ABSTRACT
This chapter concludes by looking at a group of poems in which Shelley's stylistic choices and performances are inextricably enmeshed in choices and performances of living. Harold Bloom in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: 'Shelley's heart, when he died, had begun to touch the limits of desire, as his final love lyrics show. 'The Invitation' and 'The Recollection' together, we find that Shelley has situated himself rhetorically on either side of the transient moment of lyrical intensity he attempts to define and sustain. With its inset 'notice on my door' and wittily personified abstractions, this is the most eighteenth-century section of the poem and predictably the focus of much of Donald Davie's praise. Their stylistic range and deftness, their often masterful inventions of voice and rhythm and stanzaic or couplet arrangement, are the workmanship of an artist instinctively wilful yet profoundly unresolved about writing, and about living.
