Romantic Survival and Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”

Abstract

Scholarship on Percy Bysshe Shelley tends to assume a certain deconstructive logic at work in his poetry whereby destructions entail remainders, thereby guaranteeing futurity. In this article, I argue that if we take the historical allusions in “Ode to the West Wind” seriously, then we discover a notion of destruction that leaves behind no remainder whatsoever and thus threatens the future in a way more radical than a “constitutive threat” does. While working from “within” deconstructive readings of Shelley as rigorously as possible, I suggest not only that Shelley's poetry puts pressure on the deconstructive “to come,” but also that it portrays a type of absolute erasure that has remained unaccounted for by “deconstructive” and “historicist” readings of Shelley alike (both of which tend to assume that what is destroyed will haunt or remain in one way or another).