P. B.シェリーの『詩の弁護』におけるヒエログリフの比喩―エラズマス・ダーウィンから引き継いだ伝統―

抄録

In his essay, A Defence of Poetry, P. B. Shelley compares poetry to hieroglyphics. The metaphor of hieroglyphics is used only once in this essay, but deciphering hieroglyphics is significantly linked to creative actions in both Percy’s “Alastor” and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Particularly, in Defence, the metaphor of hieroglyphics directly touches the core of Percy Shelley’s theory on poetry. His theory focuses on the complicated relationship between poetic language and human thought. For Shelley, poetic language connotes visual ideas which create a necessary relationship between language and human thought. Thus, he seems to associate the quality of hieroglyphics with the visual one which builds the necessary relationship with human thought. On the other hand, he admits that language is arbitrarily associated with its referent. This is a dilemma in his poetic theory which makes it difficult to understand the metaphor of hieroglyphics. Though Tilottama Rajan successfully interprets the metaphor embodying both the possibility and the limit of visualized language, her discussion focuses on William Warburton’s influence on Shelley and then excludes other possible sources for Shelley’s view toward hieroglyphics. Critics have discussed whether Shelley is conscious of Warburton’s groundbreaking view of hieroglyphics which suggests hieroglyphics’ phonetic quality in the eighteenth century. Yet, this essay proposes that another source might be Erasmus Darwin since Darwin compares hieroglyphics to poetry in The Temple of Nature. Unlike Shelley, however, Darwin emphasizes the visual quality of hieroglyphics as animation of poetry. It is true Shelley adapts Darwin’s hieroglyphics to his theory on poetry, but we cannot deny that he is also conscious of other arguments on hieroglyphics. His contemporary arguments were divergent. Influenced by this historical background to the hieroglyphics arguments, Shelley’s view of hieroglyphics is recreated on the basis of his theory on language and view on the relationship between picture and poetry.