In identifying the strongest infidel currents in the poetry of Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, I stopped short around 1800. Of course all produced much major work thereafter, but in trying to trace ‘Romantic atheism’ through the poetry of the Romantic period as a whole, it makes sense to home in now on the new generation of poets who emerged in the 1810s, with only an occasional glance at the continuing work of the older generation. Shelley, Byron and Keats all fit easily into almost any definition of infidelism, and actively and unashamedly declared as much. The simplest task of this chapter, then, will be to produce and discuss some of the abundant evidence for this. A somewhat more challenging one will be to try to trace the lines of this infidel development, not just from the earlier poets already discussed but from some others who also deserve a place in the jigsaw, and from or alongside the contemporaneous works and activities of some of the protagonists of the previous chapter.

To begin with some of the abundant evidence: in Shelley's Queen Mab (1813) the spirit of a sleeping young woman relates how her mother took her as a child ‘to see an atheist burned’, forbidding her to weep since he ‘Has said, There is no God’.