Writing “Supreme Reality”: Coleridge’s Religious Musings and Shelley’s Queen Mab

Abstract:This article argues that Shelley’s experimentation with prophecy in Queen Mab closely connects him to the Coleridge of Religious Musings. Prophecy, in Coleridge’s hands, is a means of social criticism as well as a divine calling. Shelley relished such doubleness, transforming prophecy into an imaginative mode that marks his entire poetic career. Religious Musings, with its multi-faceted preoccupations, spoke to Shelley’s early ambitions as a philosophical poet in Queen Mab. Religious Musings was a model for Shelley that he would return to with a keen sense of his own mastery of Coleridge’s twist on the prophetic mode.