Shelley's Visions of Death

This book provides the first modern, in-depth analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s engagement with the phenomenon of death. It argues that, for Shelley, this most nebulous of realities represents, first and foremost, possibility: Shelley’s poetic writings on death are both numerous and varied, presenting his reader, with differing degrees of confidence over the course of his brief but brilliant career, with several key visions of what death might be or actually is. Shelley’s Visions of Death stresses the seldom-appreciated fact that death was one of Shelley’s most enduring preoccupations, and also demonstrates the poet’s power to imagine, with startling variety, that which lies beyond the boundaries of experience.

Chapter 1: ‘While Yet a Boy I Sought for Ghosts’: Contexts.- Chapter 2: ‘Rending the Veil of Mortal Frailty’: Queen Mab (1813).- Chapter 3: ‘Who Lifteth the Veil of What is to Come?’: Alastor (1816).- Chapter 4: ‘And is This Death?’: ‘Seeing’ the Unseen, and Visionary Experimentation (1816-20).- Chapter 5: ‘Where the Eternal Are’: Adonais (1821).- Chapter 6: Shadows and Dreams: Conclusions.

Andrew Lacey is a scholar of the literature and culture of the Romantic period. In the last decade, he has worked as Senior Research Associate, on the Davy Notebooks Project and the Davy Letters Project, in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK. He assisted in the preparation of The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy (4 volumes, 2020) and Volume Four of The Poems of Shelley in the Longman Annotated English Poets series (2014). He is Co-Editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and a former winner of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Keats-Shelley Prize.