Abstract
Engaging with the poetics of Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry and Lord Byron's The Prophecy of Dante and practicing Godwin's notion of the licentia historica, Mary Shelley's Valperga explores poetry's role in rethinking history. Against the grain of historical narratives that legitimize Castruccio's rise to power and his rule, Valperga dramatizes the conflict between his rhetoric and Euthanasia's counter-rhetoric of freedom, which is modeled on Dantean poetics. Shelley inserts poetry and passions into history through Euthanasia and Beatrice, while simultaneously depicting their erasure. Interrogating the concepts of passion, reason, and non-reason in rhetoric, this essay examines Valperga's recurring focus on the "chasm" and "blanks" that result from historical erasure as part of Shelley's metapoetics. Through an archeology of the heart that excavates the poetic heart from the ruins of conventional history, the essay suggests the regenerative potential of the blanks that persist as poetic residues.