[In the following essay, Woodman analyzes Percy Bysshe Shelley's views regarding the relationship between artistic creativity and "divine insanity." Woodman demonstrates how Shelley's career reveals the poet's frustration with the inability of art to truly represent divinely inspired vision.]

I

Since Plato banished the poets from his Republic many have rushed to their defence in an attempt to reinstate them. Among the English poets, Shelley remains the foremost apologist for the divine insanity of which Plato accused the poets and for which he sent them into exile as unfit for citizenship in a rational society governed by logos rather than mythos, philosophy rather than religion. Shelley in his apology, particularly his Defence of Poetry, meets Plato on his own ground. He too rejects the role of religion in society, substituting for it what he calls in his essay, On Life, the "intellectual philosophy" (p. 477).¹ More than that, his objection is Plato's: the superstitious acceptance of the probable or mythical account of ultimate reality turns it into a true account supported by institutional and priestly sanction. Plato rejected the poets because as myth-makers they were the founders of religion. Shelley, following in Plato's footsteps, was determined that poets would no longer assume this role. Because "the deep truth is imageless" (Prometheus Unbound, II. IV. 116), all poetry as poetry is a fiction. Like Plato, Shelley argues that the poet works by spell and incantation. However, because the poet now knows this, he is no longer (as Shelley describes him in the preface to Alastor) "deluded" or "duped" by his "generous error," "doubtful knowledge," and "illustrious superstition" (p. 69). So long as he remains true to his own experience, he will dissolve or abjure his "rough magic" in bringing the creative process, "always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden" (Defence of Poetry, p. 504), to an end. He will in the name of poetic truth take every precaution to remind his auditors that what they have just suspended their disbelief in is a spell the true object of which remains unknowable, poetry for Shelley being the true voice of scepticism:²

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given—
Therefore the name of God and ghosts and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear, and all we see,
Doubt, chance and mutability.
("Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, " 25-31)

Though poetry has its limitations, it nevertheless assists man to become the master rather than the slave of "Doubt, chance and mutability" by rendering them answerable to that harmony among the various parts of the tripartite soul (imagination, intellect, and sense, for Shelley) which Plato argued it was the function of dialectic to achieve. And here again Shelley agrees with Plato. The function of dialectic, he suggests, is to bring into consciousness among the various parts of the soul that intuitive harmony "beyond and above consciousness" (Defence of Poetry, p. 486) which poetry mimetically represents. Plato in The Republic is, as Shelley reminds the reader, also a poet.³ The myths he constructs, however, are placed at the service of a dialectical process that cannot function without them. Shelley is equally concerned that his own mythopoeia be used in somewhat the same way, which is to say, copied by legislators and moral reformers into what in his Defence he calls "the book of common life" (p. 501).

What, however, most distinguishes Shelley from Plato is his attempt as a poet to explore "the mind in creation" (Defence of Poetry, pp. 503-04) by making the subject of the poem the creative process itself. In this way he hoped to render that process not something separate from, but an integral part of, the functioning consciousness of men, a consciousness that would render them the masters of the inner world even as science was rendering them the masters of the outer. Plato himself had attempted something like this in his integration of dialectic and myth-making in such a way that myth propelled the dialectic toward an enlargement of consciousness even to the point of granting it some direct knowledge of the "imageless" world to which the archetypes belong. Plato in the Ion seems to have believed that the poets in a state of divine possession had in some direct, immediate, and outrageously short-circuited way gained a direct revelation of the Forms without, however, having any idea of how or why that experience took place. "For the authors of those great poems which we admire, " he writes in Ion (Shelley's translation),

do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art, but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own. Thus the composers of lyrical poetry create those admired songs of theirs in a state of divine insanity, like the Corybantes, who lose all control over their reason in the enthusiasm of the sacred dance; and, during this supernatural possession, are excited to the rhythm and harmony which they communicate to men. Like the Bacchantes who, when possessed by the God, draw honey and milk from the rivers, in which, when they come to their senses, they find nothing but simple water…. For a poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains to him. For whilst a man retains any portion of the thing called reason, he is utterly incompetent to produce poetry or to vaticinate…. The God seems purposely to have deprived all poets, prophets, and soothsayers of every particle of reason and understanding, the better to adapt them to their employment as his ministers and interpreters; and that we, their auditors, may acknowledge that those who write so beautifully, are possessed, and address us, inspired by the God.⁴

Plato, I suspect, is here identifying the poet with a sacred disease to which considerable superstition is attached. Many who are not afflicted by possession would pretend to be in order to gain the kind of control or power traditionally attached to prophets, shamans, and soothsayers. The Romantics were conscious of the fact that in an enlightened society governed by reason and natural law, the poets had still to defend themselves against the accusations of madness that were continually raised against them. Shelley's Defence of Poetry, for example, was a reply to Peacock's satirical attack in The Four Ages of Poetry. Characteristically, the Romantics provided a natural or psychological explanation of the supernatural phenomena Plato critically, even mockingly, dismissed. Thus they identified the world of supernatural possession with the fantasy world of the infant—even as Peacock identified the poet with the infancy of society—and the naturalizing of it with the process of growing up. Where the process of growth remained blocked, the poet becoming the prisoner of the infant's world, unable to put to creative use his reason, consciousness, and will, the poet projects the image of a traumatized infant bound to tyrannical gods (possessive parents) from which he struggles in vain to escape. Blake's "Infant Sorrow" reveals the dangers of innocence, though in a manner that Shelley, as we shall see, failed to grasp in Prometheus Unbound:

Struggling in my father's hands:
Striving against my swadling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.

