Chapter 13 - Shelley and the Lake Poets

Summary

Percy Shelley’s relationship to the so-called ‘Lake School’ Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) has long been framed as a narrative of the earlier poets’ broken political commitments and the missed personal and emotional encounters of the ‘second-generation’ Romantic at his later post-revolutionary moment. Enriching the interpretive texture of this account, this chapter understands Shelley’s complex, productive relationship with Wordsworth, in particular, not simply through the charge of apostasy (political falling-away) but as an affective and poetic performance of inter-generational grief. I engage reading methods drawn from speech-act theory, affect studies, sociolinguistics, and deconstruction to show the weird temporalities of Shelley’s major poems addressing Lake Poet disconnection: ‘To Wordsworth’, Peter Bell the Third, and The Witch of Atlas. I conclude that Shelley’s generous lateral conception of unbounded agency opens his thinking up to an enlarged remit for receptive disappointments.