Missed Opportunity

My mother was a poetry expert. Actually she earned her living as a Speech Therapist and Elocution Teacher, but what she most enjoyed was working with her senior pupils to get them through the LAMDA and Poetry Society exams. Some of those who came to her went on to be distinguished in various aspects of the dramatic arts. She knew her Shakespeare inside out, and was very fond of Keats and Shelley among others.

Most of this passed me by. A steady drip of poetry, both good and less so, has a similar effect on a child as inoculation. I did learn to appreciate some poets and their work, but not as widely as I might have. And I never took the opportunity to discuss with her the basis of her interpretations. When she advised that a line be rendered this way rather than that, what exactly did she have in mind? Was it the sound, the dramatic effect, the poet's meaning? And if the latter, what did she know of the background against which he was writing?

I know a little about Shakespeare's place in history, not much, and nothing at all about Keats. But I do know quite a bit about Shelley. He married the daughter of one of my heroes, William Godwin, who went on herself to write Frankenstein. Shelley was deeply influenced by Godwin's 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and in some respects was more Godwinian in his views than Godwin had been when he wrote it. Shelley certainly disapproved of adjustments that Godwin made to his theory in later editions of the book in the light of experience. Shelley's poetry is intimately related to Godwin's original philosophy.

And so was his behaviour. Shelley's cavalier attitude towards other people's feelings and opinions, which sprung from his enthusiasm for Godwin's ideas, led indirectly to the suicide of Mary Wollstonecraft's first daughter, Fanny, and directly to the suicide of his first wife, Harriet, who he abandoned for Mary Godwin, and to his subsequent total disinterest in his children from that marriage.

Which is why I would like to have discussed my mother's interpretation of his poetry with her. How much of this did she know? How much of it, if she knew it, did she take into account when teaching his poetry? Did she think that the relationship between the poetic expression of ideas and the behaviour to which those ideas led was important, or even relevant?

I shall never know. Does it matter? Godwin's ideas also form the basis of his daughter Mary Shelley's brilliantly original novel, Frankenstein, and many of the conflicts and questions that arise from his teaching are worked out between the characters of the story. Indeed, it was to popularise her father's insights that Mary wrote the book. But who cares about that now? It's just a darn good story, isn't it?