ABSTRACT
Citing Demogorgon’s oracular statement in Prometheus Unbound that ‘the deep truth is imageless’, critics tend to assume that Shelley’s iconoclastic verbal scepticism, which attacks received cultural ideas as if they were sculpted idols to be broken, disavows the visual and plastic arts. Shelley’s early, limited interest in the visual arts first takes creative shape as iconoclasm, a verbally represented ekphrasis of idol-smashing as political critique. This chapter presents the traces of the maenads’ dance in the manuscript of ‘The Triumph of Life’, setting the figures within Shelley’s return to a complex ‘disfiguring’. When this renewed iconoclasm first appears in drafts of ‘A Defence of Poetry’, it is an optimistic defence of the power of language, as opposed to all other arts, but in ‘The Triumph of Life’, as de Man has famously argued in ‘Shelley Disfigured’, its scepticism risks shattering all meaning.
