Vitalism Re-Visited: From Percy Bysshe Shelley to Contemporary Eco-Poetics

Abstract

This paper reconfigures the theme of divine encounters in the literature by examining the intersection of pantheism, vitalism, and ecological imagination, with a particular focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Far from depicting the divine as transcendent, Shelley envisions it as an immanent force permeating nature, matter, and life itself. In poems such as “Queen Mab”, “Mont Blanc”, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, “Ode to the West Wind”, or “The Cloud” Shelley translates vitalist science into poetic vision, challenging orthodox religious beliefs and contemplating the divine as inherent in natural processes. The study also situates Shelley’s thought within a broader genealogy that extends through John Ruskin’s vitalist aesthetics, Henri Bergson’s élan vital, and into contemporary posthumanist philosophy, neomaterialism and ecocriticism, along with scholars who have contributed to reviving and transforming vitalist traditions, reframing human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. The paper shows the importance of the Romantic period in the development of vitalist approaches in various fields of knowledge, anticipating ecological concerns. The study is framed as a genealogical and epistemological problem attempting to articulate connections while situating poetic practice as a privileged site where vitalism is negotiated.

1. Introduction

The notion of “divine encounters” is often linked to the portrayal of transcendental and spiritual experiences. However, in the context of British Romanticism, such encounters were frequently grounded in pantheistic and vitalist worldviews. Deriving from pan- ‘one and all’ or ‘everything’, as well as the Greek theos ‘god’, the concept of pantheism was used, in adjective form, by the Irish freethinker John Toland in the title of his work Socinianism Truly Stated (Toland 1705), recommending his book “by a pantheist to an orthodox friend”. Toland’s self-identification ties him to a particular view of divinity that he went on to describe in Pantheisticon (Toland [1720] 1976). Deriving from the Italian reformer Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), these trends contributed to the supernatural distance with the divine and placed emphasis instead on immanence, reason, and the natural order, ideas that were also related to the re-emerging vitalism of the period.

Against both atheism and conventional theism, in pantheism the universe itself embodies the divine, becoming an immanent present foundation, rather than a transcendent expression, absent and external to the world (Levine 1994, p. 6). For Michael Levine, the most important characteristic of pantheism is the experience of the divine existing in an all-inclusive Unity, “where Unity and divinity are regarded as distinct properties which are nevertheless inextricably connected in various ways.” (ibid., p. 49) He also asserts that this partly means that it is experienced as having value via human affective natures (ibid., p. 60). And since values are related to ethical and moral judgements, theistic and pantheistic concepts of divinity would be functionally equivalent (ibid., p. 69). Additionally, the idea of the divine is also grounded on positive feelings as well as the absence of clear conceptualisation, being often apophatic, following a via negativa; that is, focusing on the unknowable nature of the divinity and, thus, defining it by what it is not, rather than by what it is. In this way, the apprehension of the divine produces a sense of strangeness and awe, often related by the Romantics to beauty under a Platonist viewpoint, and referred to as ‘the Sublime’. The Sublime is not reducible to common experience nor adequately expressed in words and description, as Edmund Burke had described in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke [1757] 1990).

In pantheism, the divinity has no intrinsic personality, although it is still associated with timelessness, immortality and order (Levine 1994, p. 58). This emphasis on the indestructibility of the divine might indicate a form of cosmic insecurity: a fear of anomie and a corresponding need for stability, present in most religious and spiritual experiences. However, by situating the divine in the world itself, pantheism seemed to be reducing the sacred to the profane, overcoming the transcendence characteristic of established religions, an aspect that was often seen as introducing a heretical worldview.

Pantheism has ties with ancient cosmological traditions where laws of nature and other principles or forces were used to explain an initial Unity from which all multiplicity originated. This is the case of several pre-Socratic philosophers, Platonism, and various ancient Eastern philosophies like Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, and some forms of Buddhism, all of which exhibit comparable pantheistic tendencies. For instance, Lao Tse presents the Tao as a universal, flowing principle inherent in all beings, guiding the harmonious unfolding of nature and life (Lao 1981, pp. 33–38). In the Vedanta tradition of Hindu philosophy, especially as expressed in the Upanishads, the ultimate reality, Brahman, pervades all existence, sustaining and harmonising the cosmos and rendering every aspect of the universe sacred and interconnected (Radhakrishnan 1953, pp. 59–65). Across many of these ancient cultures, there emerges a shared vision of the sacred divine as intimately bound to natural processes and their vitality, rather than as an external transcendental power. The natural and the ethical are also intrinsically connected in all these belief systems.

Sharing this foundational reliance in the importance of the natural world, pantheism and vitalism are closely intertwined. However, while pantheism generally focuses on the divine as a form of Unity and harmony of the totality of existence, vitalism emphasises the how of this experience; the intrinsic life-force or dynamic principle that animates matter. In pantheistic vitalism, the universe itself is infused with this divine energy, where every element participates in the continuous unfolding of life, a synthesis that bridges biology and metaphysics, suggesting that vitality is a sacred expression of being itself. In contemporary vitalist approaches Unity is eschewed in favour of encounter; reorienting objectivity toward relationality and interdependence as sites of meaning and intersubjectivity (López-Varela Azcárate 2010).

The present article, with many limitations because of space constraints, presents an overview of the evolution of vitalist paradigms in order to enquire if they might anticipate contemporary ecological neomaterialist and posthumanist thinking, which ascribes vitality to a more-than-human world, initiating a dispersal of ego-centred agency. At the heart of contemporary debates lies a difficulty that is now widely recognised as irreducible: the fact that subjective experience resists explanation in terms of purely third-person, physical descriptions. Even theories that embrace emergence and complexity encounter a persistent gap between organisational description and phenomenal presence. Explaining how neural or biological systems are structured, integrated, or dynamically coupled does not, in itself, explain why such structures should be experienced from within. What is often overlooked, however, is that this dilemma has a historical analogue. Romantic vitalism, especially in its British forms, faced an almost identical problem when attempting to theorise life not merely as organisation or mechanism, but as felt, animated, inwardly meaningful existence. Scientists, thinkers and poets resisted the idea that life could be exhausted by mechanical causality, yet they were equally dissatisfied with invisible vital forces without clear explanation. They realised that no scientific or philosophical language was adequate to articulate this ‘more’ without lapsing into obscurity or mysticism. As a result, Romantic vitalism struggled to give a discursive account of life that could include inwardness, affect, animation, and meaning, dimensions that were experienced as central to living beings, although they were somehow resistant to empirical formalisation. Crucially, this struggle did not simply remain unresolved. It was displaced into aesthetics and, above all, into poetry and the concept of the Sublime.

My argument in this paper is that, at least in British Romanticism, aesthetics functions as an epistemic strategy, a mode of thinking where conceptual explanation reaches its limit. In other words, poetry does not illustrate vitalism; it performs what vitalism cannot explain. Poetry provides not a theory of life, but an experiential analogue of animation, capable of evoking interiority, dynamism, and affect without reducing them to explanatory schemata. The work of Percy Bysshe Shelley is particularly illuminating here because it repeatedly stages this tension.

Shelley’s declared atheism in “The Necessity of Atheism” (P. B. Shelley 1880) is not incidental. By rejecting both theological explanations of life and consciousness and any transcendent guarantor of meaning, Shelley forecloses recourse to a sort of pantheistic divine principle capable of resolving the gap between material organisation and subjective experience. In the absence of God as metaphysical ground, vitality cannot be anchored in a soul, an immaterial essence, or a providential design; nor can consciousness be secured by appeal to transcendence. Deeply influenced by vitalist thought, Shelley refuses to stabilise life into a definable principle. Instead, he relocates vitality into processes of relation, resonance, and affective transmission, most notably through poetic language itself. In this sense, Shelley’s atheism radicalises Romantic vitalism by forcing it into an aesthetic register, where subjectivity is neither divinely guaranteed nor conceptually resolved but experientially enacted through poetic form. The divine is dispersed across natural phenomena and vital processes, negotiating the interplay between science and imaginative creativity. His poetry becomes a way of narrating life and nature as animated by invisible powers. In his poems, vitality is not an original substance but circulatory energy, enacted through rhythm, apostrophe, and syntactic propulsion. Shelley’s poems induce an experience of animation in the reader that simulates life itself.

At this point, the connection to contemporary debates becomes particularly clear. Modern theories that appeal to emergence or complexity often reproduce the Romantic vitalist dilemma in a new register: they place their focus on explaining how systems are organised but fail to explain why organisation should be felt. Shelley’s poetic vitalism offers a historical model for responding to this impasse, not by supplying a missing ontology, but by shifting from abstract cognition to intelligibility. Poetry becomes a way of thinking subjectively without objectifying it. It does not claim to explain consciousness, but it demonstrates how experience can be shared, transmitted, and recognised without being reduced to third-person description. In this sense, Romantic aesthetics anticipates a crucial insight of contemporary philosophy of the mind: namely, that certain dimensions of consciousness, particularly those involving affect, relationality, and embodied presence, resist being captured by propositional, explanatory, or computational models and instead require non-reductive modes of access grounded in experience, form, and sensation. This insight has acquired renewed relevance within contemporary eco-poetry and ecocritical paradigms, which similarly confront the inadequacy of instrumental or representational language to account for ecological entanglement, more-than-human agency, and the felt continuity between mind, body and environment.

By privileging aesthetic enactment over conceptual mastery, eco-poetic practices inherit the Romantic intuition that poetic form can mediate modes of awareness, such as ecological interdependence and more-than-human relationality, that remain inaccessible to discursive rationality alone, thereby offering not a theory of consciousness or nature, but a situated, experiential mode of knowing attuned to the living world, sustained by artistic imagination (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, p. xix). Within the context of the Anthropocene, a term that designates the current epoch defined by the pervasive impact of human activity on planetary systems, this mediating function of literature has acquired renewed urgency. As environmental degradation and climate change have reshaped both material conditions and critical frameworks, literary studies have increasingly turned toward texts that confront ecological collapse, environmental injustice, and speculative futures. Scholars such as Timothy Morton (2013) have argued that literature in the Anthropocene must negotiate unprecedented scales of time, causality, and responsibility that exceed habitual modes of human perception, thereby placing strain on conventional narrative structures and representational strategies. In this setting, literature is no longer approached merely as a reflection of the natural world, but as an active mode of ecological engagement, capable of fostering ethical reflection, imaginative projection, and affective attunement to nonhuman agencies. Ecocriticism has responded by advocating an explicitly interdisciplinary methodology that bridges the humanities and environmental sciences, encouraging the re-reading of canonical texts through the lens of climate change in order to recover latent ecological insights. Within this renewed critical landscape, Romantic poetry, and particularly its sustained attention to natural processes, temporal cycles, and relational ontologies, emerges as a crucial archive for thinking about ecological complexity, offering resources that continue to inform contemporary environmental discourse.

The paper unfolds across the following sections. The first traces the deep roots of pantheism and vitalism, highlighting how ancient notions of cosmic vitality and divine immanence inform later thinkers and, in particular, Romantic thought. The second section focuses on Shelley’s poetry as a central site where pantheistic vitalism is poetically reconfigured. The third follows the intellectual trajectory from Shelley through Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Henri Bergson to reach contemporary neomaterialist thought, tracing a very brief account of the evolution of vitalism into broader philosophical and ecological frameworks that remain crucial and influence contemporary eco-poetry. The final section explores some British and North American authors who have been inspired by the poetic vision anticipated by Romantic vitalism and Shelley’s poetry in particular.

Given the breadth of historical periods, disciplines, and intellectual traditions involved, the scope of this inquiry inevitably exceeds the limits of a single article. The study therefore does not claim exhaustiveness but rather advances a focused, exploratory synthesis, acknowledging its omissions while aiming to foreground conceptual continuities that warrant further, more detailed investigation.

2. Pantheism, Vitalism, and the Roots of British Natural Philosophy

The conceptual roots of pantheism can be traced to a range of ancient philosophical and religious systems, from Druidic to Greco-Roman and Eastern traditions. In all of these, divinity was a force diffused throughout nature’s animate and inanimate elements, emphasising the harmony of the cosmos and the presence of the sacred in all things.

