Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” still stands as perhaps the representative English Romantic lyric. Less well known to non-specialists is Percy Shelley's powerful, disturbed response to Wordsworth and to Wordsworthian immortality, the long allegorical poem “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude.” In Shelley's poem, a Wordsworthian spirit of solitude, in the person of a self-involved but sincerely questing poet, meets a bad end and goes to an “untimely tomb” (50). Whereas Wordsworth's Immortality Ode enacts the complex movements of a consciousness variously dejected, exultant, sobered, yet ultimately solaced by “the faith that looks through death” (187), Shelley's allegory polemically depicts a spirit permanently alienated, a poet prematurely yet decisively dead. From Wordsworth, intimations of immortality recollected from early childhood; from Shelley, a critical death, an insistence on mortality unredeemed and unredeeming.