Shelley’s Excursion

This article considers Percy Bysshe Shelley’s response to William Wordsworth’s The Excursion, viewing the younger poet as responding to the challenge of Wordsworth’s epic throughout his career. Focusing specifically on Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound, and The Triumph of Life, this article shows Shelley’s one-sided debate with Wordsworth as pitting his poetics against Wordsworth’s poetics, Shelleyan philosophy against Wordsworthian thought. The Excursion was not a poem for Shelley to reject. It was the epic that would tease Shelley into complex thought. Shelley’s troubled though profound response to Wordsworth’s poem sees Shelley make The Excursion his own.