The Art of Losing

Abstract

Reviving pastoral elegiac form in Adonais, his elegy on the death of Keats, Shelley engages Keats’s allegorical style, which revives antique figures in order to show them passing on. This chapter dwells on Shelley’s figural strategies, especially his treatment of the Mother/Muse Urania, to argue that the poem’s efforts to consolidate the legacies of Keats and second-generation romanticism are shadowed by a story of catastrophe, that of the child who dies before its parental generation. Adonais at once participates in fashioning a romantic movement, corpus, and legacy and simultaneously suggests that lining this aggrandizing project is that which was cut off, aborted, did not come to pass. It thus dramatizes a modernity that is necessarily bound to that which it has failed to succor.