| Popis: |
Percy Bysshe Shelley, though not an active musician, was a keen listener. Like other progressive intellectuals in the 1810s, he perceived in the act of listening to music a form of soulful elevation which, in poems such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’, he connected to awakened political consciousness and self-realisation. Shelley twice gave musical instruments to women whose musical talents inspired him poetically. The first was an expensive Kirkman piano given to Claire Clairmont, the second an Italian-made guitar given to Jane Williams. His poems inspired by them, ‘To Constantia, Singing’ and ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, are contrasted with his ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, a poem addressed to a third musician friend, which contains no explicit musical references. Shelley believed that music was a property of his verse: in his Defence of Poetry, he distinguishes poetry from prose by virtue of its ‘uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry’. Finally, the neuroscience of listening to music is briefly discussed. |
