Bringing the Ballad ‘Back to the Streets’

Lenora Hanson

Almost all criticism about Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” takes the poem as prima facie revolutionary rhetoric; as if, had it been published, it had the potential to call the people of England to a non-violent revolution. Such analysis of “The Mask” tends to move past either a material or historical critique and instead to judge the aesthetic success or failure of this political and poetic work. Those analyses never consider the crippling effect to the revolutionary cry of “Rise like Lions after slumber” if the poem’s form and language are mindfully disingenuous. I would challenge that “The Mask” becomes disjointed in its call for political rebirth because it ends up aligning itself with the class structures it supposedly fights. Neither similar in form or publication to Shelley’s “Hellas” or “An Address to the Irish People”, this text stands in an uncomfortable middle ground between the literary ballad revival and political philosophies imagining what a revolutionary praxis between the working and middle classes might look like. Shelley’s poetic form, use of conflicting actual and rhetorical audiences, and intended place of publication can be read in “The Mask” as potentially objectifying the working class and appropriating it as a means for a middle class version of reform. A stylistic and linguistic co-opting occurs here that enforces the necessity of class division while also defining the middle class through a colonialist rhetoric. Shelley’s rhetoric here foreshadows the politically moderate movements that would culminate in the passage of the Reform Act of 1832; itself a nod towards progression serving as a symbol instead of a structural change, as an appeasement for the masses rather than a sweeping overhaul.