Shelley's conception of his own role as a political revolutionary continues to ally the visionary with the campaigner. In letters to Leigh Hunt of 1820, he sees his task as one of popularizing reform. His projects for ‘a little volume of popular songs’ and ‘a standard book for the philosophical reformers politically considered’ are intended to make radical ideas generally accessible, one in poetic, the other in theoretical language. ‘I see you smile,’ writes Shelley, anticipating Leigh Hunt's incredulity. In fact the prose A Philosophical View of Reform (Clark, 229–61) is judiciously temperate in comparison with the apocalyptic political transformation Shelley allows himself to set down for Hunt. ‘The system of society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations with all its superstructure of maxims & of forms before we shall find anything but disappointment in our intercourse with any but a few select spirits’. This Philippic has the slightly comical appearance of enlisting political followers in the fight for a better conversation and social life for the Shelleys. Shelley, though, has in mind the way religious communities can create in discursive practice values that to outsiders might appear otherworldly and superstitious, ‘having a power of producing that [object] a belief in which is at once a prophecy & a cause – ’ (Letters, ii. 191). If you can persuade people of progress, and so get them to speak your language, the battle is half won.

The ‘popular songs’ are presumably meant to follow the same logic, their poetic infectiousness recruiting sympathizers otherwise put off by difficult or extreme ideas. ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (R&P 301–11), like another candidate for the collection, the sonnet ‘England in 1819’ (R&P 311), ends in faith and exhortation; not fanciful success, but ‘graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day’ (ll. 13–14). This imaginative enlightenment of others through sacrificial death repeats the action of the radical poet as Shelley agonizes over it in his own case. He is popularising his own fate. He will do so again in Adonais (R&P 388–406), when, ‘A phantom among men … [he] in another's fate now wept his own’ (ll. 272, 300).