ABSTRACT
When present-day experts try to distinguish Shelley from his most illustrious contemporaries, they frequently do so by describing him as the supreme 'mythmaker' among them, especially in Prometheus Unbound and the poems written in its wake. For some this label means that the poet returns longstanding Western myths to the effort that originally brought them about, to 'mythopoesis', the projection of human aspirations, fears, and desires for patterns of recurrence into the seemingly alien 'nature' that one perceive. Prometheus has kept his alteration going, by playing out the role of the guilt-ridden ideologue only to turn round on it shortly thereafter and observe it from more of a distance. The turn between Shelley's first and second acts, therefore, belongs as it should to Promethean transference purified of its need to retain any one past 'self' or the 'central' position in a mythographic construct.
