The Triumph of Life

Abstract

Cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of the poets. Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’

The Triumph of Li fe resists an assured interpretation, and any reading of it must have uncertainty as its cornerstone. The poem is a fragment as we have it, truncated by Shelley’s accidental death. Paul de Man forcefully reminds us of this when he writes: ‘What relationship do we have to such a text that allows us to call it a fragment that we are then entitled to reconstruct, to identify and implicitly to complete? … The final test of reading, in The Triumph of Life, depends on how one … disposes of Shelley’s body.¹ Yet his critics quite often do ‘dispose of Shelley’s body’ by completing the ‘Vision [that] on [his] brain was rolled’ (40). The consensus is that Shelley was beginning a new line of development with this poem, and the disagreement … which is considerable … centres around the meaning of that ‘Vision’.