ABSTRACT
Shelley, according to Yeats, "hated life". His hatred of life, Yeats claimed, resulted from his desire for more than "unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the world" could offer. Life passed under oppressive conditions is envisaged as a kind of death, as death-in-life. Life, that is, is not just something that might be apprehended. Apprehension itself must be alive. Furthermore, this relation between apprehension and life is mutual. Shelley, of course, wishes to emulate Wordsworth's power of apprehension whilst guarding against the mind's retreat into itself. The mind can annihilate as well as create. Poetry is not simply to immure itself in the mind and create a new universe regardless of the old one. The ability of poetry to migrate across the world of things and into spirits in which abide emotions akin to those it contains is fundamental to its reanimating power.
