ABSTRACT
Wordsworth's inescapable poetic presence and Byron's celebrity and commercial success provided a source of vexation and a spur to Shelley's reflections on his own posthumous reception. One of Shelley's defining qualities and bequests to T. S. Eliot, as Michael O'Neill perceptively observes, is 'a sense of remorse'. In an early meditative lyric 'On Death', Shelley charges the human 'soul' with 'courage' to voyage 'Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way / And the billows of cloud that around thee roll'. The concision of Shelley's compressed imagery of the 'winter's midnight roar' fuses together the threatening furore of political unrest with an existential sense of the oppressive storm of life. For Shelley's poet-figure, an 'Obedient' pursuit of 'the light / That shone with his soul' is extinguished by 'night and time' until 'the minutest ray / Was quenched'. At the limits of poetic vision, Shelley's diction in Epipsychidion again prefigures the uncertain visionary voyage embarked upon at the end of Adonais.
