Ruskin and Shelley, the ‘Turner of poetry’
Taken from a paper given by Companion Naomi Lightman at the 25th anniversary conference of the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) in Oxford, Summer 2025.
RUSKIN AND SHELLEY, THE 'TURNER OF POETRY' 1]
by Naomi Lightman, taken from her paper delivered at the July 2025 BAVS conference in Oxford.
John Ruskin ‘s complex response to Shelley’s writing has received relatively little attention .2] Ruskin’s dismissal of his youthful reading of Shelley as described in his autobiography Praeterita may be partly responsible for this neglect. There he records his attraction to Shelley as comparable to a ‘fly feeding upon barley sugar in a grocer’s shop’ making him ‘sick and sticky’. But evidence from unpublished passages from Praeterita tell a different story: ’with Shelley’s descriptions of seas and mountains I had complete sympathy’....3]
Two volumes in the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, hitherto unconsidered, may help to increase our understanding of Ruskin’s response to Shelley’s writings. See images of photocopies from these two volumes, supplied by the author, in a pdf HERE.
The first, with Ruskin’s annotations, is the 1829 Galignani edition of the poems of Shelley, Coleridge and Keats. Described in Praeterita as a ’large octavo close printed volume’ it often lay open on the table in the Herne Hill drawing room where the young Ruskin sat. 4]. Published in Paris it may have been especially valued by the Ruskin family as it was edited by a family friend, Cyrus Redding. [see illustration]
Ruskin recalled how Keats’s poetry ‘puzzled’ him and that he read Coleridge ‘as a duty’. Not allowed by his parents to read Byron’s work unsupervised, he discovered Shelley in his late teens just as the ‘days of ferment’ resulting from his doomed infatuation for his father’s business partner’s fifteen year old daughter Adele Domecq developed. The subsequent ’frothy fever’ gave his capacity to imitate what he admired new impetus and in the poems of these love-lorn years Shelley’s influence is everywhere.
But Ruskin’s annotations in the edition tell us further elements in his attraction to Shelley’s poetry. These suggest also how his response differs from other readers both Victorian and later. Thus in an undated, marginal note Ruskin comments on a passage from Shelley’s verse drama Prometheus Unbound [Act 4 ll.278-286]
‘This would be a wonderful passage were it only for the physical knowledge displayed in it’.
The passage describes’ the secrets of the earth’s deep heart:’
Infinite mines of adamant and gold,
Valueless stones, and unimagined gems,
And caverns on crystalline columns poised
With vegetable silver overspread,....[. See photocopy]
Ruskin ‘s comment reveals how far his response was from contemporary and later readers who described Shelley’s style as vague and imprecise. Ruskin’s note reveals that he valued Shelley’s interests in science, welcoming a writer who like himself had ‘interwoven interests’ such as geology as illustrated in the annotated passage. Ruskin was also alert to their shared interest in meteorology. In 1839,in a paper delivered to the newly established Meteorological Society, the 20 year old Ruskin writes a rhapsodical defence of meteorology illustrating again from the 4th act of Prometheus Unbound describing the earth as she spins beneath her ‘pyramid of light’ ending with further echoes of Shelley’s imagery in his concern to explain the pattern behind evanescent climatic appearances:
Times and seasons, and climates, calms and tempests, clouds and winds, whose alternations appear to the inexperienced eye the confused consequences of irregular, indefinite and accidental causes, arrange themselves before the meteorologist in beautiful succession of undisturbed order, in direct derivation from definite causes; it is for him to trace the path of the tempest round the globe,-to point out the place whence it arose ,- to foretell the time of its decline ,- to follow the hours around the earth…5]]
With his discovery of Turner, Ruskin found further encouragement for his appreciation of Shelley’s poetry. It gave him the verbal tools to describe in prose the effects Turner was trying to capture in paint .Beyond the examples before him from Wordsworth and Byron, Shelley’s depiction of natural effects opened up to him a delicacy of perception which offered a parallel in words to Turner’s late style.
When Ruskin first visited Venice in 1835, Shelley’s portrayal of the city’s ‘sea glories‘ offered a welcome contrast to the ’darker truths‘ of Venetian history he encountered in Byron. Now venturing into fiction, Ruskin’s epigraph to his unfinished novel of 1835-6 draws together passages from Shelley’s ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills’ which encapsulate the abstracted essence of Turner’s representation of the city:
Underneath day’s azure eyes
Ocean’s nursling Venice lies
On the waters crystalline
Column, tower, dome and spire
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire -tinted skies….
