SOURCE: “‘The Dark Idolatry of Self’: The Dialectic of Imagination in Shelley's Revolt of Islam,” in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. XL, 1991, pp. 73-98.

In the following essay, Richardson characterizes The Revolt of Islam as “a profoundly dialectical treatment of heroism and imagination.”

The Revolt of Islam is, paradoxically, both Shelley's longest and least anthologized poem. It has numerous aesthetic infelicities that partly explain this neglect, notably Shelley's choice of Southeyan romance as a genre. But the most frequent and serious criticism levelled at the poem is that it contains a fundamental thematic weakness. Although in recent years interpreters of the poem have demonstrated that its structure is much more subtle and unified than had previously been thought,¹ many readers still dismiss the poem on the grounds that the education of the near-perfect hero and heroine provides no satisfactory model for the revolutionary regeneration of humanity the heroes attempt to...