Romanticism does not idealize innocence; it seeks, rather, to rescue the psyche from imprisonment within it, while at the same time lamenting the fact that consciousness cannot completely absorb or transform it. The limitless domain of the gods, identified with the oceanic world of the unconscious, cannot be contained within the finite world of consciousness. The fancy, therefore, is a "deceiving elf" (74) if it deludes the poet into believing that he can arrest the nightingale's "full-throated ease" (10) or capture the "profuse strains" of the skylark's "unpremediated art" (5). The bird's unconscious ecstacy becomes "high requiem" (60) and "plaintive anthem" (75) in Keats's conscious song, its "sweetest songs" inevitably telling Shelley's "saddest thought" (90). The Romantic poet advancing toward maturity, Keats's "sole self" (72), weeps in his poetry of process for the divinity he must leave behind. With the single exception of Blake, the elegiac mode dominates Romanticism, Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality Ode" providing a paradigm or model. What, however, the poet laments is not the loss of innocence, but the inability of poetry adequately to transform it. It laments the limitations of consciousness which, as Shelley argues in his Defence, renders the actual poem "a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet" (p. 504). The Romantic elegy mourns its own limited reality, the "fading coal" that is the "mind in creation.'" Plato's divine madness might be attributed to the nightingale's song; it cannot be attributed to the poet's. "Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?" asks Blake in his motto to The Book of Thel,

Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

Keats's Fall of Hyperion contains one of the most outspoken attacks upon the poet as dreamer creating a "paradise for a sect" (2) in an unconscious state resembling sleep. With his own Endymion in mind, he condemns the poet who takes up residence in "the bosom of a leafy world" ("Sleep and Poetry, " 119), as, for example, Prometheus finally does in Shelley's lyrical drama. Keats's Narrator in The Fall of Hyperion finds himself in the ruins of that world. Overcome by an "appetite / More yearning than on earth [he] ever felt" (38-39), he eats deliciously of a feast that "seem'd refuse of a meal / By Angel tasted or our Mother Eve" (30-31). He is, after the fall, back in the now forbidden garden feasting at the breast of the "mighty Mother" who induces oblivion as surely as does the Urania of Adonais. To extricate himself from "the recesses of a pearly shell" ("Sleep and Poetry," 121) where, like an embryo in the womb of the Great Mother he lies "upcurl'd" (which is Prometheus's fate at the conclusion of Shelley's third act), the poet-narrator must give birth to himself. In response to Moneta's command either to mount the steps or die upon the pavement, Keats's Narrator describes his own labour pains which are the contractions of "Soul-making" or "Spirit creation" (14 February-3 May 1819):

I heard, I look'd: two senses both at once
So fine, so subtle, felt the tyranny
Of that fierce threat, and the hard task proposed.
Prodigious seem'd the toil, the leaves were yet
Burning,—when suddenly a palsied chill
Struck from the paved level up my limbs,
And was ascending quick to put cold grasp
Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat:
I shriek'd; and the sharp anguish of my shriek
Stung my own ears—I strove hard to escape
The numbness; strove to gain the lowest step.
Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold
Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;
And when I clasp'd my hands I felt them not.
One minute before death, my iced foot touch'd
The lowest stair; and as it touch'd, life seem'd
To pour in at the toes: I mounted up,
As once fair angels on a ladder flew
From the green turf to heaven.
(I, 118-36)

It is this particular agony of "Soul-making," which is of course for Keats poetry-making, that led Keats to be critical of Shelley's poetry which struck him as possessed by a divinity not his own because he had not earned it. Thus he writes to Shelley (16 August 1820) in reply to his invitation to join him in what for Keats was a false paradise: "A modern work it is said must have a purpose, which may be the God—an artist must serve Mammon—he must have 'self-concentration' selfishness perhaps." Having recommended that Shelley "curb his magnanimity and be more of an artist," he continues: "The thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furl'd for six Months together." Though in daily expectation of Shelley's Prometheus, he points out that he is not particularly looking forward to receiving it. Not knowing what Shelley had done with the myth, he could nevertheless anticipate the treatment: the unbinding would come far too swiftly and far too easily, as spontaneously, indeed, as a wandering thought. "I am in expectation of Prometheus every day," he writes. "Could I have my own wish for its interest effected you would have it still in manuscript—or be but now putting an end to the second act. I remember your advising me not to publish my first-blights, on Hampstead heath—I am returning advice upon your hands." Keats, in short, is accusing Shelley in advance of abandoning himself to the divine madness that only Mammon could cure. The radically different postures of Keats's Moneta and Shelley's Asia reveal at once everything Keats rejected in Shelley.

Not surprisingly, Keats, unlike Shelley, greatly admired Wordsworth's Excursion. While, for Shelley, Wordsworth had in The Excursion proven himself one of "those meaner spirits" described in the preface to Alastor who had dared to abjure the dominion of "that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world." Keats, as he wrote to his brothers (13, 19 January 1818), considered the poem one of the "three things superior in the modern world," the other two being "Haydon's pictures" and "Hazlitts depth of Taste." Wordsworth had earlier exploited Plato's notion of divine madness by applying it to his vision of the child as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Having, however, deified the child, as indeed in The Prelude he deifies his first seventeen years by rendering them an account "Of genius, power, / Creation and divinity itself" (III, 170-71), Wordsworth in "Resolution and Independence" recognized that the imagination subjects the poet to a dangerous delusion. "By our own spirits are we deified," he writes;

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
(47-49)

The divine madness of the poet, which Wordsworth celebrates in his visionary account of his first seventeen years, becomes in the end mere madness if not chastened and subdued by "the still, sad music of humanity" ("Tintern Abbey," 91). The poet, he argues, cannot separate the "divinity in man" (Defence of Poetry, p. 505) from the humanity it must ultimately serve if that divinity is to remain sane. The poet cannot isolate himself from society, nor poetry from moral reform. He must in the construction of his artefacts bridge the two worlds, though in the very process of construction the "radiance which was once so bright" is "forever taken from [the poet's] sight" ("Intimations of Immortality Ode," 180), inspiration declining even as composition begins. Blake's divine child, having invoked the poet's song, immediately disappears, leaving the poet to pluck a hollow reed, make a rural pen and stain the water clear. Vision, Blake insists, must descend to the "Printing house in Hell" (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 15). In the loss of innocence or divine possession resides not only the poet's humanity, but his sanity as well. The coming to terms with loss constitutes the poet's release from divine madness, a release that provides the Romantic answer to Plato's attack upon the poets as well as the cure for the sacred disease he describes.