Among the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, the Milesian monists, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, explained creation in terms of a primordial Unity equated with an initial natural substance that gave way to the world. Thales envisioned the universe as a living whole originating from water (Kirk et al. 1983, p. 90). In de Anima, Aristotle also conjectured that Thales envisioned “the whole world as somehow alive and animated” (ibid., p. 94) and that all things were “full of gods” (ibid., p. 96). Thales’s pupil, Anaximander, postulated the apeiron, or infinite, a boundless generative inexhaustible principle from which all things emerge and into which they return. It gives rise to the world’s multiplicity, including opposites like hot and cold or wet and dry, related to cyclical processes of creation and destruction (ibid., pp. 106–9). The third Milesian monist, Anaximenes, held that aer (a kind of misty air) was the underlying substance (arche). This notion, later adapted by Plato, significantly influenced British Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Percy B. Shelley, interested in the “breath of life” (pneuma) and vitalism. This idea of a single, fluid substance underlying the diversity of the natural world appealed to the Romantic desire for a living spirit in nature, acquiring symbolic value in Romantic imagery (for the impact of Humphry Davy and other scientists on the period, see Heringman 2004, pp. 144–48; Boyson 2022).

Heraclitus (1951) of Ephesus, with his notion of the logos as the dynamic, ordering principle of reality, contemplated divinity as inseparable from the flux of nature (Kahn 1979, pp. 46–52). The term logos carries multiple semantic layers: it means ‘word,’ ‘account,’ ‘principle,’ and ‘reason.’ Although it can be considered a sort of rational force, it is not so in the narrow sense of human rationality or logical argumentation. Rather, it is a universal principle of order, measure, and intelligibility that pervades and structures the cosmos (Kirk et al. 1983, p. 187). Heraclitus insists on the Unity of opposites and multiplicity, and the logos is what ensures that this flux of contraries is not chaotic but patterned (Kahn 1979, pp. 101–7). He conceives the logos as something alive and immanent, governing the flux of the world, a process he compares to fire, an image that suggests a self-regulating, vital force.

Similarly, the Stoics explicitly identified the logos with pneuma, Epicurus’ word for wind (Long and Sedley 1987, vol. 1, p. 71). They considered it a sort of warm breath that they held to be the stuff of the soul (ibid. p. 287); a vital animating force permeating all matter (ibid., p. 322). Likewise, Pythagorean and Empedoclean doctrines of the world-soul articulate a unifying breath or animating substance (Hadot 2006, pp. 195–200). In Europe, mediaeval physics was influenced by the idea of pneuma, helping to shape later aether theories (ibid., pp. 142–48).

In all these thought systems, divinity was not transcendent but localised in some basic vital essence, embodying a sort of pantheistic vitalism that highlighted sacredness in all that exists. This worldview was fundamentally holistic, refusing to draw sharp boundaries between human and nonhuman, or between animate and inanimate reality, laying the ground for the claim that vitality is an intrinsic, irreducible property of life and matter.

Aristotle is often regarded as one of the earliest systematic thinkers to articulate concepts that can be read in a vitalistic key. In his biological and metaphysical writings, he posits the soul (psyche) or entelechy as the immanent principle that animates and organises beings. This notion of an inner, purposive force can be seen as anticipating vitalistic interpretations of life as self-organising, as Hans Driesch did at the beginning of the twentieth century. Aristotle’s cosmology extends this logic to the universe as a whole: all motion and becoming are ultimately oriented toward the unmoved mover, a transcendent actuality that draws the cosmos toward its fulfilment. In this way, Aristotle combines an immanent principle of vitality (the soul as entelechy within organisms) with a transcendent source of motion and order (the first mover), offering a vision where life is governed both from within and from the highest principle of the universe.

As early as the seventeenth century, vitalist theories arose in response to Isaac Newton’s and Descartes’s ideas. While Newtonian physics had emphasised the mathematical regularity and predictability of motion, some of his contemporaries and immediate successors acknowledged phenomena such as growth, reproduction, and the organisation of living systems, which could not be fully captured by purely mechanical laws. This tension created intellectual space for alternative conceptions of nature and the rise of British natural philosophy.

The Cambridge Platonists, including Henry More, Ralph Cudworth (1678), and John Smith, tried to reconcile Christian theology with philosophy, emphasising reason, ethics, and a spiritual worldview against the mechanistic materialism of Descartes. They posited an active principle of life of plastic nature, always mediated by God (Hutton 1982; Kaldas 2024). Meanwhile, Baruch Spinoza’s vision of a unified, animate cosmos became increasingly influential in post-Enlightenment Britain.

A Dutch philosopher of Sephardic Jewish descent, Spinoza (1632–1677) never employed the term ‘pantheism’, although his philosophical system in Ethics articulates a vision of God and Nature as identical (Deus sive Natura). Ethics was originally written in Latin (published posthumously in 1677 and later in Spinoza 1883), and for much of the eighteenth century it circulated clandestinely because of its reputation as atheistic. According to Spinoza, the universe constitutes a single, unified substance, and all individual entities are mere modifications or ‘modes’ of this singular divine reality. Spinoza’s monism also integrates what would later be recognised as vitalist intuitions: the cosmos is not inert but imbued with forms of self-organisation.

Despite sustained theological and philosophical censure, Spinoza’s thought exercised an increasingly profound influence on Enlightenment and Romantic intellectual cultures across Britain, France, and Germany. Romantic natural philosophy did not emerge in opposition to Enlightenment science but rather through a transformation of its conceptual foundations, particularly in relation to the understanding of life as an immanent self-organising process. Within this context, Spinoza’s monism offered a powerful alternative to Cartesian dualism by proposing a unified cosmos in which natural law, moral order and the dynamism of living systems could be apprehended as interrelated expressions of a single substance. For British natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle and John Ray, Spinoza’s framework, albeit often adopted obliquely or selectively, enabled a reconceptualisation of nature as a coherent, law-governed, yet internally animated whole, in which divine immanence and natural causality were not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing (Naess 1973, p. 4).

By the latter half of the eighteenth century, these philosophical commitments increasingly converged with empirical developments in chemistry, physiology, and natural history. Romantic biology arose from this convergence, with speculative metaphysics and experimental science becoming mutually constitutive. In Britain, the chemical and physiological investigations of William Cullen and Joseph Black, alongside Erasmus Darwin’s speculative natural histories, exemplify this synthesis (Reill 2005, p. 122). Darwin’s evolutionary conjectures, grounded in a belief in organic self-organisation and developmental continuity, echo Spinozist and vitalist assumptions concerning the internal dynamism of matter. Life, in this framework, was no longer understood as a static endowment imposed from without but as an emergent property arising from nature’s intrinsic productive powers. Physiology, in particular, became a privileged site for articulating these ideas. John Hunter’s pioneering anatomical and embryological studies exemplify this Romantic reorientation of life science toward formative principles rather than mechanical explanation alone. In his Treatise on the Blood (Hunter 1794), published posthumously by his brother-in-law, Hunter invokes a “principle of life” that directs bodily growth, response and repair, an organising agency irreducible to chemical or physical processes (Reill 2005, pp. 174–76). This conception aligned closely with the broader Romantic insistence on Bildung or formative power, a concept situated at the heart of Goethean science and German Naturphilosophie (Richards 2002, pp. 8, 13, 49). Life, in this view, manifests as a self-directing process whose intelligibility depends on recognising its internal purposiveness rather than treating it as an assemblage of inert parts.

These vitalist ideas found explicit theoretical articulation in France through the Montpellier school, where the term “vitalism” itself was first coined. As Donohue and Wolfe have demonstrated, the Montpellier vitalists challenged mechanistic physiology by asserting the autonomy and irreducibility of vital functions, thereby reinforcing a conception of life as governed by principles distinct from those of inorganic matter (Donohue and Wolfe 2023, pp. 3, 116–23). Continental physiological discourses shaped by figures such as Albrecht von Haller intersected with Galvanism, which further destabilised the boundary between animate and inanimate matter. Luigi Galvani’s discovery of bioelectric phenomena lent empirical credibility to vitalist claims by suggesting that life processes involved forces not yet subsumable under classical mechanics.

The implications of Galvanism were most radically articulated by the German physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, whose work epitomises the Romantic ambition to unify nature through a single dynamic principle. In 1800, Ritter famously concluded that the organising principle of all matter is electricity, a force that both unified nature and endowed all entities with life. In the Romantic imagination, electricity, like life itself, functioned as a mediating concept through which matter, mind, and morality could be understood as interconnected expressions of a living cosmos.

Within this intellectual climate, British natural philosophy became increasingly entangled with metaphysical, theological, and ethical reflection. The study of nature was inseparable from questions concerning divine immanence, the agency of life, and the moral and aesthetic consequences of inhabiting a world in which all matter was potentially animate. Vitalist assumptions, that life possessed an inherent, self-directing energy, and pantheistic perspectives, that this energy constituted an expression of divine presence within nature, permeated scientific discourse in Britain, contributing to relocating divinity from transcendent design to immanent process. Scientists and natural philosophers such as Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, John Thelwall, and Humphry Davy, prominent figures in the circles that the Shelleys were part of, connected science, particularly the physiology of voice, radical utterance and politics, and poetry during a turbulent era, revealing voice as central to identity, power, and social change (Rhodes 2025). This is visible in Shelley’s poems, where these philosophical and scientific developments are translated into poetic and aesthetic forms, where life itself becomes the central explanatory principle of nature, culture, and meaning.

Spinoza was an important influence. British thinkers adapted his ideas to local theological, political, and scientific concerns. When mechanistic explanations were increasingly felt to be insufficient. Spinozism helps to think of life, matter, mind, and morality as an integrated framework. Spinoza’s texts reached Britain through German figures like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who sparked the famous Pantheismusstreit (Pantheism Controversy) during the 1780s (Gerrish 1987; also Richards 2002). During his time in Germany (1798–99), Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrestled explicitly with Spinozism. In Chapter V of Biographia Literaria (1817), he criticises monism and its perceived atheistic implications, and in Chapter IX, he discusses the limitations of Spinoza’s system in contrast with Friedrich Schelling’s idealist philosophy (Engell 1981, pp. 92, 112, 332). However, in his “Essays on the Principles of Method”, part of The Friend (1818), Coleridge stresses “the organic interpenetration of parts, and the formative union of shaping and being shaped” (Coleridge 1983, p. 168, cited in Smoker 2024, p. 5). In his analysis, James G. Smoker mentions that Coleridge portrays nature as responsive, sentient, and imbued with spiritual force: “as a foundation to ground the sacred interrelatedness of things in and through their unity without losing particularity” (Smoker 2024, p. 2). The following paragraph, cited by Smoker, shows Coleridge’s holistic understanding of everything that exists:

In all inferior things from the grass on the house top to the giant tree of the forest, to the eagle which builds in its summit, and the elephant which browses on its branches, we behold—first a subjection to universal laws by which each thing belongs to the Whole, as interpenetrated by the powers of the Whole; and, secondly, the intervention of particular laws by which the universal laws are suspended or tempered for the weal and sustenance of each particular class, and by which each species, and each individual of every species, becomes a system in and for itself, a world of its own.

(Coleridge 1969, p. 516, cited in Smoker 2024, p. 8)

Many of Coleridge’s poetical works exemplify this vision, perhaps most evidently in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). The mariner shoots the albatross because he believes it to be an unlucky omen and the cause of their ship’s faltering wind. Yet the bird symbolically represents the connective tissue between the natural and the spiritual worlds, an emissary of life’s sacred interdependence, and in maritime folklore, a bearer of sailors’ souls. Its death ruptures the delicate equilibrium between humanity and nature, inaugurating a process of alienation and moral reckoning. As the poem unfolds, life itself appears animated by mysterious vital forces; for instance, the sea teems with “water-snakes” that move in “tracks of shining white” as the wind and sun regain agency. The Mariner’s subsequent penitent journey mirrors a process of reawakening to the vitality that permeates creation. The sea, the winds, the creatures, and even the spectral presences all participate in this dynamic web of life. Thus, the poem dramatises the Romantic intuition that the divine vital ties of the universe are inseparable and that to violate this bond is to transgress the very principle of existence.

