Taking place on the eve of The Shelley Conference, this lecture focuses on some of Shelley’s better-known poems collected in Mary Shelley’s Posthumous Poems (1824) and their imaginative response to the poetry of Wordsworth. Shelley as a poet is drawn repeatedly to those clusters of images (celestial bodies mirrored in water, evanescent rainbows, a fading rose or the burnished glow of the sun), which trace out, in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, a profound loss of the ‘visionary gleam’ and sources of possible recompense. Shelley may subject Wordsworth’s hopeful vision to scrutiny, but Shelley’s Alastor and ‘Two Spirits – An Allegory’ continue to find an imaginative resourcefulness in Wordsworth’s poetic vision. This fascination with Wordsworth persists even in Shelley’s last poetic fragment, The Triumph of Life, where Wordsworth’s ‘celestial light’ and that of ‘common day’ become, for Shelley, a ‘darkness [that] reillumines’ and obliterates reality.
Mark Sandy is Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He has published extensively on Romantic poetry and its legacies, including the monographs Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Ashgate, 2005) and Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (Ashgate, 2013; reprinted by Routledge, 2019). He has also curated a series of edited collections on Romantic echoes from the nineteenth century to the present day, decadence, Venice and, most recently, the spectral (Ghostly Encounters: Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Routledge, 2021), co-edited with Stefano Cracolici). He is currently the editor of The Review for the British Association of Romantic Studies. He held a three-month Research Fellowship at the Armstrong Browning Library (Baylor University, Texas) during spring 2022. His latest monograph, Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021 (released in paperback, November 2022). He is currently co-editing a four-volume set on Loss, Memory, and Mourning (forthcoming Routledge, 2024) and researching a book-length study, provisionally, titled Spectral Presences in Romantic and Victorian Poetry: From Wordsworth to the Brownings.
