SOURCE: "The Inconsistency of Shelley's Alastor" in ELH, Vol. 13, No. 4, December, 1946, pp. 291–98.

In the following essay, Jones attributes the contradictions in Shelley's Alastor to a shift in his philosophy.

The logical inconsistency of Alastor has been the subject of analysis and of some debate, but thus far there has been no satisfactory explanation of how and why Shelley produced the inconsistency and then defended it in an even more inconsistent preface. If the problem can be solved, it is worth the trouble, for on its solution depends not only an understanding of the poem itself but of related passages in later poems.

The poem is inconsistent in that the early part of it represents the Poet as meriting punishment (presumably an early death), while the last lines praise him without qualification as the highest conceivable type. Because the Poet has lived in "self-centered seclusion" while eagerly and happily...