SOURCE: “The Seashore's Path: Shelley and the Allegorical Imperative,” in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 51-79.

In the following essay, White probes the didactic/allegorical quality of Shelley's works.

Throughout Shelley's poetic career, his writings reflect on, engage with, and struggle against a particular mode of that discursive predicament more generally called allegory: didacticism. For Shelley, the ethical dimensions of poetry should reach beyond particular referential effects—the empirically determined moralities of time and place—the better to encompass the source that grounds them. In classic romantic fashion he names that source imagination. The position is articulated in the preface to Prometheus Unbound:

… it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence...