ABSTRACT
Percy Bysshe Shelley was deeply versed in eighteenth-century medical discourse and read medical books such as Zoonomia by Erasmus Darwin and A View of the Nervous Temperament by Thomas Trotter. Shelley's theme of human love is "suspended" in the web of immortality, but this is expressed in an ironic way because there is "No sense, no motion, no divinity". Shelley fuels the reader's imagination by using musical metaphors and making them richer by manipulating the image of the physiological system. Shelley searched for the secret of life and "spirit" by applying the concepts to his verse, the outcome of which is his Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude written in the same year he met Lawrence. The Poet's journey is symbolic not only of this spirit, crucially echoing Jean-Jacques Rousseau's solitary walks in the woods, but also of his life, both in the physiological sense and the historical sense.
