Shelley’s Vaporous Poetics

Taking up Gaston Bachelard’s portrayal of Shelley as a ‘poet of aerial substance’, this essay examines how clouds assume an ambiguous ontological status in Shelley’s poetry, and reconsiders his ‘vaporous poetics’ in the light of this. Focusing first on ‘The Cloud’, Shelley’s most direct engagement with the titular subject, it shows how Shelley’s verse navigates the tensions of singularity/plurality, solidity/fluidity, real/ideal. Clouds, as both individual, abstract forces that catalyse meteorological events and an integral part of those same events, ceaselessly cross such boundaries, confounding the classic Shelleyan dichotomy of materialism and idealism. The essay explores how these tensions shape Shelley’s depiction of clouds in other key texts from around the same period, ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’, demonstrating not only the crucial function of clouds in his lyrical technique and broader poetic vision, but also why they remain central to understanding his poetics as a whole.