Coleridge’s vitalist sensibility finds a close parallel in the work of his friend, William Wordsworth. As James McKusick notes, “the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge foreshadows the modern science of ecology in its holistic conception of the earth as a household, a dwelling place for an interdependent biological community” (McKusick 2000, p. 6). Indeed, in his poetry, Wordsworth often attributes a sense of active agency and inherent joy to the natural world, a perspective that mirrors Spinoza’s concept of ‘conatus’ (impulse, inclination, tendency). In poems like “Lines Written in Early Spring,” Wordsworth describes birds and plants “reaching out” to their environment with a “faith” that they derive pleasure from their own existence (Rigby 2014, p. 64). This reflects the Spinozian drive of all beings, whether animate or inanimate, to preserve their own selves and expand their capacities through dynamic relations with others. Wordsworth’s narrator also seems to point to Spinoza’s distinction between natura naturata (nature natured) vs. natura naturans (nature naturing). The first describes the collection of finite things that exist temporarily, and the second the eternal, creative force of the universe that Spinoza controversially identified as the physical manifestation of the divinity and which Wordsworth describes as the “holy plan” (Rigby 2014, p. 64ff).

Wordsworth’s sense of an indwelling spirit in nature that fosters moral and emotional growth is also seen in his acclaimed “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (Lyrical Ballads, 1798). Verses such as “a motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought” (Tintern Abbey, ll. 100–101) encapsulate Wordsworth’s conviction that an animating principle pervades both mind and matter; a vital unity that binds consciousness to the living world. The poet feels “[a] motion and [a] spirit” … “A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts”. (Lines 51–52) and that anchors his “purest thoughts” (Line 113), with Nature becoming “the nurse/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being” (“Tintern Abbey”, lines 113–115; Collected Edition, Wordsworth 1858, p. 160).

In 1804, Wordsworth composed “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, commonly known as “Daffodils” (Collected Edition Wordsworth 1858, p. 140). The poem drew inspiration from a walk undertaken with his sister, Dorothy, near Ullswater Lake two years before. First published in 1807, the poem uses Dorothy’s journal entries to build a structure of metaphorical analogies. It links natural elements like stars, waves, and flowers to the poet’s internal world, where the memory of this intense encounter provides therapeutic healing and creative fuel. By identifying himself with the flowers, the poet suggests that poets are “dancing daffodils”, illustrating his belief in a vital living force within nature that can actively elevate the human spirit. Nature, for Wordsworth, is more than a physical setting; it becomes a living entity imbued with a divine metaphysical essence. This perspective is an early form of the idea of an interconnected earth, a concept that aligns with modern ecocritical perspectives and the philosophical ideas of Gaia, the theory that the earth’s biosphere functions as a single, self-regulating entity (Lovelock 1979, p. 25). To Wordsworth, nature provides solace, healing and joy in the face of the burdens of urban, industrial life. In poems like “The Tables Turned”, the speaker also urges the reader to “Let Nature be your teacher” in driving spiritual renewal and moments of transcendence: a “sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused” (“Tintern Abbey”, Collected Edition Wordsworth 1858, p. 161). Thus, this experience extends to a cosmic scale, where the human soul is in harmony with the universe itself, finding “inner balance and universal connectedness” (ibid.) through the contemplation of nature, which animates sensibility.

Wordsworth’s poetry has also been described as showing a deep connection and interdependence between humans and their environment, exemplifying what Jonathan Bate described as “Romantic Ecology” (Bate 1991), a study that reoriented Romantic poetry as a formative moment in the development of ecological thinking. Wordsworth’s vitalism is subtle yet pervasive: the divine is diffused through landscapes, rivers, and mountains, and the human mind perceives it through affective engagement and recollection. In The Prelude (Wordsworth 1979), Wordsworth also describes nature as an active, formative presence that shapes memory and moral growth in emotional resonance with natural phenomena, so that the natural world is morally instructive and spiritually meaningful (Bate 1991, pp. 34, 38, 92). Indeed, the poet declares, “ye presences of Nature …/Such ministry …/Haunting me …/Of danger or desire, and thus did make/The surface of the universal earth/With triumph, and delight, and hope, and fear.” (Bk 1, ll: 490–95: 54). He defines the sublime as “By the impressive discipline of fear/By pleasure and repeated happiness–/So frequently repeated …” (Bk 1, ll: 632–34: 62).

While Bate places particular emphasis on Wordsworth’s resistance to industrial modernity and his attentiveness to rural landscapes, the ecological implications of Romanticism extend more broadly, and perhaps more radically, through the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Shelley’s poetry, ecological awareness is articulated less as pastoral retreat and recollection and more evidently as a dynamic engagement with the vitality of the natural world, conceived as an active, relational, and generative field. Core elements associated with Romantic ecology, organicism, interdependence, and resistance to mechanistic abstraction are reconfigured in Shelley through a vitalist aesthetic that foregrounds processes, energies, and transformations over stable form, harmony, and spiritual refuge.

Shelley’s engagement with the natural world persistently unsettles; his poetry mobilises sensibility and imagination as mediating faculties through which the agencies of nature and matter become perceptible in their own right. This experience is powered by physical sensation, channelled in the present through the five senses, including moral sentiment and past recollection, all projected into the future to create the timelessness of the Sublime. In this sense, Shelley’s work exemplifies an ecological poetics grounded in relationality. By staging encounters with the Sublime that emphasise instability, scale, and human vulnerability, Shelley’s poetry cultivates an awareness of ecological fragility and the limits of conceptual and technological control, anticipating the epistemic orientations of contemporary ecological thought.

Comparable articulations of pantheistic vitalism can be identified across a broader range of Romantic and post-Romantic writers, each responding in distinct ways to the pressures exerted by rationalism, industrial mechanisation, and the processes of secularisation. By relocating the divine within the immanent, dynamic processes of the natural world, these authors sought to restore agency, value, and meaning to landscapes, bodies, and nonhuman life, thereby challenging reductive mechanistic accounts and anticipating key orientations of modern ecological thought. Although the scope of the present paper does not permit a more extensive examination of these parallel developments, it is worth noting that this synthesis of pantheistic and vitalist perspectives finds a particularly influential continuation in the American Transcendentalist movement. Figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau similarly foreground the vitality and sacrality of the natural world, articulating a relational ontology in which nature functions as an active participant in ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical inquiry, inspiring late-nineteenth-century environmentalists like Octavia Hill and John Muir (Hall 2014, Introd.).

Indeed, Shelley’s poetry achieves its fullest intellectual and aesthetic legacy when situated within the vibrant and contested milieu of early nineteenth-century vitalist speculation, a period in which natural philosophy, chemistry, and physiology intersected productively with broader philosophical, political, and poetic inquiry. Shelley’s work exemplifies a distinctly interdisciplinary mode of thought that refuses the separation of scientific rationality from imaginative or affective understanding, a disposition that Joseph Barrell identifies as central to Shelley’s intellectual temperament (Barrell 1947, p. 73). Rather than treating science and poetry as opposed epistemic domains, Shelley approached them as mutually illuminating modes of inquiry, each probing different dimensions of the same ontological questions. His sustained engagement with contemporary debates on the nature of life is evidenced by his wide-ranging reading of Erasmus Darwin, the Baron D’Holbach, Humphry Davy, and the writings of his own physician, William Lawrence (Holmes 2008, p. 311). Shelley could have been aware of other physiological writers in Germany via Lawrence, who had translated Blumenbach’s Comparative Anatomy in 1807 (Rigby 2014, p. 66).

Darwin’s Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (E. Darwin 1794–1796) and The Temple of Nature (E. Darwin 1803) articulated a vision of living beings animated by an intrinsic capacity for self-development, presenting life as inherently generative, dynamic, and continuous with material processes (for an exploration, see Heringman 2004, p. 226ff; also Richards 2002, p. 466), an approach that anticipated later evolutionary thinking, including that of Darwin’s grandson, Charles. Yet it was the increasingly polarised debate over a putative “life principle” that sharpened the stakes of Shelley’s engagement with vitalism. Between 1814 and 1819, the public controversy between William Lawrence (1819) and his mentor John Abernethy at the Royal College of Surgeons crystallised the tension between competing models of vitality: Abernethy’s defence of a divine immaterial animating principle and Lawrence’s materialist insistence that life emerges from the organisation and interaction of matter itself (Ruston 2005, p. 84). Lawrence’s position, influenced by the French materialists and perceived by conservative contemporaries as blasphemous and ethically dangerous (Ruston 2005, pp. 6, 11), provoked a fierce backlash that forced him to withdraw his work and temporarily damaged his professional standing. Lawrence was Shelley’s personal physician for a time, and their relationship extended beyond mere medical care into shared intellectual sympathies. They had met within the radical gatherings organised by Mary’s father, William Godwin. The circle also included figures such as Humphry Davy and William Nicholson, discussions on early experiments with electricity by Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, or Giovanni Aldini, as well as debates over a possible electric fluid or magnetic “life force” (Ruston 2005, pp. 110–17), all of which shaped not only Percy’s poetry but also Mary’s novel Frankenstein (M. Shelley 1818).

Shelley’s notebooks and letters indicate that he followed all these discussions closely during his London years (1811–1813), when he was immersing himself in works of natural philosophy, physiology and chemistry (Pulos 1985, p. 112). Shelley’s own prose work, “A Refutation of Deism” (P. B. Shelley 1814) and his essay “On Life” (1819–1820; see Ruston 2005 for a comprehensive analysis), echo Lawrence’s concept of life as an inherent property of organised matter (Piper 1962: p. 122). He absorbed these readings into his poetic vision, transforming Lawrence’s scientific materialism into a poetic vitalism that reconciles science, philosophy, ethics, and imaginative creation, as summarised in his testament, “A Defence of Poetry” (1821/40), where poetry becomes “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” As shown in the following section, Shelley’s poetry is the crystallisation of vitalism, in that he transmutes speculative natural philosophy into his aesthetic vision.

The final sections of this article try to show how the vitalist currents that informed Shelley’s poetics and Romantic natural philosophy laid the groundwork for a broader intellectual engagement with life’s dynamism that continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century during the Victorian period. Shelley’s intuitions found echoes in the work of John Ruskin, who articulated a form of aesthetic and ethical vitalism. His stance in Modern Painters (1843–60) and other works represents a bridge between Romantic poetics, Thomas Carlyle’s “natural supernaturalism”, and the new scientifically inflected debates. In parallel, Henri Bergson’s concept of élan vital foregrounded the creative and temporal nature of life as an ongoing process of becoming, opposing both the mechanistic vitalism of contemporaries such as the biologist Hans Driesch, who postulated a teleological vital force guiding organic development.

The evolution of vitalism also had an important influence on early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, for it aligned with their interest in dynamism, metamorphosis, and the rejection of the rigidity of classical forms. Poets, novelists, and visual artists drew upon vitalist currents to explore new modes of expression, for instance, the “stream-of-consciousness,” a term coined by psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the continuous, unbroken flow of thought, sensations, and memories. James Joyce told his translator, Valery Lar-baud, that he had borrowed this as a narrative technique after reading Edouard Dujardin’s novel, Les lauriers sont coupés. Similarly, artistic currents like Expressionism, Surreal-ism, and Futurism echoed similar beliefs in life’s creative forces. André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (Breton 1924) described psychic automatism as guided by energies beyond conscious control. Paul Klee’s (1925) writings on form as the genesis of movement mirrored living forms as dynamic processes. The “words in freedom” (parole in libertà) of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and other Futurists can also be read as metaphors for vital creativity. These are just some examples of how these emerging understanding foregrounded the phenomenological interpenetration of mind and matter.

Beyond their immediate aesthetic impact, vitalism also anticipates key concerns still present in twenty-first-century neomaterialist and posthumanist theories. By asserting the irreducibility and agency of life, it prefigures the ideas of contemporary theorists like Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Timothy Morton, among many others who highlight the vitality of matter, the distributed agency of nonhuman entities, and the entanglement of humans with a more-than-human world. In this sense, vitalism brings forth a continuous intellectual engagement with life as a self-organising, relational, and ethically charged phenomenon, providing a conceptual bridge that links literary, philosophical, and ecological thinking across centuries.