The chief danger of Romanticism, which Blake alone managed creatively to circumvent during a long and arduous career, is the Romantic poet's tendency to focus in his poetry of process upon a one-sided struggle between the son and his "mighty Mother," a struggle in which he must overcome the lyrical or narcissistic temptation to remain forever an infant feeding upon "honey dew" and drinking "the milk of paradise." For that infantile world, described by Wordsworth in The Prelude as "the eagerness of infantine desire" (II, 26), he must substitute the epic hero's task which demands that he leave behind the world of the mothers to seek at-one-ment with the world of the fathers. In moving from the lyric to the epic, he must substitute for Dionysian frenzy Apollonian calm, without however rendering that calm lifeless. He must, in Coleridge's phrase, "carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood." Plato attacks the poet's apparent failure to fuse them, the Dionysian or oceanic feelings which the Romantics identified with childhood overcoming the Apollonian rationality of manhood which they identified with loss. He attacks, that is, the excesses to which the Romantic spirit is prone, a spirit which, through reason and dialectic, he had in himself managed to subdue.

While Shelley was thoroughly conscious of the grounds of Plato's attack upon the poets in The Republic (part of which he translated) and made every effort to accommodate that attack by focusing upon the dangers of fiction if embraced as truth, he nevertheless images himself in Adonais as the victim of the very dangers he, even within the elegy, warns against. Having by stanza 47 of Adonais been "lured… to the brink" of suicide by the fictional world he had constructed for Keats out of the Adonis myth, Shelley's Narrator, as if aware of what was happening, instructs himself to "Clasp… the pendulous Earth" and to "keep [his] heart light" (417, 422). Yet he cannot stop the creative process that has taken over with what would appear to be a will and a direction of its own. The poem dialectically, rhetorically, imagistically ascends to meet the suicidal stance that in the guise of "The One" (460) propels it toward itself. Struggling as a man to protect himself against the possession that has overcome him as a myth-making poet, the Narrator tries centripetally to "shrink / Even to a point within our day and night" in an effort to resist the centrifugal force of his "spirit's light" which left to itself defies gravity and darts "Beyond all world's" to "Satiate the void void circumference" (418-20). This centripetal shrinking, like an interval of inspiration in which for Shelley "a poet becomes a man" (Defence, p. 507), becomes briefly a shelter "in the shadow of [Keats's] tomb" where he finds momentary refuge from "the world's bitter wind" (457-58) as if he were mad Lear upon the heath. "What Adonais is, why fear we to become?" (459), he asks, the question dissolving in him "the last clouds of cold mortality" (486). The ego (Keats's Mammon) destroyed, the poet continues:

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
(469-71)

As if tempting him, the "world's bitter wind" now becomes "the low wind [whispering] near" (475). "'Tis Adonais calls!," he cries, "oh, hasten thither, / No more let Life divide what Death can join together" (476-77). Adonais ends with its Narrator "darkly, fearfully" possessed by his own fiction as he is "borne" toward an "abode" that had for Shelley, the man, no objective existence (493-96). The "point" within his night and day finally bursts as "the massy earth and spheréd skies are riven" (491), leaving the poet to that "one annihilation" (587) with which Epipsychidion breaks off. The irony at work in Adonais extends even beyond Earl Wasserman's brilliant analysis of it,⁵ the death of Keats becoming the death of Shelley now seen as the proper subject of his own elegy. The elegy as tomb, however, lies empty. Shelley has explored an aesthetic of nihilism to affirm a "void circumference" that makes the action of mind the action of a Quixote striking at windmills. The poet "in mad trance, strike[s] with [his] spirit's knife / Invulnerable nothings" (347-48). After reading Peacock's "anathemas against poetry, " Shelley wrote to him good humouredly (15 February 1820) to say that they had excited him "to a sacred rage, or caloëthes scribenti of vindicating the insulted Muses. " "I had the greatest possible desire to break a lance with you, within the lists of a magazine, in honour of my mistress Urania, " he continues with Don Quixote in mind,

but God willed that I should be too lazy, and wrested the victory from your hope; since first having unhorsed poetry, and the universal sense of the wisest in all ages, an easy conquest would have remained to you in me, the knight of the shield of shadow and the lance of gossamere.

II

In Alastor, Shelley's Wordsworthian Narrator enacts in his tale of the Visionary his own frustrated attempts to consummate his love for the "Mother of this unfathomable world" (18) by penetrating her "inmost sanctuary" (38). Fully eroticizing in the Visionary's dream and the Narrator's "strange tears" and "breathless kisses" (34-35) Wordsworth's intellectual love for this "goodly universe, " Shelley implies that Wordsworth's Christian orthodoxy in The Excursion had betrayed his earlier vision. Instead of celebrating the marriage announced in his Prospectus, Wordsworth contemplates his own poetic corpse with the "pale despair" of the Solitary and the "cold tranquillity" (718) of the Wanderer. The "wedding garment" had become a "shroud" ("Dejection: an Ode," 49).

Shelley's response to the spectacle of Wordsworth's "poisonous decay" can be seen in his attitude to the Visionary. As he points out in his sonnet, "To Wordsworth" (published in the Alastor volume), Shelley identified himself with Wordsworth's loss of the "visionary gleam." Unlike Wordsworth, however, he alone deplored it. "One loss is mine," he writes in the sonnet, "Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore" (5-6). "Deserting these ["Songs consecrate to truth and liberty"]," he concludes, "thou leavest me to grieve, / Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be." Wordsworth had substituted the "truths" of the Christian religion for the fictions of the imagination. He was the victim rather than the maker of myth.

