What might Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry teach us about the current crisis of the humanities? This crisis is perpetual at least since Plato banished poets from his Republic. But in our current climate of anti-intellectualism, the crisis feels especially urgent. Or is it? Shelley’s answer was the autonomy of imagination, a creative spirit that sustained liberal notions of what Northrop Frye called an “educated imagination,” the hallmark of civil society. Yet Shelley feared this future might never arrive. Instead of a second half of the Defence, he wrote an elegy on the death of Keats. So, what is our future in a world where the autonomy of imagination has morphed into fake news and alternative facts? Add to this the existential crises of a pandemic and climate change and poetry must not only reimagine the world but justify its capacity to do so. This latter necessity defines a neoliberal academy in which the humanities, precisely because historically they have questioned being instrumentalized, need to make themselves ever more relevant or perish altogether. This chapter asks what hope might be created from contemplating that possible wreck, and thus what it means to educate our imaginations in perilous times.

While Percy Shelley anticipates and speaks to many important subjects of “our times,” he also developed a poetry and methodology for connecting and collaborating with peoples in other places and epochs. In this account, the editors reconsider Shelley’s often binaristic historical reception as both politically radical and childishly idealist, instead offering a version of the poet who continuously rethinks categories and relations among people and their times.

The sixth and final chapter considers horror writing’s appropriation of flesh-caricature from writing descriptive of the human body, dismantling character’s place in formal realism. I explore the grotesquing of the disproportioned body in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and her short story ’Transformation’, and in Walter Scott’s dwarf characters, where the aesthetic type of the ’gigantic dwarf’ gives rise to a mode of writing I call ’horrid realism’. The second part of the chapter grounds horrid realism in eighteenth-century texts that imagine the literalisation of caricatúra, such as Thomas Browne’s depiction of the Hippocratic face, and the effects of swaddling bands and foundation garments as pictured by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Buchan, William Cadogan, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and J. P. Malcolm.

This chapter addresses five authors who respond to Romantic hopes in indefinite futures: John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Mill’s late writing on religion, hope in eternal life constitutes a link to Romantic poetry, a motive for taking life seriously, and a wan empirical possibility. In Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil, blind hope, or our uncertainty about other people and any future we might share with them, may be necessary for love and engagement in this life – or it may be a grievous, fatal error. Along with Dickinson, Eliot supplies a bridge to the Modernists’ largely ironic representation of hope, more or less stripped of its possible virtue. The art of Dostoevsky is also oriented toward emerging Modernism, even as he exposes the ills of modernity, ultimately affirming something akin to Christian hope. Nietzsche sketches a new hope that might rise on the grave of Christianity. Despite his well-known adage on Pandora’s jar – the hope it contains is “the worst of evils” – Nietzsche more often prophesies, in his later writings, the “highest hope” of becoming who one is.

There are numerous records of Byron and Shelley’s discussions, including, perhaps above all, Shelley’s brilliant conversation poem, Julian and Maddalo, in which Shelley’s ‘Byron’ is Count Maddalo and Shelley’s ‘Shelley’ is Julian. Like the conversation of Julian and Maddalo, the conversation with which I want to begin this consideration of the overlapping poetries and poetics of Byron and Shelley may or may not have happened quite as reported. ‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’ appeared in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal eight years after Shelley’s death and six after Byron’s.