3. Vital Flames and the Romantic Imagination: Shelley’s Engagement with Life

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) represents perhaps the most explicit fusion of pantheism and vitalism among British Romantics. While often associated with atheism, Shelley’s poetry reveals a view of the divine as immanent within the natural world and life as a dynamic force where multiplicity is connected by love. Shelley’s poetic and philosophical vision repeatedly returns to the idea of love as a metaphor for this vital principle connecting all forms of existence, from the human and the natural to the divine. This belief is most explicitly articulated in his later works, the philosophical poem “Epipsychidion” (1821) and in his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (P. B. Shelley 1820b), where love functions as a metaphysical force that unites and creates harmony.

Shelley’s conception draws deeply on Platonic philosophy, particularly from the Symposium and the Phaedrus, where love (Eros) is conceived as the desire for the Good and the Beautiful that propels the soul toward Unity and transcendence. However, Shelley reinterprets this through a Romantic and immanentist lens. Rather than aspiring toward an abstract transcendental realm of Ideas, for Shelley, love is diffused throughout the material world, binding all living entities in a dynamic, self-organising system. In this sense, Shelley’s Platonism is transformed into a sort of vitalist pantheism, where love is the affective and ontological medium through which the universe continually renews itself; the regenerative force opposing tyranny and decay, as he writes at the end of Prometheus Unbound: “Love from its awful throne of patient power/In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour/Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, /And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs” (P. B. Shelley 1820b, pp. 152–3).

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Love’s Philosophy”, was first published in 1819 in Leigh Hunt’s periodical The Indicator and later included in Posthumous Poems, a collection edited by Mary Shelley (P. B. Shelley [1819] 1824). The poem envisions love as the binding principle of the universe: “Nothing in the world is single; /All things by a law divine/In one spirit meet and mingle” (M. 1824, p-191), articulating the metaphysical belief that all elements of existence participate in an underlying Unity. Love is not merely an emotion but the animating force that reconciles multiplicity with the One. This cosmological tenderness is framed through natural analogies, fountains mingling with rivers, and winds meeting each other, in which Shelley transposes Platonic abstraction into sensuous immediacy. The poem, thus, crystallises Shelley’s conviction that the vitality of nature and the moral life of humanity are interwoven through love’s sacred correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm.

This meditation on the interconnectedness of life emerges in many of his early poems. “Queen Mab” (P. B. Shelley 1813) stands as one of his first and most ambitious attempts to articulate a vitalist vision of the cosmos, one that fuses radical political and religious criticism with speculative natural philosophy, metaphysical inquiry. It also includes a defence of the practice of vegetarianism as theorised in the long Note 17’ to the poem, which was subsequently published independently under the title of “A Vindication of Natural Diet”. Written during Shelley’s formative years, the poem reflects Shelley’s heterodox intellectual views. Subtitled “A Philosophical Poem,” the poem explicitly announces its ambition to intervene in contemporary debates concerning the nature of life, consciousness, and moral order. Shelley’s correspondence of 29 July 1812 with his publisher, Thomas Hookham, and with his father-in-law, William Godwin, confirms his engagement with the works of D’Holbach, Spinoza, and David Hartley (1749), among others (Letters, P. B. Shelley 1964, vol. 1, pp. 183–84 & 315–16). These readings encouraged Shelley to conceive consciousness not as an immaterial faculty imposed upon inert matter, but as the emergent product of a continuous interaction between mind and body within a dynamically animated universe. In this respect, Shelley also participates in the British reception of Spinoza, one shaped by Enlightenment materialism, religious dissent and vitalist physiology. Figures such as Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, and John Thelwall had already adapted Spinozist monism to scientific and political concerns, developing conceptions of life as self-organising, immanent, and ethically consequential. “Queen Mab” inherits this intellectual milieu and translates it into a visionary poetic cosmology in which vital force, moral affect, and political emancipation are inseparable expressions of a single living Unity. The poem’s clandestine printing and private circulation mirrored the subversive nature of its ideas: rejection of institutional religion, monarchical power, and mechanistic materialism. The later unauthorised publication by Richard Carlile in 1821, one of the leading figures of radical freethought, extended Shelley’s anti-dogmatic message to a wider, working-class readership, linking pantheistic vitalism with the political energies of early socialism.

Although “Queen Mab” has frequently been read through the lens of political radicalism, Jonathan Bate’s observation that ecocriticism’s most enduring contribution may be “more phenomenological than political” (Bate 2000, p. 75) proves especially illuminating. The poem’s opening scene already stages a vitalist cosmology. Shelley confronts the reader with a stark meditation on the apparent dominion of death, personified as a “gloomy Power” reigning over “tainted sepulchres.” From a vitalist perspective, this passage dramatises the question of whether life is governed by a negative, entropic force or by an immanent self-renewing principle. The repeated interrogatives (“Hath then…?”, “Must then…?”) suspend judgement, staging a moment of ontological uncertain transformation that is crucial to Shelley’s vitalism.

Hath then the gloomy Power

Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres

Seized on her sinless soul?

Must then that peerless form

Which love and admiration cannot view

Without a beating heart, those azure veins

Which steal like streams along a field of snow,

That lovely outline, which is fair

As breathing marble, perish?

Must putrefaction’s breath

Leave nothing of this heavenly sight

But loathsomeness and ruin?

Spare nothing but a gloomy theme,

On which the lightest heart might moralise?

(“Queen Mab” I. pp. 9–23)

The “gloomy Power” invoked shows that putrefaction, decay, and even dead inert matter are paradoxically alive, questioning “From yon remotest waste… The limits of the dead and living world,” as he explained years later in “Mont Blanc” (P. B. Shelley 1817b, p. 181), an aspect explored in contemporary ecocriticism (i.e., Zimmer 2021). The syllepsis “breathing marble” connects an animate quality to an inanimate object. The “azure veins”, likened to streams, emphasise circulation, continuity and latent motion. Even in apparent lifelessness, matter retains the potential for animation, a key vitalist assumption. Death is thus presented not as the annihilation of life’s principle but as a problematic transformation whose meaning remains undecided. The passage thus enacts a subtle reversal: death is no longer a sovereign force but a phase within a dynamic economy of life.

When this early use of “Power” is read in relation to Shelley’s later poetry, its provisional character becomes clear. In “Mont Blanc” (P. B. Shelley 1817b), it designates an impersonal, impassive force that “dwells apart,” constitutive of nature’s ceaseless activity. In the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” (P. B. Shelley 1817a) power becomes explicitly vital and relational: an invisible influence that visits human consciousness, animating thought, emotion, and ethical aspiration. Finally, in “Ode to the West Wind,” power is a force of destruction inseparable from renewal, driving natural and poetic circulation alike. Seen in this light, the “gloomy Power” of “Queen Mab” represents an early formulation of Shelley’s vitalism.

Ianthe, the poem’s heroine, a symbol of Nature and of Life, lies suspended between sleep and death, her body described in terms that oscillate between stillness and animation:

Or is it only a sweet slumber

Stealing o’er sensation,

Which the breath of roseate morning

Chaseth into darkness?

Will Ianthe wake again,

And give that faithful bosom joy

Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch

Light, life and rapture from her smile?

(“Queen Mab” I. pp. 23–30)

From a vitalist perspective, sleep here functions as a threshold condition in which life’s organising principle remains present, though momentarily latent. Shelley’s diction, particularly the emphasis on “breath,” “light,” and the anticipated return of “life and rapture”, invokes physiological processes associated with animation and transformation. Ianthe’s condition reveals a larger vital process, one in which dormancy and renewal are structurally interdependent.

This imagery also evokes contemporary physiological theories that understood life as a process of circulation, responsiveness, and latent energy. In particular, D’Holbach’s principle of mens sana in corpore sano influenced Shelley’s belief that diet had an impact on physical health. Shelley cites long passages from The System of Nature (D’Holbach [1770] 1820), which Shelley read in its original French, in Notes 11’ and 13’. D’Holbach’s ideas of attraction and repulsion running through the pulses and nervous system play a crucial part in influencing the mind, invigorating the body and sustaining vitality (Piper 1962, pp. 20–21; for a detailed exploration of D’Holbach’s influence on “Queen Mab”, see Kitani 2011). The figure of Ianthe, “like a marble Galatea,” embodies matter poised on the threshold of animation, suggesting that all substance contains the potential for life when permeated by an immanent organising force. Unlike the Galatea of classical myth, who requires divine intervention to awaken, Ianthe’s animation depends upon no transcendent agent. Life, in Shelley’s universe, arises from within matter itself, animated by a principle analogous to breath, circulation, or vital energy. This image aligns Shelley’s poetic imagination with the vitalist conviction that life is self-directing and internally generative. The “gloomy Power” signifies beyond domination and comes to denote an invisible, self-renewing energy that animates both matter and mind. Ianthe’s suspended state embodies this transition, offering an early poetic image of life understood in terms of a continuous becoming, perpetually oscillating between latency and creative expression.

As Timothy Morton observes, “Queen Mab” contains an early denunciation of industrial pollution and chemical exhalations, aligned with his vegetarianism and his later ecological concerns. The “gloomy Power” signifies beyond domination and comes to denote an invisible, self-renewing energy that animates both matter and mind. Ianthe’s suspended state embodies this transition, offering an early poetic image of life understood in terms of a continuous becoming, perpetually oscillating between latency and creative expression. More significantly, Shelley’s references to animals, “No longer now/He slays the lamb that looks him in the face” (cited in Morton 2007, p. 13), reveal a shift from sentimental compassion toward a philosophically grounded recognition of a shared (“looks him in the face”) timeless (“No longer now”) vitality that reflects a Spinozist ethical logic: if all beings participate in the same living substance, then violence against animals constitutes a violation of the very fabric of life itself. According to Shelley, adopting a vegetarian diet not only sharpens one’s physical and mental sensitivity (psycho-physiological power), but also deepens empathy and compassion towards all living beings on earth. Ethical responsibility emerges from the shared recognition of being, rather than from hierarchical distinctions between human and non-human life.

The poem’s visionary structure further reinforces this conception of life as an interconnected totality. Queen Mab, mentioned by Mercutio as the fairies’ midwife (Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 4), functions as a guiding intelligence who reveals both the harmony and corruption of the world to Ianthe’s soul. Her delivery role as accoucheuse closely resembles the anima mundi of Platonic tradition, reconfigured through Spinozist immanence and Romantic natural philosophy. She personifies the living Unity of the cosmos, a principle that animates matter, governs natural law and underwrites moral order. Through her revelations, Shelley collapses the distinction between physical causation and ethical consequence: hatred, envy, and ambition are identified as the roots of misery, disease, and crime (“Queen Mab” VIII. 216–17), while joy and sympathy are aligned with health, harmony, and creative energy.

This prophetic vision culminates in Shelley’s explicit rejection of theological dualism. When he declares that “there is no God” except in nature’s living Unity (“Queen Mab” VII. 13–15), Shelley does not negate the sacred; he redefines it. Divinity is no longer external to the world but inheres in what he elsewhere describes as the “one Spirit’s plastic stress” that binds atom and star alike. This position aligns with Spinoza’s formulation of Deus sive Natura, in which God and nature are understood as different expressions of the same infinite substance. Shelley’s atheism is therefore not nihilistic but profoundly affirmative, where the sacred is synonymous with vitality itself. This immanent divinity is apprehensible through reason and imagination, the twin faculties Shelley calls upon to liberate humankind from ignorance.

Science and poetry, far from being antagonistic, converge in “Queen Mab” as complementary forms of revelation: one analytical, the other intuitive, both grounded in wonder at the universe’s dynamic plenitude. Like the Romantic scientists of his age, he perceives nature as a self-organising totality animated from within, where the same forces that govern growth and decomposition also shape human consciousness and social relations. When this vital current is obstructed by tyranny, superstition, or greed, it becomes destructive, producing suffering and social decay. When allowed to flow freely, it generates joy, sympathy, and political renewal.

Between 1812 and 1817, Shelley’s intellectual and emotional life underwent a profound transformation, one that is already latent in “Queen Mab”. Composed in his early twenties, the poem reflects a period of revolutionary fervour marked by personal turbulence, financial instability, and social ostracism following the publication of “The Necessity of Atheism” (1811) and “A Declaration of Rights” (1812). These experiences intensified Shelley’s commitment to liberty, equality, and the natural rights of humankind, while sharpening his hostility toward monarchy, inherited privilege, and institutional religion. Yet even in this early work, Shelley’s political radicalism is inseparable from a deeper ontological commitment: the belief that life itself is animated by a principle of freedom, growth, and transformation. “Queen Mab” thus stands as a foundational articulation of Shelley’s enduring vitalist worldview, one that would continue to evolve in more symbolically complex forms in his later poetry.

