Beyond the Binary Opposition of Poetics and Politics: Shelley"s The Mask of Anarchy

Beyond the Binary Opposition of Poetics and Politics: Shelley"s The Mask of Anarchy

&nbsp;&nbsp;This essay intends to provide a political re­reading of Shelley’s poetry as a political discourse and his politics as a poetic discourse, focusing on The Mask of Anarchy in terms of the politics of poetic form. In short, this article argues that poetics and politics are one in Shelley, at least in The Mask. While the first half of The Mask shows how to read written history as a disguised masquerade, the other half is concerned with how to write unwritten history through poetry. On the one hand, by re-presenting the Peterloo Massacre as a dream vision of the poet, Shelley sheds a new light on the massacre and, at the same time, calls for the audience’s active interpretation of the event in this unfamiliar version. Besides, the incoherent and not­seamless structure of The Mask also heightens the “alienation effect” of the poem, impeding the audience’s entire immersion into the poem. Shelley’s representation of the massacre as a masquerade asks readers to “read” not only his poem but also the massacre itself with a keen sense of political consciousness.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;In The Mask, more importantly, history itself becomes a kind of text to be read, written, and revised like a poem; the poem is a kind of political performance to intervene in society like political movements. Like Poesy&nbsp;&nbsp;awakens and inspires the poet, Shelley wants his poem to awaken and inspire the reformers so that they can “revise” their previous drafts of law. Through The Mask, in short, Shelley shows how to read/write a poem and, at the same time, how to read/write history as a story. After all, poetics and politics become one in Shelley.