‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo show Shelley responding to other poets as he shapes his discrete poetic voice. Wordsworth, who had been Shelley's leader found, was becoming, in Shelley's eyes, a leader lost. Yet this ‘heavy change’ (Lycidas, 37) extended to Wordsworth as a political rather than a poetic model for the younger poet. ‘To Wordsworth’ and ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’ (referred to as ‘Verses’ throughout this chapter), represent Shelley's subtle and shifting response to Wordsworth. Despite overtly rejecting Wordsworth for having ‘cease[d] to be’ in ‘To Wordsworth’ (14), both ‘Verses’ and ‘To Wordsworth’ pay tribute to, even as they seek to correct, the erring source of their inspiration. Julian and Maddalo, shaping an urbane conversation between two friends—and then their confrontation with the Maniac, which undermines the tenor of their debate—seems to stage a Shelley-Byron conversation, and Shelley places their ideological clash at the forefront of his dialogic poem. Yet even as Shelley seems to provide the reader with symbolic footholds, Julian representing the melioristic Shelley and Maddalo Byron's jaded melancholia, the poem resists such identifications. Byron, who loomed large in Shelley's life (Claire Clairmont living with the Shelleys while she sought to resolve issues around Allegra's custody) and his imagination, becomes a vital presence in the poem. But the nature of his presence seems deliberately obscured by the poet: the reader is finally shut out, a denizen of the ‘cold world [who] shall not know’ (Julian and Maddalo, 617). If Shelley, in these poems, is a poet among others, he remains carefully apart by virtue of his nuanced and mobile response to his peers.

Wordsworth was, and remained throughout Shelley's career, one of his most vital influences, to whom he could allude, respond, and challenge. From his earlier works, such as those contained in the Esdaile Notebook to The Triumph of Life, Shelley fashioned responses to the older poet's works, even those he claimed to reject. The complex sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’ shows Shelley confronting the older poet who, as G. Kim Blank claims, is both predecessor and peer. Invoking Wordsworth as the ‘Poet of Nature’ (‘To Wordsworth’, 1), Shelley anchors him in the land to which he had laid claim in his Lyrical Ballads as the source of and the site of his inspired poetry.