If Wordsworth refused to grieve for his own death as a poet why should Shelley weep for him? Shelley raises the question both in the poem (which he refuses to call an elegy) and in the preface. Perhaps nothing better reveals the apparently impenetrable complexity of Shelley's Alastor than the Narrator's response to the death of what is essentially his own "visionary gleam":

Upon those pallid lips
So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes
That image sleep in death, upon that form
Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear
Be shed—not even in thought. Nor, when those hues
Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,
Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone
In the frail pauses of this simple strain,
Let not high verse, mourning the memory
Of that which is no more, or painting's woe
Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery
Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence,
And all the shews o' the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.
(699-712)

Shelley, it would appear, is here deconstructing the elegy he has just composed by questioning the ability of "high verse" (as opposed to his "simple strain") to deal with the larger issues of life and death. All art, whether sculpture or painting or poetry, is "cold," "feeble," "frail and vain" when measured by the human aspiration it attempts to encompass or contain. The artist, as artist, is doomed because the "divinest lineaments" of his insatiable desire are themselves "worn by the senseless wind" of inspiration. The "feeble imagery" of art testifies finally to its "own cold powers." What then is left to the Wordsworthian Narrator who, subject to the capricious, even "senseless," waxing and waning of creative power, must continue to deal with his "incommunicable dream, / And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought" (39-40)? Wasserman offers what may be the definitive answer:

For in his opening invocation the Narrator had prayed that the inspiring
breath of the Great Mother sweep over him, moveless as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane.
(42-44)

His later management of the same image reveals that for man to be but a passive lyre totally submissive to the forces of nature is actually to be a corpse, senseless, motionless, soulless, and gradually eroded by nature's forces. Now the Narrator's original comparison of himself as poet to the "long-forgotten" lyre in the "solitary" dome of a "deserted" fane, so casually brushed over in a first reading of the invocation, gains its full ironic horror in retrospect: despite his belief that he is of the community of nature, he is, as merely a child of the World Mother, just as solitary as the Visionary, as alone as the incarnate death of the Wandering Jew.⁶

The psychic setting of Alastor is the empty skull of the Narrator, imaged as a "moveless" lyre suspended in the "solitary dome" of a "deserted fane" (Locke's tabula rasa) and briefly stirred to illusory life, even as in Adonais "Life's pale light" (220) flashes through the dead limbs of Keats as Death, invoked by Urania, rises to meet her "vain caress" (225). Poetry, Shelley suggests, is the futile attempt to animate a corpse; the poet is a necrophiliac whose eternal lot is the "LIFE-IN-DEATH" of Coleridge's Mariner. The irony of the Narrator's hope resides in the death it contains. The irony of Shelley's poem is that the process of its construction is at the same time the process of its deconstruction. Composition and decomposition are both in nature and in the mind one and the same. Shelley in Alstor is exploring an aesthetic of nihilism.

At the same time, however, Shelley in his preface is critical of the nihilism his poem enacts. In his critical reaction to the Visionary's "self-centred seclusion" (which the Narrator shares through his identification with the sub-human brotherhood of nature), Shelley resists the temptation to make his poem answerable only to itself, mirroring as artefact the process of its making. The self-centred seclusion of his Visionary is mirrored in the self-centred seclusion of the poem. Standing back from it, Shelley, as critic, addresses in his preface the Visionary of the poem, imposing upon him values which, if alien to poetry, are nevertheless necessary to human life. He judges the poem on moral grounds and finds it wanting. The "Poet's self-centred seclusion" becomes an "instruction to actual men" (p. 69). All men, he argues, who refuse to be "deluded" by "generous error" or "duped" by an "illustrious superstition" are "morally dead." By rendering his vision of the veiled maid answerable to the "beloved brotherhood" of "Earth, ocean and air" (I) to which the Narrator attaches himself, she simply dissolves into the elements to become, like Wordsworth's Lucy, nothing at all. Narrator and Visionary are the victims of natural religion. "Wordsworth must know that what he Writes Valuable is Not to be found in Nature, " writes Blake in his annotations to the 1815 edition of Wordsworth's poems (p. 655). If, however, the veiled maid "is not to be found in Nature," nature must be "found" in her if nature is to be awakened from her subhuman world where his only "kindred" are birds, beasts, and insects. In his discovery that natural objects lack "an intelligence" similar to his own, he encounters the resistance of the Great Mother to his entirely human demands, though not before gaining in sleep a vision of her emerging human form. His failure to sustain awake his vision of her in sleep, to affirm as "waking dream" the "spousal" vision capable of transforming the "simple produce of the common day" into "Paradise and groves / Elysian" (Recluse, I, 47-55), constitutes his (or Wordsworth's) "moral" failure. Thus, for the Shelley of the preface the "sudden darkness and extinction" of the Visionary is preferable to the "slow and poisonous decay" of the Narrator as Wordsworth himself witnessed it in The Excursion.

Confronted by the spectacle of Wordsworth's ruin, which he poetically explores in Alastor (finally to identify with it in The Triumph of Life), Shelley in his preface makes a futile attempt to resolve the impasse confronting the Narrator. That resolution resides in the human uses of the Visionary's discovery of "strange truths in undiscovered lands" (77) among "secret caves / Rugged and dark" (87-88) that record "the Zodiac's brazen mystery" (119). What, Shelley asks in his preface, is the Visionary to make of the flashes of meaning which work upon him like "strong inspiration" (127) to reveal "thrilling secrets" (128) "inaccessible / To avarice and pride" (89-90)? If he is not to be struck "by sudden darkness and extinction" because his perception is "too exquisite" or "dare to abjure its dominion" in order to preserve his life, what stance or attitude must he assume? Shelley's answer owes something to Coleridge: he must willingly "suspend his disbelief for the moment." He must affirm in the name of "poetic faith" everything that his reason would otherwise reject. He must, in short, allow the "strong inspiration" working in flashes to usurp his intellect and dupe him into the working acceptance of "illustrious superstition." He must, as Coleridge does in "The Ancient Mariner," work with the protagonist's "delusion" in an attempt to discover the poetic or dramatic truth which it reveals. Shelley's answer to the fate of both the Visionary and the Narrator, tentatively suggested in his preface, is fully explored in "Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" which he wrote the following year.

