a proponent. Shelley could not have foreseen the manner in which Alford was to read his poem, but he foresaw at least that it would be unforeseeable, that after “one age” has taken from a poem all that “their peculiar relations enable them to share,” another age succeeds, “and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight” (Defence, p. 500). The importance of The Lover's Tale is that it allows us to watch these new relations being developed. Tennyson's poem is imitative, but it is an imitation of a new and characteristically early-Victorian kind. The imitation is affectionate, and yet there is a constant pressure diverting the poem from copy towards parody. It is a paradoxical method of winning free from a predecessor, not by avoiding his poetic habits, but by flamboyantly displaying how completely they can be assumed.¹⁹

Harold Bloom has famously argued that poetic history is made by poets “misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.” The new poet meets his precursor in a “battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads,”²⁰ and it follows from Bloom's Freudian analogy that the new poet can oust his father only by misrecognizing him, by repressing the knowledge that the killing makes him a parricide, and that the love it frees him to enjoy is incestuous. The Bloomian model of poetic influence works surprisingly well for the major Romantic poets, all of whom were men, whose dealings with their predecessors were manifestly aggressive, and who were ready enough on occasion to represent poetic utterance as the product of repression. It seems much less apt as an explanation of dealings with a predecessor such as Tennyson's in the case of The Lover's Tale.

To understand this later case, we might do well to abandon Bloom's Freudian model in favor of the model supplied by an old opponent of Freud's now little remembered, the Swedish historian of sexuality, Edward Westermarck. Against Freud, Westermarck argued that the rarity of incestuous relationships indicates that human beings do not much desire them, and he explained this disinclination by suggesting that familiarity blunts the erotic instincts of those brought up in close proximity to each other, with the result that almost all people look outside their immediate families to find sexual partners.²¹ The practice of exogamy is explained by Freud as a symptom of repression. Westermarck offers instead a scheme in which the place of repression is taken by habit. Guided by Westermarck, we can understand a poem such as The Lover's Tale as Tennyson's attempt to familiarize himself as fully as possible with the manner of his predecessor. He is intent, as Bloom suggests, on clearing an imaginative space for himself, but he does so not by misreading the predecessor, not by an act of wilful misprision, but by habituating himself to Shelley.²² The poem works to blunt Tennyson's infatuation with Shelley into the calm affection of a family attachment, a familiar bond that does not constrain Tennyson, but leaves him free to enter into new relationships, to write poems of his own. “Poetry,” writes Harold Bloom gnomically, “is the enchantment of incest disciplined by resistance to that enchantment.”²³ For Shelley, perhaps, but The Lover's Tale suggests another possibility: that a poet can yield to the enchantment rather than resist it, and find that it is through yielding that he can best win freedom from the constrictions of the family romance.

Notes

1. Alford's poem is printed in The Poetical Works of Henry Alford (London: Strahan, 1868), pp. 131-32, under the title “Written in a Copy of ‘The Revolt of Islam’.” Frances Alford remembers the book as given to her not on her wedding day, but on her first wedding anniversary, in her Life of Henry Alford (London, Oxford and Cambridge: Rivingtons, 1874), p. 105.

2. The Poetical Works of Henry Alford, p. 3.

3. On this, see John Donovan, “Incest in Laon and Cythna: Nature, Culture and Desire,” Keats-Shelley Review, 2 (1987), 49-90.

4. Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: Norton, 1977), pp. 473-74; all references to Shelly's prose are to this edition, hereafter cited in the text.

5. All quotations from Shelley's poetry are from The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corr. G. M. Matthews (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

6. Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Crucial to Clark's argument throughout his book is his persuasive presentation of Shelley's insistence that human beings are characterized by their capacity for unlimited desire as the notion through which Shelley is able to unify the erotic and the political energies of his verse.

7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structure of Kinship Relations, trans. Bell, von Sturmer and Needham, revised edition (London: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 68.

8. See John Taylor Coleridge's unsigned article in the Quarterly Review, reprinted in Shelley: The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 124-35.

9. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structure of Kinship Relations, pp. 492-97.

10. Shelley may have in mind Coleridge's description, in chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria, of Wordsworth's ambition in his contributions to Lyrical Ballads “to awaken the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom” by “directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.” The significant difference from Shelley is that Coleridge chooses, in place of an erotic language, a language that invests the thought with religious resonance by its echo of the psalmist. The connection made by Shelley between love and language has been often remarked, for example by Roland A. Durkheim, who argues that for Shelley the “creative, imaginatively identifying use of language … is the quintessential act of love” in his Shelley's Poetry of Involvement (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 33. The relationship has been most fully explored by William A. Ulmer in his Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

11. “I always go on until I am stopped, and I never am stopped,” Shelley told Edward Trelawney according to his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, ed. Edward Dowden (London: Henry Froude, 1906), p. 45.

12. For an extended exhibition of this technique see Epipsychidion, lines 1-123; but such passages are only extreme manifestations of Shelley's liking for metaphors that admit their own deliquescence, the kind of metaphor explored by William Keach in his chapter, “Evanescence: Melting, Dissolving, Erasing,” Shelley's Style (New York and London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 118-53.

13. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1961), p. 160. The “self-inwoven simile” is again only the most extreme manifestation of that quirk of Shelleyan style ably explored by William Keach in his chapter “Reflexive Imagery,” in Shelley's Style, pp. 79-117.

