Book contents
- Percy Shelley in Context
- Percy Shelley in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I Life and Death
- Part II Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Contexts
- Chapter 7 Ancient Philosophy
- Chapter 8 Ancient Poetry
- Chapter 9 English Literature to 1792
- Chapter 10 European Literature, Dante to Rousseau
- Chapter 11 The Visual and Plastic Arts
- Chapter 12 The Radical Press
- Chapter 13 Shelley and the Lake Poets
- Chapter 14 Mary Shelley
- Chapter 15 Thomas Love Peacock
- Chapter 16 Byron and Shelley
- Chapter 17 Keats and Shelley
- Chapter 18 Revolution and Reform
- Chapter 19 Political Economy
- Chapter 20 Empire
- Chapter 21 Shelley’s Sexless Sexuality
- Chapter 22 The British Empiricists
- Chapter 23 The Sciences
- Chapter 24 Religion
- Part III Writings
- Part IV Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 13 - Shelley and the Lake Poets
‘Have I Not Kept the Vow?’
from Part II - Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2025
- Percy Shelley in Context
- Percy Shelley in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I Life and Death
- Part II Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Contexts
- Chapter 7 Ancient Philosophy
- Chapter 8 Ancient Poetry
- Chapter 9 English Literature to 1792
- Chapter 10 European Literature, Dante to Rousseau
- Chapter 11 The Visual and Plastic Arts
- Chapter 12 The Radical Press
- Chapter 13 Shelley and the Lake Poets
- Chapter 14 Mary Shelley
- Chapter 15 Thomas Love Peacock
- Chapter 16 Byron and Shelley
- Chapter 17 Keats and Shelley
- Chapter 18 Revolution and Reform
- Chapter 19 Political Economy
- Chapter 20 Empire
- Chapter 21 Shelley’s Sexless Sexuality
- Chapter 22 The British Empiricists
- Chapter 23 The Sciences
- Chapter 24 Religion
- Part III Writings
- Part IV Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Percy Shelley’s relationship to the so-called ‘Lake School’ Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) has long been framed as a narrative of the earlier poets’ broken political commitments and the missed personal and emotional encounters of the ‘second-generation’ Romantic at his later post-revolutionary moment. Enriching the interpretive texture of this account, this chapter understands Shelley’s complex, productive relationship with Wordsworth, in particular, not simply through the charge of apostasy (political falling-away) but as an affective and poetic performance of inter-generational grief. I engage reading methods drawn from speech-act theory, affect studies, sociolinguistics, and deconstruction to show the weird temporalities of Shelley’s major poems addressing Lake Poet disconnection: ‘To Wordsworth’, Peter Bell the Third, and The Witch of Atlas. I conclude that Shelley’s generous lateral conception of unbounded agency opens his thinking up to an enlarged remit for receptive disappointments.
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- Percy Shelley in Context , pp. 99 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025