By 1836 with Ruskin’s first written defence of Turner he focuses on the painting of ‘Juliet and her Nurse’, in which Turner changed the location from Verona to Venice. Ruskin’s response owes much to Shelley’s fascination with fleeting effects like the ’inconstant motion’ in the epigraph above , when he describes Venetian mists ’of uncertain light ‘ as the city’s spires rise ‘indistinctly bright….’ We might recall Turner’s words 'Indistinctness is my forte’ to account for Ruskin’s attraction to a poet like Shelley who depicted in words ‘evanescent visitations’ and the 'radiant mystery’ of a visible world that tested ‘the bewildered and foiled glance.’
It is not surprising therefore that when setting himself the task of connecting modern painters to poets he should choose for Turner a passage from Shelley, from Prometheus Unbound, Act 2 lines 17-25 heavily marked in his edition of Shelley’s poetry.6] It depicts an elusive moment of transition between night and day spoken by a character longing for the dawn bringing a reunion and it merits being quoted in full:
The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains; through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it: now it wanes; it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air;
‘Tis lost! And through yon peaks of cloud-like snow
The roseate sunlight quivers….
Such a description spoken by a character puts an emotional emphasis on the last vestiges of night merging into ’widening dawn.’ Present participles like ‘widening’, ’quivering,’ ‘burning,’ verbs like ‘unravel‘, ‘gleams', ‘wanes’ and ‘quivers’ capture in the use of the present tense the delicate changes as they take place .Shelley’s use of ‘chasm’ is an exact parallel in poetry to one of Turner’s characteristic painterly effects. Ruskin’s choice of Shelley to illustrate Turner offers an insight into the part played by his poetry in helping him to convey Turner’s vision in prose as in the first volume of Modern Painters. Thus in ’Of Truth of Clouds’ what has been described as ‘oscillation’ in Shelley’s diction is comparable to Ruskin’s own use of words like ‘kindling, ’trembling’, ’fluctuating’, ’palpitating’, ’melting’ and ‘quivering ‘. It might also be suggested that these verbs connect the visual reaction to landscape with bodily ones. In Ruskin’s exhortation to his readers to ‘stand upon the peak of some isolated mountain at daybreak ’to observe the progress of the rain cloud', can we also trace Shelley’s use of’ aerial perspective’ which Ruskin defines in Modern Painters in, for example, the first stanza of canto 1 of the Revolt of Islam, which begins with a reference to the ’brief dream of trampled France’?
From visions of despair I rose, and scaled
The peak of an aereal promontory……….
And saw the golden dawn break forth, and wake
Each cloud…
The storm which follows affects the spectator in terms which the young Ruskin may well have felt an affinity with
I could not choose but gaze; a fascination
Dwelt in that moon, and sky and clouds……
Turner’s later symbolic treatment of sea and storm ,as in The Slave Ship, might also offer another link to such passages in Shelley.
Such enthusiasm for Shelley’s response to nature waned in the years following the first volume of Modern Painters and by the late 1840s Ruskin was to call Shelley’s diction "affected ‘’ and to contrast his ’sickly dreaming over clouds and waves’ with Walter Scott’s ’masculine and magnificent grasp of men and things’’7]. However, many years later ,he came to a different conclusion. Now ln contrast to ‘the cheerful joys’ of Scott and Chaucer, and the delight in ‘clear-struck beauty’ of painters like Fra Angelico, erstwhile favourites, he had come to believe that he shared with four men in modern times - Rousseau, Byron, Turner and Shelley - a sense of material beauty of inanimate nature, which in ’iridescence, colour-depth, morbid mystery and softness,’ were unique in modern time 8 ]
An annotation in the Galignani edition also offers yet another contrast between Ruskin’s earlier and later assessments of Shelley’s impact on him. It can be found in the margin of a passage in Prometheus Unbound ,[Act 1 l.316] and it describes the entry of the god Mercury as a ‘noble modern piece of Greek ideal’:
But see, where through the azure chasm
Of yon forked and snowy hill……
With golden-sandalled feet, that glow
Under plumes of purple dye…
A Shape comes now…
A cancelled note in the first two editions of Modern Painters recalls Ruskin’s memory of visiting a site in Switzerland in 1835 where he uniquely experienced the ‘Greek feeling of divinity’ which he suggests might have been the ‘ ground work of many of Shelley’s noblest descriptive passages.’9] Though in 1854 he would dismiss myths as ‘paltry fables’, the later myth-making in books like The Queen of the Air [1869] suggests another re-reading of Shelley’s dramatic use of myth. Daniel Williams quotes Ruskin’s words defending ‘the vital, felt, instinctive truth in ancient symbolism’’[19:22] and sees Athena’s ’bright blue eyes and…aegis’ as accurate mythic expressions of natural phenomena 10]
When, later still, Ruskin turned his attention to the issues around climate change, in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, there may be yet further links with Shelley. Sharon Ruston has described Shelley’s reading of pioneering scientific literature of his time related to the earliest awareness of how, as he describes in the first Act of ]Prometheus Unbound [lines551-3]
Many a million -peopled city
Vomits smoke in the bright air
In Shelley’s apocalyptic landscapes relating to the effect of Prometheus’s curse, Ruskin would have read of a link between changes in the natural world and moral and societal factors that could be connected to Shelley’s own day but which offered a more recent version of an ancient Biblical theme.
