Kant, Purity, and the Devil

It is in the Alastor volume of 1816 that Shelley’s quarrel with Wordsworth as a lost moral leader emerges for the first time. Chapter 5 turns to Peter Bell the Third, Shelley’s satire on Wordsworth, and relates the moral death-in-life of Peter Bell to Shelley’s revulsion against the wish to remain unchangeably as we are, as previously discussed in Chapter 2. This chapter revisits a question that has perplexed certain Shelley critics: did Shelley actually read Kant? The chapter supplies an answer to the question. Under the name of Bell, Wordsworth appears as a Kantian disciple corrupted by an ethical system that elevates, as the fundamental principle of moral action, duty above sympathy or the pursuit of happiness.