Mourning Life: William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley

What does it mean that Shelley publicly mourns the death a living Wordsworth in his poetry? This essay argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley's renunciation of a narrow concept of selfhood not only informs, but germinates, his psychological and political principles, and in the process shapes his response to William Wordsworth—not as an “egotistical” poet, but as one who paradoxically and enviably escapes mutability by being ontologically identified with forms of non-life. I argue that Shelley brilliantly (and correctly) attributes this position to Wordsworth's poetic thought through his own poetic thinking in works such as Peter Bell the Third, and that Shelley also finds such an alignment incomprehensible. His construction of Wordsworth is a skeptical dialectician's disavowal of mute or dull inclusion. The essay attends to Shelley's treatment of Wordsworth in connection to Shelley's performative speech acts of inversion: life-death; heaven-hell; blessing-curse. Shelley abjures Wordsworth for excessive love for otherwise inanimate things; for ‘ma[king] alive | The things it wrought on’ and awakening slumberous ‘thought in sense’.