posted on 11 Oct 2016

Red Shelley by Paul Foot

Paul Foot died at the comparatively early age of 66 in 2004 and despite being a long time member of Socialist Workers Party and a tireless campaigner for justice – usually characteristics that would lead to vilification from the establishment -  his reputation has the pre-eminent popular radical journalist of his generation has continued to grow. Foot was able to be both a coruscating critic of the powerful and get his message out into the public in a popular way – he regularly wrote for the Daily Mirror and for Private Eye.

Whilst Foot is remembered largely as a political journalist and writer of broadsheets he was by no means a one trick pony.  He also loved radical writers within the English literary canon and developed a particular passion for the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley which led, in 1980, to the publication of his ground-breaking study Red Shelley.

Foot’s study starts from a perspective we can all identify with – school poetry anthologies. For generations we have been served up anthologies of poetry, usually  edited by some renowned older statesman of the literary scene, which purport to give young readers an introduction to the great works of the most important poets in the language. Of course what most us suspect even when we encounter these collections for the first time is that these selections tip-toe very carefully around anything that might be deemed to be even remotely ‘controversial’ and the result is something anodyne and tragically dull.

Few writers have suffered more from this backdoor censorship than Shelley. Lumped in together with a batch of other Romantic poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Byron – we are usually served up the stuff that won't scare the horses but that emphasises the rather populist notion of the Romantic school as fey, limp and lyrical. Anyone digging deeper will know of course that this is a travesty and that the  poetry of the Romantic school was often as revolutionary ( and reactionary in some cases) as the Age of Revolution from which it came. No-one was more radical and less compromising in his commitment to social justice than Shelley and this belief in political protest against a corrupt establishment runs through his work like a seam of gold.

In this book Foot sets out to liberate Shelley from the cage of the anthology and to elucidate for us the main strands of his thinking and to set the poet in his rightful social and political context. He starts by giving us a warts and all picture of the contemporary social and political milieu and graphically sets out the greedy, exploitative and corpulent tendencies of the ruling class in Britain at that time; a ruling class beset by fear of popular revolution, hatred of the ‘mob’ and an absolute belief in their entitlement to rule. Shelley saw the fundamental barbarity of their attitudes and their methods of social control and had the skill to capture his fury in verse that was as powerful as anything produced by the protest singers of the 1960s.

Shelley also understood how the powerful retained control and the institutions that supported their unjust rule – in particular he turned his fire on organised religion. Controversially for the time in which he lived, Shelley was a vocal and confirmed atheist who saw the church and the message it peddled as a critical part of the repression of ordinary people and a tool to frustrate their desire to be free of oppression. Foot does, I think, more than adequately refute later revisionist interpretations of Shelley’s work which have claimed he developed a belief in God towards the end of his (short) life and he also shows how hard Shelley worked on trying to get Byron to also reject a belief in a supernatural God.

I think Foot’s book makes a compelling case for seeing Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy as his most powerful poem -  a cry of rage and anguish occasioned by the terrible Peterloo massacre in Manchester. There can be few more moving and powerful poems of human rights  than this and very few that have been so systematically airbrushed out of existence in the anthologies I mentioned at the beginning. It’s hard to imagine that anyone reading this poem will forget the haunting images of horror that accompany vicious pen portraits of demon politicians and any poem that starts like this is a thing of wonder:

 

I

As I lay asleep in Italy

There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

II

I met Murder on the way -

He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

 

III

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

 

In many ways Castlereagh was an easy target – he was a man that was easy to hate and deserved most of that. Shelley wasn’t alone in detesting this dark political operator. Byron too had an opinion:

Posterity will ne'er survey

A nobler grave than this:

Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:

Stop, traveller, and piss.

 

I first read Foot’s book the best part of 20 years ago and at the time it completely blew me away, partly because it opened up the work of Shelley in a way I couldn’t imagine happening if I’d turned to tradition literary criticism for inspiration and partly because it helped to show me just how covert censorship works. Reading it again I come to it with a slightly more critical eye and I can see weaknesses in the way the book is structured and in some of the blanket dismissals of any critical voices seeking to diminish what Shelley achieved. However, ultimately the book is still a triumph because of the remarkable verve Foot throws into the study – by sheer weight of  enthusiasm he carries the reader along with his argument and I for one was happy to be taken on the ride.

Terry Potter

October 2016