ABSTRACT
Consistency of purpose runs through Shelley's career. 1 In boyish letters the ideas of his maturity pulsate with embryonic life. The continuity is obscured by the contrast between the fanaticism of his undisciplined youth and the growing tolerance and moderated hopes of his last years. But the change was in strategy, not in aim. Realizing that premature direct action by reformers would defeat their ends, he came to rely upon poetry as one of the “instruments with which high spirits call the future from its cradle.” 2 By gradual modulation rather than abrupt change the radical pamphleteer developed into the greatest of radical poets. The time when one phase yielded to the other cannot be determined precisely; the years 1812–1818 saw the transition.
