Shelley’s Poet-Birds

IN ‘TO A SKYLARK’, Shelley wonders how to understand the bird he observes: ‘What thou art we know not; / What is most like thee?’1 The same question might be asked of poets, we realise, when Shelley swiftly makes the skylark ‘like a poet’ that is ‘Singing hymns unbidden’ (ll. 36, 37), a singer of such sincerity and feeling that it might seem a model for the poet. Shelley was fascinated by the identity and responsibility of the poet. Wordsworth asks, ‘what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?’2 Shelley’s approach is more oblique, his prose and poetry strewn with similes rather than bound by definitions. Conjuring the ideal poet as a combination of legislator and prophet, A Defence of Poetry imagines one who ‘essentially comprises and unites both these characters’ (MW, p. 677). In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley complements this abstract though thoughtful description with brief portraits of figures such as Dante and Plato, who provide examples of the nature of the poet. But in his poetry Shelley returns to the more figurative idea of the poet as a bird, granting himself the freedom to conceive multiple ways of seeing or imagining the poet via an avian counterpart. Strengths and weaknesses are drawn out through the parallels: the poet-bird, sometimes standing in for a particular poet, at other times representing the poet as an unspecified figure, lets Shelley muse upon the reality and the ideal of the poet’s role.