Julian and Maddalo as Revisionary Conversation Poem

Abstract

Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation has challenged formal interpretation for many years, and for good reason. Consisting of a madman’s soliloquy framed by a first-person narrative that comprises both scenic description and dialogue, the poem has been variously characterised as a test of the reader’s self-knowledge (Wasserman, 1971, p. 61), a ‘psychodrama’ (Newey, 1982, p. 74), a ‘dramatic monologue’ (Hirsch, 1978, p. 14), a ‘fragment poem’ (Levinson, 1986a, pp. 150–6), and an ‘eclogue’ (Curran, 1986, p. 110). Oddly enough, no one has yet thought to ask whether Julian and Maddalo, as its subtitle implies, might be generically indebted to the Coleridgean ‘conversation poem’. This may be because, as Ronald Tetreault has recently noted, it so little resembles Coleridge’s monologues (Tetreault, 1987, p. 149). Generic indebtedness, however, need not imply generic emulation. As I hope to show, Shelley’s particular hybridisation of lyric, dialogue and narrative — an inclusive form similar to the pastoral eclogue — constitutes less an instance of or an experiment with traditional poetic genres than it does a specific generic anti-type, namely a critique of the essentially pastoral vision of social and cosmic harmony informing the first-generation Romantic conversation poem.