Shelley’s Vision

Abstract

In this chapter, I bring the presentation of visionary critique (or paraphysics) motivated by the consideration of Kant and other philosophers in previous chapters to bear on the poetry of Shelley, and in turn Shelley’s poetry indicates routes for the extension of visionary critique beyond the bounds of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. I read Shelley antithetically against Harold Bloom’s essays on Shelley, showing that the limit Shelley’s poetry approaches in his last lyrics, and especially the fragment, “The Triumph of Life,” can no longer be handled by the rhetorical criticism Bloom practices. I offer an alternative, which I call locative poetics, which is the poetic analogue of the philosophical idea of visionary critique: it consists in a re-locating of poetics in a realm beyond rhetorical figuration. Such re-locating is an analogue of philosophical self-(re)positioning, and the two fuse together to point the way from visionary critique to a fuller development of the notion of paraphysics.