14. I find it appropriate that Epipsychidion, the poem in which Shelley's two figurative techniques are employed more pervasively than elsewhere, should include a fierce rejection of the marriage ideal: “I never was attached to that great sect, / Whose doctrine is that each one should select / Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, / And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend / To cold oblivion …” (lines 149-53). It would not have escaped Shelley that, in the extract from The Recluse prefixed to The Excursion, Wordsworth celebrates his own poetics by insisting on their foundation in the Christian ideal of marriage. His task is to celebrate “the discerning intellect of Man / When wedded to the goodly universe / In love and holy passion,” and his is “the spousal verse / Of that great consummation.” Shelley is himself capable of using the nuptial metaphor, as in A Defence of Poetry, when he claims of poetry that “it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things” (p. 505). But even here Shelley seems to go out of his way to suggest a marriage as unstable as possible. William Ulmer is the critic who has explored most profoundly the relation in Shelley between love and language, especially in the first chapter of Shelleyan Eros, “Shelley's Poetics of Love,” pp. 3-24. He argues that Shelley's idealization of love requires an “idealization of metaphor” (p. 7); that is, Shelley's insistence that the ideal lover is a mirror image of the self requires Shelley to entertain the fiction that metaphor may join tenor and vehicle in an indivisible unity in which the difference between them is erased. The moments of collapse that punctuate the poems mark those moments at which the fiction proves impossible to sustain. Ulmer's argument is strongly suggestive, and I am indebted to it, and yet it seems to me mistaken in its emphasis. It seems odd to accuse of entertaining the ambition to eradicate the difference between tenor and vehicle a poet who has prompted David Perkins to protest: “it sometimes seems in Shelley's poetry that virtually anything can be compared to anything else,” The Quest for Permanence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 168. And it seems equally odd to claim this of a poet so willing to refuse the insistences of metaphor in favor of the approximations of simile.

15. For the tangled publication history of The Lover's Tale, see The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Ricks, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1969), 1, 325-81; all quotations are from this edition unless otherwise noted. Cadrilla, when the poem was at last published, was re-christened Camilla. Julian and Lionel are distinctively Shelleyan names, as in Julian and Maddalo, Rosalind and Helen, and The Boat on the Serchio. In later life Tennyson claimed to have written his poem before he had read Shelley, but commentators on The Lover's Tale concur in dismissing this as a lapse of memory.

16. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 1-2.

17. John Bayley, “Tennyson and the Idea of Decadence” in Studies in Tennyson, ed. Hallam Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 186-205.

18. The Life of Henry Alford, p. 84.

19. Compare Browning in the second book of Sordello, when Sordello announces that he will display his mastery over all other men by showing his capacity to become them. This is put in a more masculinely aggressive manner than came naturally to Tennyson, but it does indicate how the composition of Paracelsus and Sordello may have helped Browning in much the same way that the writing of The Lover's Tale helped Tennyson. On Browning's understanding of Shelley, see Philip Drew, “Browning's Essay on Shelley,” Victorian Poetry, I (1963), 1-6; Thomas J. Collins, “Browning's Essay on Shelley: in context,” Victorian Poetry, 2 (1964), 119-24; and John Woolford, ‘The philosophy and poetics of power in Browning's early work,” Browning Society Notes, 14.2 (Summer 1984), 1-21.

20. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 3, 11.

21. Westermarck's views are set out at length in The History of Human Marriage (London: Macmillan, 1894), and are condensed in his A Shorter History of Marriage (New York: Macmillan, 1926). Freud dismissed Westermarck's theory on the cause of exogamus prohibitions on the ground that it failed to explain the severity of the punishments deployed to deter us from incest, punishments which, it seemed to Freud, would be redundant were there not a general human inclination towards incest. See Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1922), p. 177. The objection has some force, but Freud himself is unable to account for the existence of societies that impose no or minimal sanctions against incestuous behavior, and it is not evident that a correlation must exist between the severity of the penalty and the temptingness of the crime. In Britain, for example, one of the few remaining capital offences is the crime of setting fire to Her Majesty's dockyards. It would be rash to infer from this a lively disposition in the British to experiment with this particular form of arson. Stronger empirical support can be given to Westermarck's hypothesis than to Freud's. Arthur Wolf has investigated practitioners of the traditional Chinese sim-pua form of marriage, in which the bride is introduced into the groom's household as a very young girl, and brought up as an adopted daughter of the family. He finds such marriages to be remarkably unsuccessful, and reports the sad case of a father who, after the marriage of his son and daughter-in-law, was able to persuade them to remain in their bedroom only by standing guard outside the door armed with a stout stick (American Anthropologist, 72.3 [June 1970], 503-15). Even more remarkable are the findings of Joseph Shepher, who has studied the marriages of those brought up in the Israeli kibbutzim where children were reared communally, girls and boys sharing dormitories, showering together, without restriction on any sexual play between them. He has been unable to authenticate even one example of a marriage between a man and a woman brought up in the same children's group (“Mate Selection Among Second Generation Kibbutz Adolescents and Adults,” Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 1 [1973], 293-307).

22. Westermarck and Freud may seem to maintain quite inconsistent theories of the origin of incest prohibitions, but Robin Fox in The Red Lamp of Incest (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), offers an ingenious suggestion as to how they might be reconciled. All that is required is to reverse the sequence of Freud's argument, so that incestuous desires are represented as the product of their repression rather than their cause. In that case, those societies that seek to deter the nearly related from expressing sexual interest in each other would risk producing the desires that they seek to repress. In societies where such behavior is not repressed, the Westermarck effect will operate. This leaves open the possibility that what Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence” would exert itself strongly only on poets whose sense of self-worth was tied to a belief in their own supreme originality, for they would be induced to deny that they had been influenced, and the more vehement the denial the stronger would be the bonds tying such poets to their precursors. Poets able to begin their careers happily and guiltlessly imitating the manner of an admired predecessor could expect to emerge into poetic independence quite unneurotically.

23. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 95.