Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude, published in 1816 when Shelley was in his early twenties, is widely regarded as the poet’s first major work and his most probing expression of the role of the poet. The poem is equal parts a visionary allegory centered on the tension between flesh and spirit; a mythical journey narrative of self-identity; a philosophical meditation on the sublimity of beauty and the mechanics of the imagination; and an autobiographical exploration by an aspiring, if melancholic, poet struggling to clarify the function of poetry itself.

Young Shelley wrote the poem, more than 700 lines of tightly constructed iambic pentameter, in three weeks of furious, passionate creativity in autumn, 1815. The poem is something of a cautionary tale as the poet’s heroic journey to find both beauty and truth is frustrated by his ambivalence over entirely breaking with nature. His heart tells him to do one thing, his imagination and creativity quite another. The title refers to a malevolent figure from Greek mythology, one of the black horses that pulls the chariot of Hades, the god of the underworld, and refers to the spirit that, in the poem, tempts the conflicted poet to abandon his interactions with the lackluster and corrupt “real world” to pursue the ideal dreamy worlds conceived by his soul at full throttle.