In "Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" Shelley releases the poet from the "NIGHTMARE LIFE-IN-DEATH" constellated in Alastor by affirming the supreme fiction which constitutes the "delusion" without which human life is both devoid of meaning and "morally dead." The poet's task, he argues, is to construct a myth that is answerable to human desire, a myth which gives birth to itself "in the still cave of the witch Poesy" ("Mont Blanc," 44). He must, at the same time, acknowledge its source so that what issues from its "secret springs" is never separated from its origins to become other than what it is: an "illustrious superstition" whose life resides in "spells" and "incantation." The poet, according to Shelley in 1816, constructs for the psyche in those inspired "uncertain moments" images that may suffice. Confronting once again in "Mont Blanc" the Narrator's "beloved brotherhood" of "Earth, ocean and air," on the one hand, and the Visionary's corpse, on the other, he asks:

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

Shelley answers:

a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fare.

III

The realization that "the dream / Of dark magician in his visioned cave"—"the still cave of the witch Poesy"—is not "the true law / Of this so lovely world" (681-86) defeats the Narrator in Alastor and conducts his Visionary "to a speedy ruin." "Natural piety" prevents him from affirming the psychic or poetic truth of delusion. In Prometheus Unbound, on the other hand, Shelley releases the imagination from Wordsworth's "natural piety," rendering it answerable to what he calls in his Defence man's"diviner nature" (p. 504) that operates "beyond and above consciousness." Shelley in Prometheus Unbound is at liberty to consummate the marriage denied to the Visionary in Alastor because of the Wordsworthian moral fetters imposed upon his creative desire. The"impulse" that "rolled back… on [the Visionary's] vacant brain" (191-92) is carried in Prometheus Unbound to its apocalyptic conclusion because Prometheus in the first act is released from the precipice upon which his moral will has been impaled for three thousand years. Shelley's Narrator in Alastor is a bound Prometheus unable through and in the Visionary to break free of Jupiter's natural religion. Though union with the Great Mother is his apocalyptic theme, "natural piety" dictates against it. Thus Shelley, satirizing Wordsworth while at work on Prometheus Unbound, describes him as "a kind of moral ennuch" who

touched the hem of Nature's shift,
Felt faint—and never dared uplift
The closest, all-concealing tunic.

("Peter Bell the Third," 314-17)

The Great Mother of Alastor has "ne-er yet / … unveil'd [her] inmost sanctuary" despite the attempts of the Narrator, "like an inspired and desperate alchymist," to penetrate her mystery (31-38).

Shelley's transformation of the nightmare vision of Alastor into "the spousal verse / Of this great consummation" can be seen in Shelley's treatment of the relations among Prometheus, Asia, and Earth. The psychic action of Shelley's drama traces the gradual process by which Prometheus, morally bound to Jupiter, making his "agony" the sole barrier to Jupiter's complete conquest of nature and man, is reunited with Asia, thereby releasing the recreated universe and man from the last vestiges of Jupiter's rule. Though Asia herself does not appear until the second act, her transforming presence, "beyond and above" the consciousness of the bound Prometheus, is already at work in him during the first act, the second being the internal type of the external events of the first. Asia's journey with Panthea to the cave of Demogorgon is her own "interpenetration" of Prometheus's soul in answer to Prometheus's longing. Initially, therefore, Prometheus, determined to recall the curse, is bewildered; the "awful whisper" that is rising up appears less to be the now forgotten sound of his own earlier curse than the voice of love:

for I would hear that curse again….
Ha, what an awful whisper rises up!
'Tis scarce like sound, it tingles through the frame
As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike.—
Speak Spirit! from thine inorganic voice
I only know that thou art moving near
And love.
(I, 131-37)

The "awful whisper" that he hears is the "melancholy Voice" of his mother which he does not yet recognize. "Obscurely through my brain like shadows dim," he says,

Sweep awful thoughts, rapid and thick.—I feel
Faint, like one mingled in entwining love,
Yet 'tis not pleasure.
(I, 146-49)

The Earth then identifies herself.

I am the Earth,
Thy mother; she within whose stony veins
To the last fibre of the loftiest tree
Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air
Joy ran, as blood within a living frame,
When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud
Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy!
And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted
Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust
And our almight Tyrant with fierce dread
Grew pale, until his thunder chained thee here.
(I, 152-62)

Reuniting with his mother, Prometheus, as one of "her pining sons," is gradually undergoing a new birth. Unlike the Great Mother of Alastor, Earth is unveiling to him her "inmost sanctuary," thereby opening the way to that reunion with Asia who is the Great Mother herself now seen as bride, which is to say, the Venus Genetrix who in Adonais is both the mother and mistress of the poet. The "inorganic voice" that rises up within Prometheus, tingling "through [his] frame / As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike" and "entwining" him in a love that is not yet pleasure, becomes in the second act Asia herself descending from her long exile to the cave of Demogorgon, that teeming womb of creation which is the proper scene of Shelley's action. Thus, after his unbinding, Prometheus's reunion with Asia is imaged as a sexual union with his mother now transfigured to become Asia, his bride. When he addresses her, bending down to kiss the earth, the Earth replies:

I hear.—I feel.—
Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down
Even to the adamantine central gloom
Along the marble nerves—'tis life, 'tis joy,
And through my withered, old and icy frame
The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down
Circling.
(III, 84-90)

Prometheus embracing the transfigured earth, the Venus Genetrix, is fathering himself to become, like the poet, his own creator. Man through his creative faculty gives birth to himself. In the son's sexual consummation with the "Mother of this unfathomable world" which confronts and rejects the social taboo that would bind the poet to a fixed moral order, Shelley celebrates Wordsworth's intended incestuous marriage to "this goodly universe / In love and holy passion," a marriage which renders "Paradise and groves / Elysian" the "simple produce of the common day."

