Young Shelley immersed himself in Gothic fiction, especially in 1809–11. The immediate results were his Gothic romances, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and his earliest long verse narrative, The Wandering Jew. As derivative as these were, they show the wide range of his Gothic reading and his initial ways of striving to make the Gothic his own. Despite his regretting these ‘extravagances’, it turns out he never left the Gothic behind. Instead, he enriched the suggestiveness of Gothic symbol-making across his career – from Alastor and his contributions to Mary’s Frankenstein to The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and The Triumph of Life – partly by building on the Gothic’s expansion from the 1760s on but also by exploiting the symbolic fundamentals of ‘Gothic Story’ as Horace Walpole defined them in The Castle of Otranto. By reworking Walpole’s interplay between the assumptions of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ romance, Shelley repeatedly used the Gothic to intimate the tug-of-war between retrogressive and progressive ideologies that simmered in his own thought and in Western culture.

Conservative reviewers berated Percy Shelley for his political radicalism, his opposition to religious orthodoxy, and his alleged personal immorality. The Tory Quarterly Review subjected Shelley to violent personal attacks, to which he responded in Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. In 1821, pirate editions of Queen Mab provoked some of Shelley’s most vituperative and partisan reviews. Nevertheless, even politically antagonistic reviewers acknowledged the aesthetic merits of Shelley’s poetry. Moreover, positive and negative reviews alike registered the originality of his stylistic innovations and experiments with poetic form. Many of the passages quoted by hostile reviewers as evidence of Shelley’s allegedly incomprehensible diction include striking examples of his distinctive figurative language. In perceptive articles by John Gibson Lockhart, the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine defended Shelley’s poetry while condemning his political principles. Meanwhile, Leigh Hunt consistently defended Shelley in the pro-reform Examiner. Eventually, the elegiac reception of Adonais fed into the posthumous mythologising of Shelley.

This chapter investigates how Percy Shelley’s poetry of speech draws on a Darwinian materialist understanding of the body and can be read alongside John Thelwall’s theory of rhythmus in its figuring of speech as unstoppable action. Focussing on Shelley’s later works, including A Defence of Poetry, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, and The Mask of Anarchy, this chapter draws out the ways that materialist and embodied models of speech production underpin Shelley’s figuring of poetry as a force of change, and allow him to blur the boundaries between art and science, aesthetics and politics, the internal and the external. It examines how such understandings of the communicative power of voice as a physical and material force that can be felt as action or movement challenge the notion that Shelley’s later poems are indicative of the failure of both poetry as a means of communication and utterance as a means of effecting change.