Conclusion

Abstract

Shelley’s knowledge of the issues key to the vitality debate is clear, as are his connections with the figures involved in it. He uses the vocabulary and ideas of the debate to address his own concerns, asserting the importance of mutability, transience and decay to issues of selfhood, identity, history and politics. Awareness of the ideological motivations and consequences of theories of life enabled Shelley to exploit them to the full, and such theories provided him with a means to explore issues of gender and political hierarchies in poems such as Prometheus Unbound. I hope that I have persuaded the reader of the importance of this context, its influence on the language, ideas and images Shelley uses in his poetry and prose. The newly-conceived life Shelley came across was constantly changing, assimilating other forms and, in the process, transforming them and itself: this life can be seen as a model for the poetry Shelley wished to create, which ‘transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes’ (Defence of Poetry, P&P, p. 533).