So long as Prometheus, bound to the rock of morality which governs Jupiter's reign, is denied his incestuous union with the Great Mother, nature itself remains a "God / Profuse of poisons" which in the likeness of a "green serpent" drives the Visionary of Alastor, as it drove Wordsworth, to "a slow and poisonous decay." Prometheus's reunion with his Mother, creating himself anew in her "inmost sanctuary," purifies nature to make it once more what Wordsworth in a state of noble rapture would in his Prospectus boldly declare it to be:

—I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation:—and, by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too—
Theme this but little heard of among men—
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish:—this is our high argument.
(56-71)

It is precisely this "high argument," the "dominion" of which Wordsworth "dare[d] to abjure," that Shelley's Earth Mother now proclaims:

There is a Cavern where my spirit
Was panted forth in anguish whilst thy pain
Made my heart mad, and those who did inhale it
Became mad too, and built a Temple there
And spoke and were oracular, and lured
The erring nations round to mutual war
And faithless faith, such as Jove kept with thee;
Which breath now rises, as among tall weeds
A violet's exhalation, and it fills
With a serener light and crimson air
Intense yet soft the rocks and woods around;
It feeds the quick growth of the serpent vine
And the dark lined ivy tangling wild
And budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms
Which star the winds with points of coloured light
As they rain through them, and bright, golden globes
Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven;
And, through their veined leaves and amber stems,
The flowers whose purple and translucid bowls
Stand ever mantling with aereal dew,
The drink of spirits; and it circles round
Like the soft waving wings of noonday dreams,
Inspiring calm and happy thoughts, like mine
Now thou art thus restored. This cave is thine.
(III.iii.124-48)

Earth is here addressing Asia who is the "Lamp of Earth," or Earth itself restored through reunion with her son to its original "celestial" form. The cave in which she will dwell forever in androgynous union with Prometheus is the womb of the Earth Mother purged now of its poisonous vapours to become everything that Wordsworth originally believed it to be before submitting his insatiable desire to the binding restrictions of Jupiter's rule. Wordsworth's divine child who, as a "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" lives in a nature that is "apparelled in celestial light" becomes in Prometheus Unbound Asia and Prometheus living forever in an enchanted cave "Like human babes in their brief innocence" (III. iii. 33).

To suggest that Shelley in his lyrical drama transcends what in his preface he calls "the moral interest of the fable" by releasing his imagination to "ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar" (Defence, p. 503) is not to argue that he abandons the moral interest. Shelley insists in his lyrical drama, as he insists in his Defence of Poetry, that the only way to sustain the moral interest is to offer men a vision of hope which makes it possible for them "to suffer woes," "to forgive wrongs," and "to defy Power" (IV, 570-72). The man who remains after Demogorgon Prospero-like dissolves the spell is a bound Prometheus who is able, like the Prometheus of the first act, to suffer, forgive, and defy because he can now also "love," "bear," and "hope" (IV, 574), creating in his imagination, if not on earth, the very thing his hope contemplates. Shelley's drama, like Shakespeare's Tempest, has taught its audience the power of "rough magic," shown it how to weave a spell by encouraging it to shape rather than suppress its own insatiable longings which, as Wordsworth argues, are "in most, abated or suppressed," while "in some, / Through every change of growth and of decay," they remain "preeminent till death" (Prelude, II, 263-65). Shelley's apocalyptic vision in Prometheus Unbound, like the vision that in Wordsworth failed to materialize, resides in the son's incestuous union with the Great Mother, a union that drives Shelley's earthly ideal toward a revolutionary anarchism that leaves man "Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed—… / Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, / Exempt from awe, worship, degree,—the King / Over himself" (III. iv. 194-97).

Over this vision of liberated man Asia presides as its reigning goddess, threatening in her radical reversal of the patriarchal despotism of Jupiter's reign to reduce Prometheus to the passive recipent of her redemptive grace. The last act of Shelley's drama is very close to Blake's world of innocence, chimney sweeps released from their coffins to "rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind" ("The Chimney Sweeper," 18) and the children released from the charity schools, "like a mighty wind" raising "to heaven the voice of song" ("Holy Thursday," 9). The fact that their freedom is in some sense a dream, that Tom will still have to rise in the dark and get with his bags and brushes to work or that the "grey headed beadles" are still in control is, partly at least, the warning of Demogorgon as he dissolves his spell, though not, as in Blake's satirical lyrics, with the sinister advice to "cherish pity" or to do one's duty in order to escape harm. Shelley appears to be far less aware of the dangers of innocence than Blake, at least in Prometheus Unbound. By making Asia the active agent of Prometheus's unbinding, which then takes place in a stage instruction ("Hercules unbinds Prometheus who descends"), Shelley tends to trivialize the "suffering and endurance" of the first act by effectively isolating them from the apocalyptic action of the drama proper. Prometheus finds Hercules's "gentle words… sweeter even than freedom long desired / And long delayed" (III. ii. 4-6). Addressing Asia and her "Fair sister nymphs," he tells them that they "made long years of pain / Sweet to remember, through [their] love and care" (III. ii. 8-10). Pain having been eclipsed by pleasure, never to appear again, Prometheus immediately begins his long account of the enchanted cave "all overgrown with trailing odourous plants, / Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers." By obliterating even the memory of Jupiter, Prometheus has in effect regressed to something very like Blake's Beulah rather than advanced through ceaseless "mental fight" to Jerusalem. He has ceased even to be, as he was in the first act, "the king / Over himself;" kingship in any guise, psychic or political, is finally alien to Shelley's poetic nihilism, governed by a pursuit of the "void circumference" or "intenseinane." Like Wordsworth in the first book of The Prelude who, "baffled and plagued by a mind that every hour / Turns recreant to her task," Prometheus has regressed to infancy to find both release and renewal in

those lovely forms
And sweet sensations that throw back our life,
And almost make remotest infancy
A visible scene, on which the sun is shining.
(Prelude, I, 632-35)

