SOURCE: "Romantic Death: Real Death," in The Pursuit of Death: A Study of Shelly's Poetry, Octagon Books, 1970, pp. 82-142.

In the following essay, Kurtz examines the many varied attitudes towards death that Percy Bysshe Shelley expressed in his poetry and traces the influences that led to the development of these attitudes.

The failure of the quest for an embodied ideal is the great romantic failure. But some romanticists pass through this failure and come out on the further side.

Their dreams, modified by the experience, become visions which are contagious to the world. If the romanticist is he who lives hugely in his dream and emotion, with more or less of Rousseau's suspicion of mere reason, and who trusts his imagination and emotion for guidance in affairs and for revelation of reality, his weakness will lie in emotionally running away from facts, his strength in critically correcting dream...