Al rescate del futuro romántico: The Triumph of Life y las utopías de Shelley

Abstract

Traditional exegesis of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of Life have been overdetermined by the poet’s early death and its surrounding myth. This posthumous fragment has been read as Shelley’s capitulation, a final surrender of the political ideals animating such poems as QueenMab or Prometheus Unbound that, in spite of the widespread disenchantment following the Congress of Vienna, argued against tyranny and in favor of a new world. His death thus became part of most critical readings of his works, and the sum of his poetry appears to reflect the rise and fall of revolutionary and political enthusiasm in the face of a hostile world (this despite the fact that the very year of his death Shelley published Hellas, another political poem centered on the possible emancipation of Greece from Ottoman rule). Certain critics’ involuntary Romanticism may have contributed to this phenomenon. However, if we pull back the mythical curtain, it is possible to reconsider both The Triumph of Life and Shelley's life work. More accurate reconstructions of his death, such as Wu's (2015), shed a completely different light on the shipwreck that ended his life. Thus we can claim for Shelley’s poetry the utopian horizonshe always sought, instead of confining it to the tragic narrative in which it has been locked, and to fight against those critical readings that seek to neutralize the political power of his poetry.