The Poet 207
a version of Self hood that bottles up an individual within himself
and prevents his going out to merge with the being of others. The
Identity is what makes Keats’s negative capability, the capacity to
annul Self and imagine the other, impossible. Ginsberg calls his
power of negation Moloch— eater of children, devourer of the best
minds and hearts of his generation— and strives against it in Howl.
In doing so, he calls on the inspiring powers of his beloved, Carl
Solomon.
The Romantic poet is compelled to anatomize the opposition. He
fi nds the spirit of Urizen where it dwells in the world, to be sure.
But he also needs to seek and disclose it in himself. Yet still there is
more to do. The Romantic poet needs to teach us, and himself, how
to break through the merely given life to make contact with Frye’s
second world, the world we aspire to live in. The poet tries to make
himself and the world around him new. And to do so, he relies on
the dangerous powers of love— dangerous because love is a source
of energy and joy, but also of illusion.
To defeat Jupiter, Shelley’s Prometheus has to forswear his own
spirit of revenge—he must repudiate that which is most Jupiter- like
in him. Just so Blake tries to repudiate his own Urizenic side. But
Prometheus has also got to join himself to his beloved, Asia, who
completes him and makes him a full creator once more. Together
they can live in the world of art and science that once was and,
through defeat of the tyrant, is now going to be regained and
renewed.
Yet there is a danger here. By forswearing vio lence and revenge,
the individual makes himself someone who is, perhaps, far too vul-
nerable for life in this world. He is too open, too easily wounded,
and also too ready a prey to disillusion. Shelley’s poetry is both a
hymn to the blessed self re- creation available through love and a se-
ries of dirges about its frequent failure and about the failure of the
world to sustain the hopes that love can ignite.