By 1816–1817, following his first wife’s tragic death and his subsequent union with Mary Godwin, Shelley’s philosophical outlook deepened into a more introspective, metaphysical mode. Their journey to Switzerland, during which they visited the Mer de Glace in Chamonix, inspired “Mont Blanc” (in M. Shelley 1817, pp. 175–83), a meditation on the limits of reason, the sublime power of nature and the uncertain relation between mind and the material world. In the poem, included in a travelogue compiled together with Mary, Shelley reflects on the mountain’s eternal presence and its influence on both the landscape and human imagination. Its opening lines, “The everlasting universe of things/Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves” (ibid. p. 175), suggest that the universe is like a vital current with which Shelley describes an animating energy that interacts with the Arve River, forests, and clouds (ibid., p. 177). The poem illustrates a relational vitality, wherein every element of the natural world participates in a network of influence and transformation (Holmes 1975, pp. 339–40).

At the end of the third stanza, Shelley articulates his conviction that the mountain, and by extension, the natural world, possesses a form of non-discursive agency: a “voice” (Rhodes 2025) that does not communicate through propositional language or moral doctrine, but through affective, experiential, and imaginative apprehension. The “codes of fraud and woe” implicitly invoke human social, political and ideological systems, which Shelley suggests are exposed or suspended when confronted with the material and temporal magnitude of geological processes. Thus, this moment crystallises several of the concerns I have been trying to develop in this article. Firstly, the fact that for Shelley poetry functions as epistemic mediation in his exploration of the limits of rational knowledge. Secondly, the alignment of Shelley’s vitalism with a material world that actively addresses human consciousness without recourse to theology or transcendental teleology (Heringman 2004, p. 71).

This conception of nature as an active yet non-discursive agent was articulated by Karl Kroeber, who argued that “Mont Blanc” intensifies what he terms the Wordsworthian “literalized interactivity of mind and landscape” (Kroeber 1994, p. 127). However, Shelley radicalises this interactivity by attributing to the mountain a paradoxical “silent voice” that exerts a transformative pressure on human consciousness. Set against the poet’s own mind, which “passively/Now renders and receives fast influencings,” this voiceless address exposes the contingency and moral insufficiency of human systems of meaning. When Shelley claims that the mountain has the power “to repeal/Large codes of fraud and woe,” he suggests that geological magnitude and material duration implicitly unsettle political deceit, ideological abstraction and anthropocentric delusion. The mountain’s agency thus operates neither through propositional knowledge nor moral decree, but through an experiential confrontation that reconfigures perception itself: “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high—the power is there/The still and solemn Power of many sights,/And many sounds, and much of life and death.” (P. B. Shelley 1817b, p. 182) The poem closes with a reflection on a secret animating force that also connects death and ephemerality: “The secret strength of things/Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!” (ibid., p. 182) In the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Tambora, “Mount Blanc” finishes an evocation of an invisible potential presence, filled with awe, silence and solitude: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,/If to the human mind’s imaginings/Silence and solitude were vacancy?” (ibid., p. 182).

Additionally, in “Mont Blanc,” Shelley also responds to Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni.” While Coleridge presented the alpine landscape as a static, inert stage for divine action, Shelley views the mountain as an active entity. In order to do this, Shelley engages with geological controversies of his time, in particular, the Neptunist-Vulcanist debate, which had been well publicised both in the Edinburgh Review and the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Leask 1998, p. 193; also Williams 2016, pp. 87–104). The poet was indirectly acquainted with Vulcanist James Hutton, possibly through Lord Byron’s physician, John William Polidori, who graduated from Edinburgh University, where John Playfair, a colleague of Hutton, lectured. Playfair had supported Hutton’s ideas with the publication of Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Hutton 1802). The theory posited that volcanic activity was a driver for geological change. In capturing the ceaseless motion of subterranean energies, Shelley envisions the natural world as dynamically self-active and alive in its transformation. The ceaseless flow of “glaciers that “creep/Like snakes” (ibid., p. 180), the fire images such as “sea/Of fire” (ibid., p. 179), or the “Earthquake-daemon” instructing “Ruin” (ibid., p. 179) are Vulcanist figures that embody this vital force operating beneath the threshold of perception. The mountain’s “rude, bare, and high, /Ghastly, and scarr’d, and riven” forms (ibid.) testify to energies that are both destructive and formative, suggesting an ontology in which creation proceeds through convulsion rather than design. Crucially, Shelley does not frame these forces teleologically, as in Hutton’s theology-inflected model of geologic repair, but as part of an ongoing, non-redemptive metabolism of matter in which loss is real and irreversible: forests are “never to be reclaimed” (ibid., p. 181), and life is extinguished without guarantee of restoration. Yet this very indifference grounds Shelley’s vitalism, which conceives matter as alive not because it serves life, but because it acts slowly, violently, and autonomously across deep time. Fire, like the glacier and the torrent, thus becomes a figure for what Shelley elsewhere calls “Power,” dwelling “apart in its tranquility, /Remote, serene, and inaccessible” (ibid., p. 180); a force immanent to material processes themselves.

Poetry, in this context, operates as an epistemic mediation, translating Vulcanist imperceptibility into imaginative apprehension and rendering perceptible the vitality of forces that cannot be directly seen, incorporating principles of mental and emotional function. In doing so, “Mont Blanc” enacts a vitalist poetics attuned to geological agency, where fire, ice and water converge as expressions of a living, though radically non-human, earth whose energies exceed both sensory immediacy and conceptual containment. This revolutionary intensity is heightened by Shelley’s singular historical context as one of the initial British visitors to reach Mont Blanc peak following the Peace of Waterloo, enabling him to imbue the mountain’s power with the cumulative force of political, artistic, and scientific revolutions that were transforming European thought (Heringman 2004, p. 39).

The vitalist and Vulcanist imagination at work in “Mont Blanc” did not remain confined to Shelley’s engagement with geological science; it gradually extended into his more explicitly philosophical poetry, where the dynamics of imperceptible force, material agency, and contingent emergence are transposed into ethical and epistemological registers. In the Alpine poem, fire operates as an unseen but formative power that shapes the earth through convulsion and slow transformation, foregrounding a world governed by energies that exceed sensory perception and human intentionality. This model of causality, non-teleological, immanent and unevenly manifest, prepares the ground for Shelley’s later poetic exploration of intangible agencies that nonetheless exert profound effects on both nature and consciousness. In this way, “Mont Blanc” (P. B. Shelley 1817b) exemplifies once more Shelley’s vitalist aesthetics, a poetics in which material forces and imaginative receptivity co-produce forms of awareness inaccessible to rational discourse alone, a framework that finds a more explicitly interior and affective modulation in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (P. B. Shelley 1817a).

Read in sequence after “Mont Blanc,” the atmospheric and geological upheavals associated with the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 offer a crucial transitional context for Shelley’s subsequent turn in the “Hymn”. The enormous volume of volcanic ash and aerosols ejected into the stratosphere reduced solar radiation, leading to global temperature anomalies, crop failures, and widespread famine across Europe and North America in what became known as the “Year without a summer”. These climatic repercussions likely reinforced Shelley’s acute awareness of nature’s power, unpredictability and the ways in which natural forces operate beyond human control. This might have intensified his philosophical reflections on the interconnection of life, death, and regeneration in both the material and moral orders. Thus, the volcanic logic of sudden emergence and long-lasting transformation finds a conceptual analogue in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, first published in The Examiner on 19 January 1817 (P. B. Shelley 1817a, No. 473, p. 41) and composed a couple of months after “Mont Blanc,” during the Shelleys’ stay at the Maison Chapuis in Cologny near Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati.

The famous gatherings at Diodati formed a shared experiential and imaginative environment in which discussions of science, philosophy, politics, and the supernatural flourished. The “Hymn” marks a conceptual and affective shift rather than a mere continuation. Where “Mont Blanc” stages a confrontation with material sublimity, geological force, and the limits of human cognition, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” internalises and transposes this encounter into a meditation on an unseen, immanent power that intermittently animates both nature and consciousness. The “Hymn” opens with an invocation of a mysterious, animating principle, an “unseen Power” that “floats” through the world like a shadow (1817, p. 67). The movement of this vital force is compared to the summer winds “that creep from flower to flower,” (ibid.) facilitating cross-fertilisation, thus hinting at nature’s generative capacity, visiting “Each human heart and countenance” (1817, p. 68).

In the second stanza, the poet’s questioning of the disappearance of the “Spirit of Beauty” functions as a metaphorical lament over the sun itself: “Where art thou gone?” (ibid.), perhaps in allusion to the ashes of the eruption: “Ask why the sunlight not for ever/Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river” (ibid.) The verses go on to describe the darkness of the poet’s state, together with his repeated questioning of light’s absence, conveying both environmental obscurity and psychological gloom. In the final lines of the stanza, Shelley strengthens the connection to emotional aspects, as he did at the end of “Mont Blanc”: “Why fear and dream and death and birth/cast on the daylight of this earth/Such gloom, why man has such a scope” (ibid.).

Shelley’s layering of sensory registers in the poem, visual, auditory, and emotional, animate the unseen Power: “Like moonbeams…/Like hues and harmonies of evening/Like clouds of starlight widely spread,/Like memories of music fled…” (ibid., p. 67–69). These fleeting phenomena instantiate a vitalism that is biological as well as aesthetic. Even if the Spirit consecrates human thought, its passing leaves existence “vacant and desolate,” (ibid., p. 68), echoing once again the ending of “Mont Blanc”. Shelley presents vitality as inseparable from transience, being apprehended in its ephemeral manifestations in natural and aesthetic experience. His vitalism, accordingly, unfolds across a continuum that links earth systems to psychic and ethical life, suggesting that the same impersonal dynamism animates glaciers and minds, landscapes, ideas, matter and thought.

Shelley’s preoccupation with cycles of transformation and renewal was intensified by personal tragedy. In 1818, while living in Italy, he and Mary Shelley lost their infant daughter Clara, and in June 1819, their four-year-old son William died of malaria (Holmes 1975, p. 518; Bieri 2005, p. 124). These devastating losses profoundly shaped Shelley’s reflections on mortality. Writing to his publisher, Charles Ollier, Shelley described the collection Prometheus Unbound (Shelley 1920) as “my saddest verses raked into one heap.” (Shelley in Bieri 2005, p. 113) It is within this context that this collection, which includes masterpieces such as “To a Skylark” and “Ode to the West Wind”, takes on a deeper resonance on nature’s cycles, perhaps Shelley’s response to grief.

While “Ode to the West Wind” as well as other poems in the volume articulate nature’s power through tempestuous motion and lament, “The Cloud” (P. B. Shelley 1820c) uniquely synthesises scientific observation, nature’s personification, and lyrical rhythm into an image of perpetual becoming. The poem’s first line—“I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers/From the seas and the streams” (P. B. Shelley 1820c, p. 196)—announces its focus on the agency of nature and of clouds. Shelley personifies them as sentient beings undergoing a continuous cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and symbolising nature’s regenerative power. The poem’s structure reinforces the theme of a self-renewing force, with Shelley alternating between descriptions of the cloud and reflections on its effects upon the environment. Shelley’s use of personification embodies a vitalist ontology in which natural phenomena are self-organising and intrinsically alive (Pulos 1985, p. 128). The final lines assert, “I change, but I cannot die” (P. B. Shelley 1820c, p. 199), encapsulating Shelley’s vision of perpetual transformation as the essence of vitality.

Similarly, in “Ode to the West Wind”, the poet invokes another elemental force, air in motion, as a symbol of destruction and renewal. Addressing the wind as a “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; /Destroyer and preserver” (P. B. Shelley 1820a, p. 189), Shelley captures the paradoxical energy that animates both decay and regeneration. The poem’s seasonal movement, from the dying leaves of autumn, symbolising his own lines, through to the tempestuous winter seas, to the renewal of the poet’s own voice in Spring, mirrors the natural cycle of death and rebirth. By equating “dead leaves” with the printed pages of his work, the poet suggests that his writing possesses a regenerative power; though his physical self may perish, his verses act as a vital nutrient for future generations, ensuring his influence endures through an eternal cycle of renewal (Ruston 2005, p. 7).

