This chapter investigates how Percy Shelley’s poetry of speech draws on a Darwinian materialist understanding of the body and can be read alongside John Thelwall’s theory of rhythmus in its figuring of speech as unstoppable action. Focussing on Shelley’s later works, including A Defence of Poetry, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, and The Mask of Anarchy, this chapter draws out the ways that materialist and embodied models of speech production underpin Shelley’s figuring of poetry as a force of change, and allow him to blur the boundaries between art and science, aesthetics and politics, the internal and the external. It examines how such understandings of the communicative power of voice as a physical and material force that can be felt as action or movement challenge the notion that Shelley’s later poems are indicative of the failure of both poetry as a means of communication and utterance as a means of effecting change.

What might Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry teach us about the current crisis of the humanities? This crisis is perpetual at least since Plato banished poets from his Republic. But in our current climate of anti-intellectualism, the crisis feels especially urgent. Or is it? Shelley’s answer was the autonomy of imagination, a creative spirit that sustained liberal notions of what Northrop Frye called an “educated imagination,” the hallmark of civil society. Yet Shelley feared this future might never arrive. Instead of a second half of the Defence, he wrote an elegy on the death of Keats. So, what is our future in a world where the autonomy of imagination has morphed into fake news and alternative facts? Add to this the existential crises of a pandemic and climate change and poetry must not only reimagine the world but justify its capacity to do so. This latter necessity defines a neoliberal academy in which the humanities, precisely because historically they have questioned being instrumentalized, need to make themselves ever more relevant or perish altogether. This chapter asks what hope might be created from contemplating that possible wreck, and thus what it means to educate our imaginations in perilous times.