Printer-friendly versionSend by email  Reading Shelley's
Interventionist Poetry, 1819-1820  Shelley, Adorno, and the
Scandal of Committed Art  Mark Kipperman, Northern Illinois
University    1. Response     In fact, can't Shelley be said to
be experimenting with a kind of radical "ventriloquism" from the
time of his early collection, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret
Nicholson? The self-conscious balladic simplicity of the Mask,
including its adoption of the popular-print and pamphlet idioms,
is further evidence of his attempt to "throw his voice" into the
fray from a position outside it. Though Shelley is concerned
about the problem of "virtual representation," we must remember
that he was the rogue son of an M.P. who continued to see just
representation as his calling, even if he renounced it as his
birthright.      The scandal of Shelley’s great political
ballad, "The Mask of Anarchy," is that its appeal to the power
of mass resistance is written from aristocratic exile. Certainly
this position does not dis