ABSTRACT
By the time he published the Prometheus Unbound volume in 1820, Shelley had found a way to coalesce his desire for political and social reform with his poetic enterprise. His intertextual engagement with Coleridge had progressed from imitation to criticism to a true dialogue where the concerns of the elder poet’s works are explored and elaborated upon as part of Shelley’s own developing vision. The relationship between language and perception, explored in ‘Mont Blanc’ and more fully dramatized in the Prometheus Unbound volume, is the means by which Shelley can argue in A Defence of Poetry, that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’. 1 The ‘vitally metaphorical’ nature of poetic language expands and replenishes perception, allowing, in ‘Prometheus Unbound’, the spontaneous regeneration of a society which has rediscovered its capacity to conceive the future anew.
