The Quest: Alastor (1961)

Abstract

In the autumn of 1815 Shelley, aged twenty-three, composed a blank-verse rhapsody of 720 lines, a quest romance called Alastor (Greek for ‘avenging demon’) or The Spirit of Solitude. This is his first poem of consequence, and is already both characteristic of his genius and premonitory of the development he was to undergo in the less than seven years that remained to him. The burden of Alastor is despair of the human condition. A preface sets forth the two possible fates the poem assigns to mankind

But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion.

The influence of Northrop Frye has been noticed in a number of recent books on Shelley, and especially in the new concern with Shelley as a ‘mythopaeic poet’, whose poems describe a new imaginative order of reality. Harold Bloom has been the major protagonist for this approach, arguing, with the assistance of Buber’s I-and-Thou concept, that the poet is seeking to image the impact of the imaginative relationship between the real world and his own perceptions. The resultant mythic quality in the poet’s work is not simply the record of an allegorical interpretation nor the reading of an analogous scheme of references between the two worlds, but is the creation of a new mode of action, the poem, which works out a new, living relationship. The immediate importance of this in Shelley is that he comes to stand as ‘a hero of the imagination in his unwavering insistence that an increase in consciousness need not be an increase in the despair of actuality, but in. his stubborn identification of imagination with the potential of consciousness’. (The Visionary Company, p. xiv.)