In both poems, Shelley’s engagement with natural processes reflects a similar vitalist worldview. Yet, “Ode to the West Wind” moves beyond description to a moral and poetic invocation, with the wind as an emblem of creative inspiration and transformation, sweeping through both nature and the human mind. The poet implores the wind to “Drive [his] dead thoughts over the universe,” fusing the physical and spiritual dimensions of existence into one continuous current of becoming. However, he concludes his “Ode” with a note of scepticism about the regenerative powers of nature, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” an unanswered question that also troubled contemporary Romantic-era scientists. The core message is that life is unpredictable and mysterious; there is no guarantee that dormant life (like Ianthe in “Queen Mab” or the seeds in the “Ode”) will truly awaken and be reborn. This concluding uncertainty is a direct appeal to his readers, both then and now, to consider the possibility that hope for renewal might be in vain and that the Earth might remain “unawakened”.

These examples are evidence that, across his oeuvre, Shelley consistently articulates a vision of life as a dynamic, self-renewing, and interdependent force. Natural phenomena are not inert or merely mechanistic; they are imbued with agency, vitality, and an immanent power that connects the human mind to the broader cosmos. This vitalist sensibility situates change, mortality, and transformation not as endpoints, but as integral components of a continuous, regenerative process, where death and decay feed renewal and growth.

This cumulative poetic exploration of life’s animating principle anticipates his philosophical argument in “Defence of Poetry”, where Shelley emphasises poetry’s unique capacity to reveal the world’s hidden beauty, transmute suffering, and render the mortal and material radiant with significance, establishing the continuity between human consciousness, natural processes, and cosmic vitality. For Shelley, poetry acts as a transformative force, enabling the reader to empathise with the poet’s feelings, creating a connection and an emotional bond that gives pleasure because “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (Shelley 1840, p. 16). Shelley asserts that poetry “transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life” (P. B. Shelley 1840, p. 51). Poetry “makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world” (ibid.). Shelley’s vitalism extends beyond human embodiment to encompass the entire living world, grounding an ethics of sympathy in ontological continuity.

For Shelley, poetry discloses the hidden correspondences and latent energies of life’s animating principle, apprehensible not only through reason but also through sensibility, intuition and aesthetic perception. In doing so, he establishes a connection between the human mind, the natural world, and the cosmos. With his radical assertion that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (P. B. Shelley 1840, p. 56), Shelley bridges an awakening consciousness, stimulating ethical reflection and inspiration. While natural philosophy sought to name and systematise life’s hidden energies, Shelley apprehends them through the fleeting revelation of beauty, and the transformative capacity of his imagination is mapped onto poetic metaphors.

Shelley’s poetic vitalism thus emerges not as a theoretical synthesis but as a mediating practice that inhabits the explanatory gap exposed by vitalist science. While aligning himself with figures such as Davy and Lawrence in rejecting supernatural accounts of life, Shelley’s poetry simultaneously registers the insufficiency of materialist explanation when confronted with subjective intensity and perceptual presence. Vitality, in his work, is neither a metaphysical principle nor a reducible property of organised matter, but an experiential phenomenon enacted through rhythm, metaphor, apostrophe, and relational movement, as Ruston (2005) also pointed out in her study. Poetic form becomes a site where material processes and lived consciousness are brought into relation without being collapsed into one another. In this respect, Shelley’s poetry functions as an epistemic interface rather than a historical precursor: it mediates between scientific models of life and the irreducible facts of experience, offering an aesthetic mode of knowing that does not resolve the problem of vitality but renders it perceptible. Long before the emergence of contemporary frameworks that emphasise the agency, relationality, and dynamism of matter, explored in the following lines, Shelley’s poetry had already demonstrated how aesthetic practice can hold together material explanation and experiential meaning, without subordinating one to the other. Thus, Shelley’s intuitions anticipate and intersect with concerns about the nature of matter, life, and cosmic order that have continued to evolve since the Romantic period.

4. Evolution, Physiology, and Vital Force in the Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth Centuries

The integration of vitality and immanent wonder in Shelley’s poetry anticipates the more systematic explorations of life’s dynamism in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as seen in figures like Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), John Ruskin (1819–1900) or Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who extended the Romantic poetic sensibilities into broader ethical, aesthetic and psychological frameworks, respectively.

The second half of the nineteenth century had witnessed a dramatic reorientation of the sciences, particularly through the emergence of evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (C. Darwin 1859) reframed the understanding of life by proposing natural selection as a mechanism for biological development. While Darwin himself resisted the overtly metaphysical interpretations of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, vitalist echoes persisted in his own works. Many experimental scientists, including T. H. Huxley (1868), a strong proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, promoted the idea that life processes could be explained by physical and chemical laws, a position that echoed Lawrence’s and Davy’s a generation before. Physics, too, contributed to the reframing of vitalist ideas. The second law of thermodynamics, formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius and the Scottish physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), provoked renewed debates with its emphasis on entropy and energy dissipation, inspiring further reflections on how vitality and divine immanence could be reinterpreted through through the complexity of nature (for impact on irreversibility and complexity theories, see Prigogine and Stengers 1984).

Art and literature continued to act as mediators between scientific and spiritual imaginaries. Some of Alfred Tennyson’s poetic works, while not analysed in this paper for lack of space, exemplify how evolutionary speculation and pantheistic longing coexisted, shaping religious experience as “divine encounters” in an emerging scientific age. The phrase “natural supernaturalism” originates in the work of Carlyle, a Scottish philosopher and historian who used it in his novel Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books (1836), first serialised in Fraser’s Magazine. Usually translated as “The Tailor Re-tailored,” the work was a hybrid, simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical. “Natural supernaturalism” describes a mode of thought in which the miraculous or supernatural is perceived as inherent in the natural order. For Carlyle, the ordinary world itself is imbued with a sense of mystery and miracle, containing a dimension of wonder, sublimity, and the supernatural that no physical science can fully explain. In the novel, Carlyle portrays the universe as a piece of clothing, an infinite living garment woven of spirit and matter. This image foregrounds vitality as immanent within nature, marking a continuity with Shelley’s “unseen Power”. However, Carlyle also frames this vitality in culture, history, and the moral energies of humankind. This prepares the ground for John Ruskin, who admired Carlyle and was profoundly shaped by his moral criticism of industrial modernity. In Ruskin’s work, “natural supernaturalism” becomes entwined with a more explicit aesthetic vitalism, one that insists on the liveliness of form, colour, and environment as both a material and a moral principle. Ruskin’s emphasis on the dynamic interplay between matter, perception, and creativity would later find philosophical resonance in Henri Bergson’s élan vital, establishing a line of continuity between Romantic and Victorian vitalism as well as early twentieth-century thought.

The concept of “natural supernaturalism” was later re-introduced and given prominence by M. H. Abrams in his landmark study Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (Abrams 1971), which describes the secularisation and reconfiguration of traditional religious concepts into naturalistic and immanent terms (Abrams 1971, p. 12). Instead of abandoning the spiritual or transcendent altogether, Romantic writers translated it into the language of myth, nature, and imagination. In Abrams’s account, what had once been considered “supernatural” was not dismissed but naturalised, recast as a property of life and nature’s self-organising vitality, intricately interconnected in a “multaneity-in-unity”, as Coleridge put it (Abrams 1971, p. 186). This helps explain why the Romantic emphasis on wonder, sublimity, and the invisible or ineffable often emerges not from divine intervention but from the perception of nature and natural processes. Kate Rigby affirms that “the Romantics’ reclamation of a place for the sacred is at once a core element of their revaluation of the natural world and necessarily, if not unproblematically, entangled with the secularising tendency traced by Abrams” (Rigby 2014, p. 70). “Natural supernaturalism” provides a powerful lens for reading Romantic and Post-Romantic vitalism, since it frames the vital principle as part of a broader cultural attempt to invest the natural world with meaning, agency, and reverence, without reverting to traditional theological divinity models. This is crucial for understanding Ruskin’s vitalist aesthetics.

For Ruskin, as for Carlyle, the natural world is a living presence imbued with moral and spiritual significance. Ruskin’s writings on landscape, colour, and architecture repeatedly insist that beauty arises from this vitality, inherent in natural forms, which speaks directly to the human imagination. In this sense, Ruskin extends the Romantic effort to naturalise the supernatural, carrying Romantic insights into an era increasingly defined by industrialisation, urbanisation, and scientific specialisation, translating wonder into a philosophy of art (López-Varela Azcárate 2026).

For Ruskin, vitality is, above all, an ethical and aesthetic principle, shaping how humans should perceive and engage with their environments. In Modern Painters (Ruskin 1856), he defends the pre-Raphaelite painters for their capacity to see “truly”, which, according to Ruskin, involves perceiving the dynamism of the natural world and the Unity inherent in the life of natural phenomena: “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.” (vol. III, p. 333)

Ruskin’s invocation of “seeing” is not merely an optical act but a sort of vitalist form of insight, similar to the “inner eye” that appears in Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils”. Perception becomes an act of recognition, a way of attuning to the spiritual life that runs through nature. Like Shelley, Ruskin describes it as a type of love: “the acuteness of bodily sense of which I have been speaking, associated with love; love I mean in its infinite and holy functions, as it embraces divine and human and…the physical perception of external objects by association, gratitude, veneration, and other pure feelings of our moral nature.” (vol. II, pt. II, sec. I, p. 143) At the end of part II, section IV, he concludes,

One lesson, however, we are invariably taught by all, however approached or viewed, that the work of the Great Spirit of nature is as deep and unapproachable in the lowest as in the noblest objects; that the Divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone, as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven, and settling the foundation of the earth; and that to the rightly perceiving mind, there is the same infinity, the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection, manifest in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of the dust as in the kindling of the day-star.

(ibid., pp. 492–93)

Against the disenchantment of scientific materialism, Ruskin reclaims art and the quality of aesthetics and “seeing truly” as ways to access the vital and divine principle, the Unity of nature and the divine. This insistence also grounds his criticism of Romantic projection in what he termed the “pathetic fallacy” (vol. III. pp. 166ff.), attributing human emotion to nonhuman nature when such projection obscures the accuracy of perception. However, he allowed metaphorical personification when it arose from deep emotional truth. As in Shelley, nature’s ‘voice’ articulates what cannot otherwise be registered; as a corrective device that reveals ecological truth otherwise inaccessible. For Ruskin, moun-tains and clouds are not individually alive. They express a Unity that binds aesthetic truth to moral insight. In this way, Ruskin anchors vitalism within Victorian morality, simul-taneously aligning it with a nascent ecological awareness (Hewison 2007, p. 88).

Across Modern Painters, or The Stones of Venice, Ruskin insists that “seeing” is an ontological discipline: to look carefully at the veining of leaves, the movement of clouds, or the sedimenting labour of lichens on rocks is to acknowledge the intrinsic vitality of the material world. Matter, for Ruskin, is never inert backdrop; it is expressive, processual, and historically thick, bearing the traces of weather, time, and human touch. Such a stance anticipates neomaterialist conceptions of vibrant matter by attributing to natural elements a quasi-agential force that shapes perception and ethical response. Ruskin repeatedly advocates a slow, patient, almost devotional attention, an exercise in humility before phenomena, which prefigures eco-poet Kathleen Jamie’s later commitment to “serious noticing” (López-Varela Azcárate 2024). Like her, he rejects the spectacular or the monumental in favour of exact description: lichens on rock, the irregularities of Gothic carving, the mutable textures and colours of the sky (López-Varela Azcárate 2026). In this sense, perception becomes a relational practice rather than an act of mastery, a way of entering into correspondence with the world’s minute agencies. Attentive seeing is for Ruskin a reparative act that restores the frayed bond between human sensibility and the living, dynamic matter that sustains it.

