ABSTRACT
This chapter explores specific stylistic aims and practices informed by Shelley's conviction that 'language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts alone'. It is fundamental to Shelley's writing as a whole, to his ambitious and radical experiment in poetic drama: The imagery employed in many instances drawn from operations of the human mind, or from external actions. The etymological structure of Shelley's mentalistic images is an interesting issue, one very much worth returning to as part of a detailed reading of particular passages. What Willliam Wordsworth admires is imagery drawn from the operations of the human mind as it interacts through the senses with objects in some way external to it. The resulting disorientation is part of any reader's experience of the poem, and for some, no account of Shelley's figurative principles and practices can adequately compensate for the toll that disorientation takes on their sympathy and patience.