Prometheus tells Asia that they

will sit and talk of time and change
As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged—
What can hide man from mutability?—
And if ye sigh, then I will smile, and thou
Ione, shall chant fragments of sea-music,
Until I weep, when ye shall smile away
The tears she brought, which yet were sweet to shed;
We will tangle buds and flowers, and beams
Which twinkle on the fountain brims, and make
Strange combinations out of common things—
Like human babes in their brief innocence.
(III.iii.8-18)

The echoes here of Lear's "Come, let's away to prison" reinforce the unfortunate impact of Prometheus's vision of life in the enchanted cave from which, according to Shelley, man's future Utopian life on earth will eventually emanate. Prometheus, it would appear, has been released from three thousand years of unending torture only to enter again his mother's womb, there, united with Asia, to become androgynous and render nature henceforth man's perpetual bride. Shelley's Prometheus inherits the fate that might have been Wordworth's had the first book of The Recluse ("Home at Grasmere") remained the "great consummation" of his powers, or indeed the fate of Lear had not Shakespeare conferred upon his hero the dignity of tragedy. Prometheus's retreat to the vales of Har suggests that in Shelley's lyrical drama divine madness is the final resolution of pain. Between these two opposing extremes, both of them humanly uninhabitable, the "Man," declares Shelley, "remains." The struggle to keep him there, even though the poet's divine madness lures him to the brink, is the tension that Shelley brings to its apocalyptic breaking point in Adonais.

IV

In the added fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley distances himself from the divine madness of the poet by identifying his "spousal verse" or epithalamion with a magical spell similar to the one that Prospero stages as a wedding gift for Miranda and Ferdinand. When the masque is complete, Demogorgon steps forward to dissolve it and in that dissolution the Shelleyan poet again becomes a man "abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live" (Defence, p. 507). The abandonment of the poet to this "sudden reflux" is at once a defeat of the poet's "divinity" and an affirmation of his humanity, the man emerging as the gods retreat, though leaving behind a glimpse of "something evermore about to be" that arises from the poet's "effort, and expectation, and desire" (Prelude, VI, 607-08). The constellation of that paradox without at the same time arresting it into a dogmatic formulation that reduces a mystery to a creed is the achievement of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality Ode" that, according to Shelley, Wordsworth "dare[d] to abjure" in The Excursion. That the paradox itself imposes upon the human psyche an insupportable burden would appear to be at least one of the inviting perspectives open to the reader of A Triumph of Life, though it is not an invitation that Shelley himself extended, there being no available evidence that he wished the poem to be published in its fragmentary form, unless, of course, his actual drowning was intended as the completion of a poem described in his Defence as "wind over a sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it" (p. 504).

In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley celebrates the transfiguration of Asia after her experience in the cave of Demogorgon in a series of lyrics that have for their theme the movement of language toward silence or the "intense inane." "How thou art changed!" cries Panthea:

I dare not look on thee;
I feel, but see thee not. I scarce endure
The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change
Is working in the elements which suffer
Thy presence thus unveiled.—
(II.v.16-20)

For nature so radically to change as to suffer the "unveiled" presence of Asia is for nature as nature to disappear altogether, the poet, as it were, having penetrated to its "inmost sanctuary" there to experience in the "flash" that reveals "the invisible world" a going out of sense. Asia compares herself to "an enchanted Boat" floating "upon the silver waves" of sound issuing from the singing air. The boat itself "seems to float ever-forever—,"

Till like one in slumber bound—
Borne to the Ocean, [Asia's soul] floats down, around,
Into a Sea profound, of ever-spreading sound.—
(II.v.73-84)

The lyric is a metaphorical enactment of drowning; language reaches beyond meaning to pure sound and sound itself becomes so pervasive that it approximates silence.⁷ "So far as he is serious," writes Susan Sontag in "The Aesthetics of Silence,"

the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the "new" and/or the "esoteric." Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.⁸

One can witness in Shelley's development the gradually ridding himself of an audience. "Still," Sontag continues,

one cannot fail to perceive in this renunciation of "society" a highly social gesture. The cues for the artist's eventual liberation from the need to practice his vocation comes from observing his fellow artists and measuring himself against them. An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively. Once he has surpassed his peers by the standards which he acknowledges, his pride has only one place left to go. For, to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. It suggests that the artist has had the wit to ask more questions than other people, and that he possesses stronger nerves and higher standards of excellence.⁹

The strategy of Adonais, moving relentlessly toward the extinction of the poet, gives to his presence within the poem a precariousness that intensifies rather than lessens its impact. When the decision is whether to cross a "t" or jump off the cliff, the crossing of the "t" assumes an unearthly radiance that makes the word itself burn not merely with the energy of a man's earthly power but with a fire that would consume "the last clouds of cold mortality" (186). Shelley thus becomes "the last cloud of an expiring storm / Whose thunder is its knell," "a dying lamp, a falling shower, / A breaking billow" (273-75) which is broken in the very act of utterance. Words, struggling to articulate silence, must finally be abandoned altogether because the articulation mocks its own intention. "Woe is me!" he cries at the end of Epipsychidion,

The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.—
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!
(587-91)

Shelley's suicidal stance, it would appear, was necessary to the perfecting of his work which attempts to give form to a vision of liberty so complete that it involves, again in Sontag's words, "the liberation of the artist from himself, of art from the particular art work, of art from history, of spirit from matter, of the mind from its perceptual and intellectual limitations."¹⁰ Thus, Adonais, by enacting its own dissolution as well as the dissolution of the poet, became in Shelley's description of it (5 June 1821) "better in point of composition than anything I have written" (p. 628). A suicidal stance is a "highly wrought" (p. 628) dying into art, like Keats's Apollo dying into life. Beyond that, it is, of course, the "void circumference" that the poet in pursuing must as a poet momentarily subdue.

