Till old experience do attain To something like Prophetic strain. --Milton (1) 1 MICHAEL FERBER STATES THE ORTHODOX VIEW WHEN HE SAYS THAT IT IS with completion of becomes Shelley, arrives at modes, themes, and style distinctive of his 'mature' poetry. (2) In Greek, Alastor names an avenging demon, and there is a certain irony, if not nihilism, in notion of coming into one's own under aegis of vengeance. Indeed, in his preface to poem appears to portray world as an intrinsically vengeful place, suggesting it rewards those who recognize its true nature by killing them off quickly rather than subjecting them, like those who fail to do so, to and poisonous decay: that Power which strikes luminaries of world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influence, dooms to a slow and poisonous those meaner spirits dare to abjure its dominion. (3) Harold Bloom writes in his gloss of this passage: That Power is Imagination, in its Wordsworthian formulation, and it brings with it a choice between kinds of destruction: ... The first becomes a quest for a finite and measured object of desire which shall yet encompass in itself beauty and truth of infinite and unmeasured conceptions of Poet. This quest is necessarily in vain, and leads to untimely death of quester. Such a theme would not have been acceptable to Wordsworth or Coleridge, and yet is legitimate offspring of their own art and imaginative theory.... [T]o put it as a contrary of Wordsworth's language, Nature always will and must betray human heart loves her, for Nature ... is not adequate to meet demands made upon her by human imagination. (4) This conception of a kind of Manichean antagonism between Imagination and Nature, between man and world in which he's fated to pass his life, certainly is in keeping with idea Shelley's poem, and through it what we have come to recognize as the mature Shelley, are born under sign of a vengeful demon. Bloom suggests becomes Shelley by asserting his incommensurability not only with Nature, but also with his own poetic progenitors, Wordsworth and Coleridge, who, by denying their incompatibility with Nature, are figured as representing not nurturing soil of Shelleyan poetics but and poisonous decay which poetics springs to life by repudiating. But this is in a sense to read Alastor's title with insufficient attention to what Bloom instructively identifies as Shelley's distinctively urbane irony (283). The preface does not only, as Bloom claims, contrast two kinds of destruction: Poet's solitude and unimaginative man's lonely gregariousness (285), but also, crucially, contrasts intercourse with an intelligence similar to himself which Poet actually thirsts for, and single prototype of his conception, with which he vainly tries to quench thirst. The Defense argues [t]he great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own, and [t]he great instrument of moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to effect by acting upon (517). In this light, Alastor's Poet can be seen to confuse cause and effect, devoting his love wholly to a certain image, forgetting point of imagination itself is it makes sympathy of corresponding powers in other human In Alastor's preface, hardly holds quest for sympathy to be vain; rather, it is precisely in contrast to worthy end Poet's vacancy of spirit makes itself felt: The intellectual faculties, imagination, functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. …