ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the Preface's remark about the Poet's 'self-centred seclusion' as a 'sign of the unease with which Shelley regarded the destructive imaginative processes that make their first appearance in Alastor'. Jean Perrin has demonstrated the underlying presence of the Actaeon myth in the Alastor poet's curious flight. By the time Shelley was writing Alastor the belief had become widespread that civilization, as a refinement of wants, had altered general sensibility in such a way as to make man increasingly the victim of nervous and mental disorders. Despite Shelley's mature anti-primitivist conception of man's savage and his artificial states, a sense of the dangers of a refinement in sensibility is nevertheless apparent in Alastor. Shelley's study of mind at the time affirmed simultaneously the delicacy of sensibility and the power of the human will to direct the active powers of the mind to its own purpose.
