Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

Although for contemporary readers, Shelley, along with his compatriots George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), and John Keats (1795-1821) are largely regarded as the defining iconic figures in British Romanticism (a term they themselves never used to define or describe their literary movement), they were actually the defining figures of the second and what would be the last age of British Romanticism. When Shelley matriculated at Oxford, the towering figures of the first generation of Romantics—most notably William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and William Blake (1757-1827)—had eased into a comfortable middle age. Their most radical works behind them, they were content to be wise and revered cultural fixtures. Their rebellion was largely over by the time Shelley took up the cause.

To understand Shelley’s literary context, however, one must account for this daring and uncompromising first generation of Romantics. These poets first demanded that poetry reflect the urgent philosophical movement toward self-definition. They saw in the natural world all around them the spiritual integrity and moral authority traditionally accorded to deities. They rejected the cool logic of the Enlightenment era that embraced rationalism and the concept of scientific investigation guided by the intellect to arrive at truths about a world, a cosmos waiting to be defined into tidy and clean laws of behavior. They perceived that the role of the poet was to engage, inspire, delight, and animate, not merely teach dreary life lessons and tidy morals.

From these lions of Romanticism, whose works Shelley pored over, Shelley began his career accepting the role of the poet as a visionary, eager to speak to the complacent and dead-eyed masses the gospel of transformation and transcendence. Seek, Shelley argues. It is time. Reject contentment. Embrace the ideal of self-consequence. For Shelley, the poetry he inherited, at once magisterial and angry, catapulted the central importance of intuition over intellect, emotion over wisdom, spontaneity over routine, experience over laws, and the individual over the herd. Young and defiant, these second-generation Romantics were in essence handed a revolution already in progress, its uncompromising agenda stalled as its progenitors gracefully moved into the tame expanses of middle-age comfort.

From the first generation of the British Romantics, Shelley also learned the importance of nature as a construct able to inspire because it was largely uncorrupted by humanity’s sorry and shabby need for acquisition and ownership.

Alastor is in many ways an allegory of restlessness, a yearning (if naïve) Poet and his bold journey to discover the real nature of Nature. Nature in the raw, experienced with an open heart, provides the Poet with the tectonic epiphany of the sublime, a transcendent moment that figures in Alastor during the Poet’s lengthy mystical dream when he glimpses the supernal figure of the woman who in turn becomes his muse, his spiritual lover. For these Romantics, engaging the natural world permitted these unexpected, totally unanticipated moments that combined not only awe but fear over trying to take in such a stunning grandeur. From the first-generation Romantics, Shelley learned to tune his poetic energies to the innocence, openness, and daring of a child. Despite his wide and deep education, Shelley regards that ability to engage the world with the unassuming confidence and open-eyed wonder of a child the sole vehicle for transcendence.

Because of Shelley’s position within the second generation of Romantics, he is able as well to moderate the energy and urgency of the first generation’s uncompromising call to challenge convention and upend authority in liberating the individual and elevating nature. The narrator of Alastor sounds that caution. It is as if Wordsworth is counseling a young and too eager Shelley, or as if a wizened Shelley is calming down his too-eager peers who may lose what is important in their grand effort to touch what is sublime. The narrator understands what the Poet resists, that challenge cannot become an end to itself, that the right journey can end in moral disaster, that agenda is not everything. Thus, the poem reflects and rejects its own literary context.