Shelly

Congratulations to correspondent Ferguson. The broadcast attack of the English Department on Shelley's claim of a poet to a vital link with the world of men, was a disgraceful sign of the times. In these red-hunting days, it is no wonder that Shelley, too, is subject to post mortem persecution. In his own lifetime he was considered so dangerous that he-was hounded from his native land, and conservatism still thinks it can hound him from his rightful place in the English heritage.

Gradually we overturn the living traditions of our national culture and our very civilisation, in an effort to save a dying social form. The universities must be the battlegrounds on which conflicting ideological forces of vitality and obscurantism, life and death, meet. The Magi of the West preach the new crusade on culture. At the same time as the moron mind is being incubated in juke-boxes, comic-cuts and sex magazines, the first regiment of the new brown-shirts, reaching for their guns when they hear the word "culture." appear in black gowns.

They start by attacking the finest strains of English literature. They lay their crowns at the feet of neurotic misanthropes like Eliot and Pound, who are proclaimed the new messiahs. Parallel misanthropes from former ages—Donne, Vaughan and some of the Augustans, escapists in an age of great social movement-are resurrected from a timely grave. Anyone who could write his name and he cynical about the future of mankind; anyone who lived in another world, but had the sweet, nauseating knack of fitting euphonious words together—he is raised into a Giant of English Literature. Milton and Blake are perverted into "mystics." Burns is a "sentimental drunkard." Shelley an "ineffectual angel." I heard one member of the English department staff remark the other day that Shakespeare's concept of human tragedy was "incomplete" because he regarded the earthly existence as final, and took no account of a hereafter!

And the Chartists sang it as they marched. His revolutionary songs, with those of cruder poets, were the rallying weapon of the nascent English working-class movement. Said Engels: "We all know Shelley then."

And to-day, when class society totters, is it to be wondered at that the powers that be want us to know Shelley no longer? Might not these lines prove, indeed, to be legislation for the world.

"Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanqulshuble number—

Shake your chains to earth like, dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many, they arc few."