Writing “Supreme Reality”: Coleridge’s religious musings and Shelley’s Queen Mab

This article argues that Shelley’s experimentation with prophecy in Queen Mab closely connects him to the Coleridge of Religious Musings. Prophecy, in Coleridge’s hands, is a means of social criticism as well as a divine calling. Shelley relished such doubleness, transforming prophecy into an imaginative mode that marks his entire poetic career. Religious Musings, with its multi-faceted preoccupations, spoke to Shelley’s early ambitions as a philosophical poet in Queen Mab. Religious Musings was a model for Shelley that he would return to with a keen sense of his own mastery of Coleridge’s twist on the prophetic mode.