It is with Percy Bysshe Shelley that the issues raised in the present book become most acute and most polarised. In addition to writing Romanticism's most famous account of the relationship between the neglect and future fame of genius in Adonais, and its most impassioned theoretical rendering of the nature of genius and its relationship with posterity in A Defence of Poetry, Shelley's poetry and prose provides pervasive, complex and often contradictory evidence for my suggestion that posterity is central to Romantic poetry and poetics. On the one hand, Shelley's desire to change the world, to effect reform if not revolution through his poetry and prose, makes his work utilitarian, polemical and direct. On the other hand, and increasingly as time goes by and Shelley finds his work neglected, abused, censored and censured, he relies increasingly on a minority readership and on the political and aesthetic after-effects of his writing. Three comments by Shelley in letters and in conversation express very clearly the kinds of issues by which he understands himself to be challenged, and the ways in which his work conceptualises the Romantic culture of posterity. In moods of despair such as that expressed in a letter to John and Maria Gisborne dated 30th June 1820, Shelley mocks his own desire for posthumous fame, as a ‘shadow’, the ‘seeking of sympathy with the unborn and the unknown’, and declares that, anyway, such sympathy is beyond his own grasp: ‘What remains to me? Domestic peace and fame? You will laugh when you hear me talk of the latter; indeed it is only a shadow.