ABSTRACT
J. Hillis Miller touches on The Triumph of Life in his essay The Critic as Host', where he argues that the poem 'contains within itself, jostling irreconcilably with one another, both logocentric metaphysics and nihilism'. Shelley's poem presents the mirror image or, perhaps it would be better to say, something like photographic negative, of the Platonic system of light and dark. The Triumph of Life enacts a process of life as continuous forgetting. Each scene does indeed deconstruct the previous one, but not in the sense of giving the reader mastery over it. 'The Triumph of Life' is evidence that Shelley was a superb reader of Rousseau. Shelley's vision is in turn replaced by Rousseau's narrative of his own life, with its climactic vision of the shape all light, the beautiful female figure who offers the glass of Nepenthe, drug of forgetfulness. 'The Triumph of Life' is one of the darkest and most shadowed of all major poems in English.