Ruskin’s Victorian moral-aesthetic vitalism anticipates the turn toward scientific neo-vitalism that crystallised in the work of Hans Driesch. Appointed to the chair of natural theology at the University of Aberdeen, Driesch developed a neo-vitalist biology in his Clifford lectures, defending life’s self-regulating capacity and showing that life processes continued even when disrupted. To account for this resilience, he revived Aristotle’s concept of entelechy, a non-material, ‘mind-like’ principle that could not be reduced to mechanical causation. His emphasis on embryonic self-organisation, hereditary regulation, and the individuality of living beings (Driesch 1908, p. 75) extended vitalism into the twentieth century at a moment when mechanistic biology and positivist models of explanation appeared dominant. Initial vitalist intuitions were being transformed into more systematic conceptual frameworks that began to emphasise life’s emergent complexity and creative generative power. Yet where Driesch sought to secure vitalism through metaphysical postulation, Henri Bergson transformed the debate by recasting life not as the effect of a hidden principle but as a dynamic process of duration, creativity, and continuous differentiation (for the debate between Driesch and Bergson, see Posteraro 2023, pp. 9–25).

In L’Évolution créatrice (Bergson [1907] 1911), Bergson reconceptualises vitality as élan vital, an immanent impulse of becoming that traverses matter itself, generating novelty through temporal flow rather than through external design. This shift from substance to process marks a decisive bridge between earlier moral and biological vitalisms and contemporary ecological thought: life is no longer an essence to be located but a relational unfolding in which organisms, environments, and perception are co-constituted.

In tracing the intellectual and aesthetic genealogy of modern vitalist thought, one may locate important antecedents in Romantic and Victorian modes of perceiving nature as animated by immanent force. Shelley’s poetry offers an early, intuitive articulation of such vitality. His evocation of an “invisible Power” in “Mont Blanc” figures the natural world as permeated by a dynamic, unseen agency that exceeds mechanistic explanation and unsettles the boundary between mind and matter. Although this force remains, in Shelley, metaphysical and quasi-transcendent, closer to a Sublime or spiritualised energy than to a scientific principle, it nevertheless establishes a crucial premise: nature is not inert substance but an active, generative presence whose movements shape human consciousness. Shelley thus provides a poetic vitalism grounded in affect, imagination, and visionary insight, anticipating later efforts to conceptualise life as process rather than structure.

Ruskin, writing several decades later, translates this Romantic intuition into a more disciplined ethical and perceptual practice. His aesthetics of “truth to nature” replaces visionary transport with sustained attentiveness to material detail, bearing the traces of nature’s internal activity and external forces. In Ruskin, vitality is no longer supernatural but immanent and legible within texture, growth, and weathering. Poetic or artistic attention thus becomes participatory: an engagement with processes already underway in the material environment.

Bergson subsequently provides the philosophical clarification of these earlier intuitions. His concept of élan vital recalls Shelley’s “invisible Power,” yet it dispenses with transcendence in favour of a systematic account of life as duration, creativity, and continual becoming. Rejecting the reductionism of mechanistic biology, Bergson argues that evolution cannot be explained through fixed laws alone, for “life is, more than anything else, a tendency to act on inert matter. The direction of this action is not predetermined; hence the unforeseeable variety of forms which life, in evolving, sows along its path” (Creative Evolution, 1911, p. 102). Vitality is therefore neither essence nor hidden substance but an immanent, temporal movement generating novelty and differentiation. In synthesising Romantic intuition and Victorian attentiveness into a processual ontology, Bergson establishes a conceptual bridge to contemporary ecological and posthumanist thought, where the world is understood as a field of active forces and poetic attention becomes a mode of participating in, rather than merely representing, the creative unfolding of life.

In the initial pages of the volume, Bergson had affirmed that “The universe endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.” (ibid., p. 11) Thus, Bergson finds the vital principle in the durée of consciousness itself: the lived experience of temporality as continuous creation. For Bergson, time is not an abstract, measurable sequence of instants, as presented by science, but an indivisible flow, qualitative rather than quantitative, experienced through psychological processes.

Bergson’s conception directly challenged the dominant scientific understanding of time as expressed in Albert Einstein. Their famous debate in 1922, at the Société Française de Philosophie, crystallised this tension: Einstein defended time as a fourth dimension, homogeneous and mathematically measurable, while Bergson insisted on the irreducibility of lived duration, the felt passage of time (temporality) as experienced by consciousness. The dispute highlighted a deeper cultural fault line, raising fundamental questions about whether time belongs primarily to physics or to phenomenology, a debate related also to the nature of consciousness, which has continued until today.

Taken together, the authors discussed so far chart a continuum of vitalist thought that moves from ancient philosophies to the Romantic poetic imagination, then through Victorian aesthetics to the early twentieth century, ultimately feeding into the cultural experimentation of the avant-gardes. In tracing the evolution of vitalism within this context, it becomes clear that the dialogues between the sciences and the humanities not only reconfigured traditional religious notions but also helped to generate new ways of conceiving “divine encounters.” The arts, in particular, situated at the interface with culture, absorbed and reshaped these transformations, offering symbolic spaces where sacred immanence and material vitality could continue to be experienced in increasingly secularised contexts.

5. Life, Agency, and Materiality: Posthumanist and Neomaterialist Vitalism Today

The ecological crisis of the twenty-first century—climate change, mass extinction, planetary degradation—has amplified the urgency of rethinking humanity’s relationship to nature. In this context, pantheistic vitalism has been reinvigorated through new materialism, posthumanism, and eco-vitalism, providing both ethical and imaginative grounding for ecological responsibility.

From the 1960s onwards, ecology as a discipline reintroduced these sensibilities within scientific frameworks. James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, co-developed with Lynn Margulis, proposed that the Earth functions as a self-regulating organism (Lovelock 1979, p. 25). While controversial among biologists, Gaia theory catalysed ecological thought, reanimating the idea of Earth as a living, sacred whole. Scholars like Bruno Latour have explicitly situated Gaia within both scientific and theological discourses, insisting that the earth “seems to react to our actions” (Latour 2017, p. 2). In doing so, it reveals “a crisis in human’s relationship with their surroundings” (Morton 2007, p. 9), requiring the need to rethink the sacred in the Anthropocene (Latour 2017, p. 105). The very concept of the Anthropocene has not been uncontested since it is too “homogenizing” (Rigby 2021, p. 9). As a consequence, not only alternative concepts have been proposed (such as “Symbiocene”, “Chthulucene”, etc.) (ibid., pp. 9–13).

These developments mark a significant re-articulation of the vitalist impulse in contemporary theory, extending vitalism into an ecological ontology of matter’s agency. Displacing anthropocentric hierarchies by conceiving vitality as a distributed force that animates both organic and inorganic systems, modern theories of material vibrancy and intra-action can be seen as secular continuations of the vision of the world as infused with life, reinterpreted through the ethical and scientific vocabularies of the Anthropocene.

This expanded understanding of vitality has come to contemplate the notion of the vital beyond the sphere of biological life; rather, it has begun to be seen as encompassing the entire continuum of processes that sustain and transform existence, including death and decay. Indeed, the death of living organisms does not mark a terminus but a necessary phase within the cyclical dynamics of ecological systems. Through decomposition, complex organic materials are metabolised into simpler compounds, releasing essential nutrients that feed primary producers such as plants and algae, which in turn sustain wider ecological networks. As numerous scholars have emphasised (Swift et al. 1979; Haskell 2012; Chamovitz 2012; Wohlleben 2016; or Woolley-Barker 2017), death itself nourishes life, participating in the regenerative continuity of matter and energy. These insights, already present in Shelley’s “Queen Mab” and his invocation of a “gloomy Power,” challenge anthropocentric and mechanistic divisions between life and non-life, presenting the world, including what has traditionally been called inert matter, as an interconnected and semiotic system of transformations and reciprocal exchanges.

This new way of apprehending vitality finds conceptual resonance in the semiotic philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, particularly in his principle of synechism—the tendency to conceive space, time, and law as continuous and dynamically interconnected. Such a view aligns with later developments in process ontology (López-Varela Azcárate 2023) and, in the mid-twentieth century, with paradigms of systems theory and cybernetics, both of which redefined living and non-living processes as relational, communicative, and self-organising. Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory (1968) and Norbert Wiener’s (1948) cybernetic models transformed the mechanistic image of life into that of an open, evolving network embedded within larger wholes (Bertalanffy 1968, p. 54).

In How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles contends that developments in cybernetics, information theory, and systems science marked a decisive shift from the humanist conception of autonomous subjectivity to a posthuman ontology grounded in distributed cognition and the systemic interdependence of material and semiotic processes. As the very notion of process evolved, the optimistic tenor of early vitalism—where life and evolution were largely equated with creativity, expansion, and organic harmony—gave way to more intricate models attentive to contingency, breakdown, and decay. Within this new framework, error, accident, pathology, and death no longer appear as negations of vitality but as its constitutive modalities. The vital thus becomes redefined as a dynamic principle that encompasses both emergence and dissolution, recognising transformation and instability as inherent to all forms of organisation, whether biological or non-living. This expanded, processual understanding of vitality also lays the groundwork for the insights later developed by neomaterialist thought.

In this intellectual continuum, Jesper Hoffmeyer’s biosemiotics also provided a reformulation of vitalist intuitions through the concept of semiotic emergence, the idea that meaning, like life itself, arises spontaneously from communicative interactions among living systems (Hoffmeyer 2008, 2010). For Hoffmeyer, semiosis is not a property superimposed upon matter but an immanent mode of organisation, one through which living beings continuously interpret and respond to their environments. This semiotic view of life echoes vitalism’s conviction that vitality is neither imposed from without nor reducible to physical causality but emerges from the dynamic interplay of signs, meanings, and material processes.

Indeed, biosemiotics provided a renewed theoretical framework for understanding life as intrinsically meaningful and communicative, thereby revitalising several core intuitions of vitalist philosophy within a contemporary scientific paradigm. While rejecting the metaphysical notion of a non-material vital force, biosemiotics nonetheless shares vitalism’s conviction that life cannot be reduced to mechanistic causality or physicochemical determinism. It posits that all living systems engage in processes of semiosis—the production, interpretation, and exchange of signs, making meaning a constitutive dimension of life itself. Hoffmeyer’s reinterpretation of vital organisation as communicative interdependence reframes Bergson’s élan vital in semiotic terms: life persists as a dynamic, interpretive process through which organisms continuously create and negotiate their own meaningful worlds. Thus, rather than a metaphysical doctrine, modern biosemiotics represents a semiotic vitalism grounded in empirical biology, one that recognises the living as not merely mechanical systems but autonomous agents of signification engaged in the ongoing co-creation of meaning within the biosphere.

While traditional vitalism posited some non-material life principle, an inner ‘vital force’ distinct from physical causality, contemporary scholars reject any metaphysical dualism between matter and life. Neo-vitalist or process-oriented positions reject the metaphysically opaque life force but posit that life exhibits emergent, non-reducible organisational properties that are not fully captured by standard physicalist frameworks. For instance, in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Maturana and Varela [1972] 1980), biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela define living systems as “autopoietic” unities, self-producing and self-maintaining networks of processes that continuously generate and delimit their own components. Life, in this framework, is not the manifestation of an external principle but an organisation that brings itself forth through recursive operations. Like earlier vitalists, Maturana and Varela emphasise forms of metabolic self-organisation within living beings, rejecting the mechanistic reduction of organisms to mere assemblages. However, they situate these processes within the systemic logic of enactivism, embodied cognition and feedback, showing how living beings evolve in continuous interaction with their environments. From a phenomenological perspective, lived body experiences act as a nexus with cognition, echoing vitalism’s holistic orientation. Cognition and consciousness are not neural epiphenomena but world-engaged processes.

This shift toward self-organising and relational models of vitality, already present in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, finds further elaboration in Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad 2007). Drawing on quantum physics, Barad develops a theory of agential realism that challenges the passive conception of matter as an inert substance. Matter, she writes, “is not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency” (Barad 2007, p. 151). For Barad, the world is composed of intra-active phenomena, dynamic configurations in which matter and meaning co-emerge through entangled material-discursive processes. In this view, agency is a performative relation through which the universe articulates itself across multiple scales. Vitality thus becomes an ontological condition of matter itself, a distributed and relational force that encompasses both cognition and creation. Barad’s ontology reanimates the cosmos in explicitly posthumanist terms, extending the lineage of pantheistic vitalism into a materialist metaphysics of becoming.

In Vibrant Matter (Bennett 2010), Jane Bennett advances a complementary perspective, proposing that all matter is imbued with vibrancy and agentic potential (Bennett 2010, p. xiii). Her argument, grounded in political ecology and affect theory, calls for an ethical and perceptual shift toward recognising the vitality of the non-human world and its capacity to act, influence, and affect beyond human intention.

