The Politics of Language in P.B. Shelley

The essay explores Shelley’s stance on the verbal medium, by examining his two ways of considering language. On one hand, Shelley’s language appears to have primarily communicative purposes and, in his more political output, serves as a vehicle to reach the lower classes, exhort them, and ultimately set them free from linguistic hegemonic policies aimed at subordinating them. On the other hand, Shelley’s discourse seems to be directed towards a self-referential reflection, in which the linguistic medium comes to be regarded as an obscure and arbitrary code that imprisons thought – and consequently artistic conception – in artificial patterns that the poet needs to dismantle in order to re-establish a direct connection between his original conception and verbal expression. While his poems show this dual implication, his aesthetic manifesto, A Defence of Poetry, reveals Shelley’s problematic approach to the standard linguistic code, which in the final analysis the poet abandons in favour of a language originating from analogical and metaphorical relationships, able to revive the dead bound between sign and referent.