Adonais and The Triumph of Life represent the pinnacle of Shelley's poetic achievements. Adonais, challenging the genre it channels, pushes the elegy as far as it can, exhausting possibility after possibility in its sinuous Spenserian stanzas. The Triumph of Life, with its nightmarish music vying to both represent and control vision, embodies its fleetof- foot mental processes in swift terza rima stanzas. Both poems are united by their intense exploration of the purpose, possibilities, and limits of poetry, from elegiac commemoration to visionary rhyme. Though many of Shelley's poetic works are informed by close attention to these questions, their significance becomes heightened in Adonais and The Triumph of Life. Shelley's and Keats's 1820 letters influence Adonais profoundly, prompting Shelley to fashion Adonais as a response to their mutual advice. The Triumph of Life emerges from a meditation on the poetry and art of Shelley's fellow artists, as revealed by his 1822 letter to John Gisborne. Though Shelley's poems are not the sites of a ‘socialised scene of writing’, he fashions a creative dialogue between himself and fellow artists suggestive of the ‘jury’ of his ‘peers’ that he posits in his Defence of Poetry (p. 680). Shelley's letters lay bare the preoccupations that would colour his poetry.

Though critics have repeatedly traced the presence of Keats's poetry in Shelley's Adonais, there has been scant attention paid to the significance of their extraordinary epistolary exchange of 1820.These letters show Keats and Shelley seeming to offer barbed advice to one another on how to improve their respective poetry. The interplay between the poetry and the letters reveals apparent ‘advice’ to be a working out of a personal poetics for each poet. Each offered the other his own formula for poetic achievement, formulas that had grown significantly out of the poetry they had recently written or were in the process of writing. However, following Keats's death, Shelley's tribute to him would be to produce an elegy that responds to Keats's and his own advice, crafting a poem alert to the counsel offered to and by his fellow poet.