Shelley, I suggest, is the only Romantic poet fully to inhabit the post-Miltonic universe the author of which is Milton's Satan. Confronting it as the limit of opacity, Blake, who enacts the Romantic struggle to reverse the natural bent of creation as an endless fall into division, sought to give the opacity a visible form so that poets, himself included, might have something for the imagination to build on. Shelley's "fullness" is paradoxically the void of Blake's Satan, a void emptied of consciousness, being "beyond and above" it. Shelley's Platonic dialectic carried him "darkly, fearfully afar" toward the death of art itself, a death that only his visionary suicide could sublimely enact, though, by remaining visionary, denying for itself the reality which it perhaps sought to embrace. The Visionary who in Alastor confronts the "blackness" of his "vacant brain" as the "veiled maid" folds him in her dissolving arms is fundamentally the Narrator of Adonais who confronts that same "blackness" and "vacancy" as it bears him "darkly, fearfully afar." Shelley's actual drowning thus becomes the poem he never wrote, arrived at only by that progressive revelation offered by the ones he did.

Notes

¹ All quotations from Shelley's poetry and prose are from Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. D. H. Reiman and S. B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1977). Quotations from Shelley's letters are from The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols., ed. F. L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Quotations from Blake's poetry and prose are from The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1965). Quotations from Wordsworth's poetry are from The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, revised E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Quotations from Coleridge's poetry are from The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Quotations from Biographia Literaria are from the edition edited by George Watson (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1975). Quotations from Keats's poetry are from The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). Quotations from Keats's letters are from Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).

² The best study of Shelley's scepticism remains C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Skepticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954). For a systematic application of Pulos's thesis to Shelley's poetry, see Lloyd Abbey, Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley's Poetic Skepticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).

³"Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendour of his imagery and the melody of his language is the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action… (Defence of Poetry, p. 484, italics mine). The"harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action," as will be seen, is what Shelley means in part by "void circumference." "Harmony," when "divested of shape and action," releases the word (or signifier) from the meaning that is asserted by binding the word to what is signified by it. It provides it with what Hartman in the preface to Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979) calls "a certain absence or indeterminacy of meaning" that renders literary language "something not reducible to meaning" (p. viii). More than any other English poet, Shelley's art lends itself to deconstructive criticism. Indeed it might be argued that deconstructive criticism had succeeded in unsealing the meaning which earlier criticism sealed in.

⁴The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 10 vols., ed. R. Ingpen and W. Peck (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1927), VII, 238-39.

Plato's notion of "divine madness" offers a veiled attack upon the poet who would, like the deconstructionist critic, release the language of poetry from the prison house of meaning. Shelley ironically affirms in Plato precisely what Plato himself rejects, as indeed he affirms in Milton's Paradise Lost what Milton's reason rejects. Thus, in the absence of Freud, Plato's notion of "divine madness" provided Shelley with a justification for exploring in his art a realm "beyond and above consciousness" in which language enjoys a suspension of meaning in a realm approximating pure sound.

Thus release of Shelley's poetry from logocentric or incarnationist perspectives is explored in Reconstruction and Criticism as, indeed, it is explored (with reservations) by Tillotama Rajan in Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). Professor Rajan's rejection of the logocentric reading of Shelley offered by Wasserman and others (including myself), while a valuable corrective, particularly in bringing the sub-text into focus, tends, I think, not to recognize the extent to which the visibility of that sub-text depends upon a logocentric perspective. Certainly my own reading of Adonais in particular stresses the sub-text which is set within the logocentric reading which I, following Wasserman, present in "Shelley's Urania," Studies in Romanticism (Winter 1978), pp. 61-75.

⁵Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 462-502. For a more deconstructive reading of Shelley's Adonais intended, in part, as a corrective to Wasserman's metaphysical interpretation, see my article, "Shelley's Urania," cited in n. 4.

⁶ Ibid., p. 38. The narrator "as alone as the incarnate death of the Wandering Jew" is the fate of the poet who believes that literary language is bound to nature. In The Triumph of Life, Rousseau warns the poet that the signifier operates without a signified. "Rousseau's history," writes Paul DeMan in "Shelley Disfigured" (Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 50), "as he looks back upon his existence from the 'April prime' of his early years to the present, tells of a specific experience that is certainly not a simple one but that can be designated by a single verb: the experience is that of forgetting." Forgetting, as DeMan "interprets" it is not the absence of what was once known or remembered. It is the not known, that which is not knowable. It is the absence of meaning. The "meaning" of Alastor, I suggest, is its absence of meaning. The "elegy" is the elegy Shelley refuses to write. It is present in its announced absence. Alastor, like The Triumph of Life, explores the experience of forgetting.

⁷ Particularly in the lyrics that celebrate the transfiguration of Asia, Shelley avoids the dangers of a incarnationist theory of poetry that would assign meaning to the word thereby rendering it didactic, which is to say, abhorrent. In "Shelley Disfigured," DeMan speaks of "the madness of words" which is "the endless prosopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn" (p. 68). Asia transfigured is also Ophelia drowning in the madness of her words, even as in Adonais it is Shelley's narrator drowning in the poetic act of being "borne."

⁸Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 6.

⁹ Ibid., pp. 6-7.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 18.