ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about Shelley's speed in terms of its effect on the reader is both unavoidable and fraught with difficulty, the tendency to see speed as a direct reflection of the poet's processes of thinking and composing is critically mystifying and singularly unproductive, Shelley's poetic self-characterizations notwithstanding. The verbal means through which an impression of speed is generated, a cascade of images as well derive from the cool measures of revision as from the rapid, and presumably evaporative, boil that is skimmed for a first draft. Shelley's speed might best be thought, as the formal verbalized articulation, produced by careful observation and deliberate compositional adjustment, of a mind working rapidly and fluctuantly in a world constituted in part through that mind's own perceptual activity. C. S. Lewis's remarks Shelley's speed 'makes us imagine while we are reading him that we have somehow left our bodies behind' is singularly inappropriate to the experience this passage offers.