Finally it is time to return to the second, hitherto unexamined book in the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University. Dating from 1845,it further enriches our understanding of the impact of Shelley on Ruskin, not only as a poet but as a prose writer whose concern over economic and social issues anticipates his own. Dating from 1846, the unmarked volume in question, ’Shelley’s Essays, Letters from Abroad’ edited by Mary Shelley, has a handwritten dedication to Ruskin dated 1846 from Joseph Severn, who had earned his tribute from Shelley in the preface to Adonais, as the friend of the dying Keats. Ruskin met Severn in Rome in 1840. He was the father of Arthur Severn who married Joan [nee Agnew], who cared for Ruskin in his last years at Brantwood.
In this edition, Ruskin would have read in The Defence of Poetry its questioning of utilitarianism and the ’unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty’. Already, in earlier years, he would have read in Shelley’s poem Queen Mab its updating of Gray’s Elegy
How many a vulgar Cato has compelled
His energies, no longer tameless then,
To mould a pin or fabricate a nail![section V lines140-3]
Did Ruskin recall such passages in The Nature of Gothic chapter in The Stones of Venice when he described that all that is left in the factory worker is not enough ‘to make a pin, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail?’
Did Shelley’s lines
The happiness of man
Yields to the wealth of nations[section V 79-80]
contribute to his famous aphorism ’there is no wealth but life’?
By 1862, Ruskin now saw Shelley not as a ‘sickly dreamer’ but with Rousseau, Keats and Byron, as
‘Real men, and all clergymen as fools ,machines or madmen’
whilst by 1880 he was still praising Shelley’s ‘volcanic instinct of Astraean justice.’
Ruskin’s final reference to Shelley is to be found in his 1885 Preface to Praeterita. He describes how he saw at first his autobiography as ‘little more than an old man’s recreation ln ‘gathering visionary flowers in fields of youth’. Thanks to the recent edition of Praeterita by Francis O’Gorman we can now identify this phrase ’visionary flowers’ as coming from Shelley’s poem ‘The Question’[1820] l.33. 10]. It describes how the poet dreams of winter changing to spring and he describes in intense detail a bank of wild flowers that dazzled his eye more than any ‘wakened eyes’ might behold. In the final stanza he dreams that he gathers a nosegay of these ‘visionary flowers’ which reflects the way in which the flowers grew in the ground ’mingled or opposed’ - a phrase that might helpfully describe Ruskin’s own responses to Shelley himself.
Footnotes:
1] E. T. Cook, Literary Recollections,1912 p217
2] Exceptions are Catherine Maxwell: ’Sensitive Plants: Shelley’s Influence on Ruskin’’, Durham University Journal 87[1995]pps31-41, and Kei Nijibayashi :’An Undercurrent of Shelley’s Poetics in Ruskin’s Modern Painters ‘ Cambridge Quarterly vol.51.no.4 December 2022 pps352-366.
3] Samuel E. Brown: ’Unpublished Passages from the Ms of Ruskin’s Autobiography’, Victorian Newsletter, Fall.vol.16 1959,p.12
4] The Works of John Ruskin,39 vol., ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn,[1903-1912] 35:274. [Hereafter cited by volume and page number ] See photocopy of title page of Ruskin’s copy at Lancaster. Reprinted with an introduction by Jonathan Wordsworth by Woodstock Books,2002 .It was the first [if pirated] collected works for Shelley and Keats.
5] 1.208
6] 3.652
7] 4.297
8] 34.343
9] 3.540 note
10] p156 in Daniel Williams; Atmospheres of Liberty: Ruskin in the clouds ELH Vol.8,No1[Spring2015,pp141-182
11] p.124,and notes32,33,34 pps203-4 Shelley and Vitality, Palgrave 2005.
]35,11-12,and see p.5 and p.367 Praeterita edited by Francis O’Gorman[Oxford University Press 2012]