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Updated: May 28, 2025
Zastrozzi, a Romance. Puerile rubbish. " Original Poetry, by Victor and Cazire. Withdrawn, and ever since unknown. " Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. St. Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian, a Romance. No better than Zastrozzi. Queen Mab. Didactic and subversive. Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, and other Poems. The earliest volume fully worthy of its author.
Alastor, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, and Prometheus Unbound, all breathe this insatiate craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness." Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form.
Read Adonais, To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, To Night, The Cloud, The Sensitive Plant, and selections from Alastor and Prometheus Unbound. Less expensive editions are in Canterbury Poets, Temple Classics, and Everyman's Library. Under what different aspects do Adonais and Lycidas view the life after death? Has Shelley modified Wordsworth's view of the spiritual force in nature?
If "Alastor" had expressed one side of Shelley's nature, his devotion to Ideal Beauty, "Laon and Cythna" was in a far profounder sense representative of its author.
His career as a poet began, characteristically enough, with the publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, entitled Margaret Nicholson's Remains, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman who tried to stab George III. His boyish poem, Queen Mab, was published in 1813; Alastor in 1816, and the Revolt of Islam his longest in 1818, all before he was twenty-one.
In Alastor, too, we see the hero wasting away until His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone As in a furnace burning secretly From his dark eyes alone.
Hogg was expected to stay with them in October, and in the meanwhile, under the green shades of Windsor Forest, Shelley was writing his Alastor, and, as his wife describes in her edition of his poems, "The magnificent woodland was a fitting study to inspire the various descriptions of forest scenery we find in the poem." She writes: None of Shelley's poems is more characteristic than this.
Shelley informs us, to embody the contrast between 'the earthly and unworthy Venus, and the nobler ideal of love, the heaven-born or heaven-sent Venus. The poem would thus have borne a certain relation to Alastor, and also to Epipsychidion.
It was written when Shelley, after his long struggle, had begun to realize that the world was too strong for him. Alastor is therefore the poet's confession, not simply of failure, but of undying hope in some better thing that is to come.
But it is now time to return from this digression to the poem which suggested it, and which, more than any other, serves to illustrate its author's mood of feeling about the life beyond the grave. The last lines of "Adonais" might be read as a prophecy of his own death by drowning. The frequent recurrence of this thought in his poetry is, to say the least, singular. In "Alastor" we read:
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