ABSTRACT
On 8 May 1820, M. Shelley sent Maria Gisborne 'An Exhortation', a poem which he included in the 1820 volume Prometheus Unbound; with Other Poems. It is a lyric dependent on analogies of the kind that Shelley found in Calderon, and has a tripping, trochaic lightness as it suggests why poets may be chameleonic. W. Wordsworth's poetry haunts Shelley's figurations and imaginings, but their author appear to him, on occasions, to be like the First Spirit as described by the Second Spirit, tied to 'thy dull earth slumberbound'. Shelley's wish to portray Wordsworth as a poet of the 'unseen' suggests a desire to free him from the 'matter-of-factness' or 'laborious minuteness and fidelity to the representations of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet' to which Coleridge objects in Biographia Literaria. Wordsworth presented by Shelley as proleptically anticipating the thirst for the 'unseen' which is at work in the poetry of one of his major inheritors.
