Article: "To Wordsworth" and the "White Obi"'. slavery, determination, and contingency in Shelley's Peter Bell the Third.(Percy Shelley)(Critical essay)

ONCE MORE INVOKING POETRY IN ADVANCE OF SCIENCE--IN THIS CASE prophesying the development of a radioactive decay-calculus that modern biologists call "half-life"--Percy Shelley's sonnet "To Wordsworth" reads as an epitaph for a man still alive. As in so many other efforts of Shelley, the poem's work is to translate a displaced "life" to a new sense. (1) Thirty-some years before Wordsworth's death (more than Shelley's own lifetime), it ends with the line, "Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be." The only way to make an explicit paraphrase of Shelley's clear meaning is to understand him as saying something like "thus having been a force for good, and a great ...

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