The image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within us.

(Bennett 2010, p. ix)

By attributing liveliness to the very fabric of matter, Bennett continues the post-vitalist reorientation, transforming vitalism from a doctrine of hidden forces into a relational ontology of active matter, systemic emergence, and ecological entanglement, extending previous vitalist concerns into the Anthropocene. Bennett’s vital materialism shifts attention from human-centred perspectives to distributed agencies, where even seemingly inert entities (power grids, food, metals) exhibit forms of vitality (ibid., pp. 24–25). Bennett articulates these insights in the context of ecological crisis and political ecology: to recognise matter as vibrant is to cultivate humility, attentiveness, and ethical responsibility.

Similarly, Donna Haraway has also expanded the discourse of vitalism by highlighting the relationality and co-constitution in multispecies entanglements. In When Species Meet (Haraway 2008), she proposed the concept of “companion species” to describe how humans and nonhumans co-evolve, shape one another, and share worlds: “Companion species are about the implosion of nature and culture in the exact joint of their making.” (Haraway 2008, p. 16) Her later work, Staying with the Trouble (Haraway 2016), develops “sympoiesis” (making-with), a model of life as collaborative, interdependent, and open-ended. This recalls previous understandings on interconnected vitality and situates them in a posthumanist ethic of care and “response-ability” (Haraway 2016, p. 34). Her focus on ethics is also continuous with Victorian moral aesthetics, for recognising life’s vitality demands new forms of care and reciprocity.

For these scholars, life is not a property of individuals but emerges from networks of interdependence. This relational ontology extends Shelley’s and Bergson’s emphasis on creativity into a posthuman context, where human agency is decentred, and life is understood as co-produced across species and systems. “Sympoiesis” as a mode of co-creation (Haraway 2016, p. 60) foregrounds relationality and interdependence as sites of meaning.

These approaches show how forms of pantheistic vitalism have been reconfigured into viable intellectual resources for grappling with ecological crisis. Art and literature, in turn, have been absorbing these frameworks, offering imaginative encounters with a world understood as alive and interconnected. In this respect, Shelley’s vitalist aesthetics continue to echo strongly with contemporary material ecocriticism as articulated by Iovino and Oppermann (2012), for whom matter is not a passive substance but a storied, agentic, and meaning-generating force. Like Shelley’s poetry, which mediates vitality through aesthetic form rather than explanatory doctrine, material ecocriticism understands narrative, imagination, and affect as epistemic practices through which the ethical and ecological agency of the more-than-human world becomes perceptible. Both Shelley and contemporary ecocritical paradigms mobilise aesthetics as a mode of attunement, enabling a relational understanding of nature that foregrounds vitality, responsibility, and entanglement beyond reductive materialism.

6. Eco-Poetry as a Space for Divine Encounters

The different approaches presented in the previous section offer a new framework that reshapes the notion of “divine encounters” as exemplified in the arts, literary fiction, and poetry. Rather than encounters with a transcendent deity, the divine becomes an experiential and immanent presence, an encounter with the vital energies that animate matter, perception, and imagination. In this sense, “divine encounters” describe moments when art or nature reveals an intensified awareness of life’s interconnectivity and creative force.

As discussed, Shelley’s poetic intuitions have inspired many other writers and migrated into new re-conceptualisations. The American poet and academic C. A. Millspaugh, author of the collection In Sight of Mountains (dedicated a very short poem to Shelley in the October 1934 issue of Poetry. “I Thought of Shelley” (Millspaugh 1934, pp. 4–5) meditates on mortality, imagination, and the enduring force of poetic vitality. The poem opens with a confrontation with death: “I did not know what Death was till/I thought of Shelley in his bones,/the bright hair long upon the skull,/his eager voice asleep.” Here, Shelley’s corporeal absence paradoxically animates the speaker’s awareness of life’s intensity. Shelley’s remains were cremated on the beach at Viareggio, Italy, after his boating accident in 1822. His ashes were later buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Italy. Some accounts suggest that certain fragments were preserved by relatives and friends. The skull itself is not in the grave in Rome, which has contributed to the mythos surrounding him, intertwining with his own ideas on mortality, life cycles and memory. Thus, Millspaugh presents the poet’s remains as the locus of a latent, almost mystical vitality; a “life force” that persists beyond physical dissolution. The poem’s language aligns with vitalist aesthetics: nature itself becomes suffused with Shelley’s presence, as in “the green, the paler leaves, the moon/instruments useless in a universal tomb” (p. 4). Time in Millspaugh’s poem implies a temporal fluidity: “It was no moment,/no startle in brusque time”. The poem’s climax, “Love accosted, known, and terrible! /Love once gone and going always; /Love once come and coming evermore” (p. 5), brings love as an enduring, regenerative principle that links human consciousness, artistic creation, and the natural order, as Shelley and Ruskin had claimed. Thus, Millspaugh’s invocation becomes both homage and philosophical reflection on life vitalism.

More recently, Gerald Stern’s “1980: Thinking about Shelley” (Poetry, vol. 136, no. 3, Stern 1980, pp. 144–45) channels Shelley’s vitalism as an imaginative inheritance, transforming a physical act, the poet swimming in a Pennsylvania quarry, into a metaphysical dialogue with Shelley’s death. The poem opens in solitude, “I had the quarry all to myself again,” establishing both a literal and symbolic space for rebirth. As Stern moves “arm over arm,” his exertion becomes an act of poetic and existential affirmation. The “muddy bank” evokes an earthbound version of Shelley’s natural sublime, where the American poet situates himself within the postindustrial landscape of the quarry lake, “across from the cedars and the rickety conveyor.” This degraded modern setting becomes charged with Shelleyan energy when Stern declares, “Every poet in the world was dead but me.” The hyperbolic resurrection of poetic life through bodily effort enacts a vitalist impulse: the poet’s body becomes the living vessel of creative continuity. Stern’s evocation of Shelley, “Thinking about Shelley and his milky body”, alludes not only to Shelley’s drowning and the myth of his heart’s survival after cremation but also to a figure of enduring creative fire. The water that Stern confronts is at once perilous and life-giving, and the “passing the islands” mirrors Shelley’s oscillation between despair and rebirth, as in “Ode to the West Wind”. The line “Full of silence now and clarity” echoes Shelley’s aspiration to be lifted into a purer consciousness through the confrontation with nature’s elemental forces. Stern often rooted his verse in the tangible energies of the living body, using breath, gesture, and exertion as vehicles of knowledge and renewal. Written at a mature stage in his career, the poem marks a reflective turning point, exemplifying a distinctive bio-poetic ethos: a poetics of embodied experience, where physical movement, memory, and mortality converge in acts of affirmation.

A contemporary British poet whose ecopoetic work also echoes Shelley’s legacy is Helen Moore. Moore describes her eco-poetry as grounded in interdependence with all beings, including small and often disregarded creatures like earthworms or slugs, explicitly evoking Shelley’s vision of poetry as alchemical transformation in her essay “Defending Ecopoetry: A Dance with Shelley” (Moore 2021a), part of the project New Defences of Poetry (2023). Her poem “Tracks & Signs” (Moore 2021b) echoes Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”. Moore’s poem opens amidst a snowy landscape: “Three days now/snow’s encased mountains, roads, town…” The speaker enters the woods, reading the snow as “wild Braille; its cuneiform/ground where no humans have walked is alabaster engraved with a series of rising suns.” Nature here becomes a semiotic text of signs and tracks, an animate field inviting decipherment, warning of erasure because of climate change. Moore’s “traces” of animals—the red squirrel, the blackbirds’ “scuffed/layers of leaves with their wings”—and the sudden shift to the supermarket with no deliveries due to heavy snow (“empty shelves stripped of milk, bread, fruit”) invoke a vital ecosystem in collapse, bringing Shelley’s gaze on nature’s power into an Anthropocene dilemma. Moore positions the poet as decipherer of “signs” in a landscape of decay. In doing so she carries forward Shelley’s belief that nature is alive, imbued with energy, and interconnected with humans and our contemporary moment. The tracks of the squirrel, the faded traces of human civilisation, and the headline the poet reads, “ARCTIC WARMER THAN LONDON, PARIS, ROME” at the poem’s close, all render Moore’s work heir to Shelley’s imaginative project, reframed for contemporary ecological urgency, inviting us to read nature not only as sublime but also as wounded, signalling our own stake in its regeneration and care. Thus, Shelley’s legacy is reborn through the lens of environmental consciousness.

Similarly, Isabel Galleymore’s poem “The Ash,” published in Poetry Magazine (Galleymore 2016), employs the ash tree as a potent symbol to explore themes of transformation and agency. The minimalist poem begins with the image of “a single branch of ash honed to the handle of an axe”. This branch, now part of an axe, “takes the hand of a woodsman,” indicating a transfer of agency and intention. The phrase “all the ash has sown” implies that the tree’s legacy and influence are embedded in the very tool used to cut it, highlighting a cyclical relationship between creation and destruction. The speaker’s act of turning the words spoken by another, despite their simplicity, mirrors this process of transformation and reinterpretation. As in Moore’s “Tracks & Signs,” nature leaves traces that can be read as signs of life, suggesting that it has agency and it communicates through its imprints. Galleymore’s poem invites readers to decode the layered meanings within natural symbols, emphasising the interconnectedness of language, nature, and co-agency. Shelley’s lines in “Mount Blanc” (“The secret strength of things/Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome/Of heaven is as a law, inhabiting/The unmeasured universe”) already suggested that nature itself is a repository of signs and meanings. Moore and Galleymore both echo and amplify Shelley’s concerns, turning them into a meditation on the vital power of nature and its more-than-human agency in the Anthropocene, an era apparently ruled by humans.

To finish, Galleymore’s ecopoetry also engages with ethical considerations, particularly in her prose poem “Of All Things” (Galleymore 2024). The poem presents a whimsical yet poignant meditation on the categorisation of animal life forms as consumables: entities like “primates, rodents, and hoofed mammals” paired with “noodles, tinned fruit, and cheeses.” In what resembles a shopping list, the speaker then describes how “hoofed mammals are channelled into camels, pigs, and goats”, becoming “cheeses soft and blue and smoked”, which she goes on to describe as “low-fat, triangular, and with pieces of ginger like the lemurs in assortments, big-eyed and striped.” With their distinctive appearance and exotic connotations, lemurs evoke curiosity, just like the food things described. They are endangered primates, yet here they are evoked sarcastically in a whimsical context, paralleling the human tendency to reduce living beings to categories, objects of observation or consumption, much like cheeses or sweets. Galleymore deliberately evokes the biblical language of creation to frame her meditation on categorisation and human authority over life. Phrases such as “he said to himself,” “let there be,” and “let these divide again” mimic the cadence of Genesis, with God speaking creation into existence. The repetition of “So he went on. The power was his” introduces a subtly ironic or sarcastic tone, emphasising the hubris implicit in such acts of ordering and naming. By juxtaposing divine syntax with mundane items—cheeses, shortbread, even “lemurs in assortments”—Galleymore highlights the arbitrariness of human attempts to systematise life and impose hierarchy. The humour of this prose poem, published in an issue of Poetry Magazine whose cover evokes children’s activity games, is deliberately mocking, foregrounding important ethical dimensions: if humans can whimsically command and categorise the world of animals and objects, almost like creator-gods, it is also our responsibility to care for them. In this sense, the poem echoes Shelley’s own concern for animal life and his advocacy of vegetarianism and attention to nonhuman life, while simultaneously questioning human pretensions to omnipotent control over creation, an aspect also covered by Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus.

7. Closing Remarks

The term ‘divine’ originated in the Proto-Indo-European root dyeu- meaning ‘shine’ and ‘sky,’ and entered English from the Latin divinus, sharing a common root with ‘divination.’ This etymology foregrounds radiance, revelation, and vision, suggesting that the divine was initially conceived not in anthropomorphic or doctrinal terms, but as a luminous quality of the cosmos: an emanation of light, energy, and perceptual intensity. Against this background, the trajectory traced in this paper reveals that the ancient articulation of pantheistic vitalism inaugurated a long intellectual lineage that continues to shape philosophical, aesthetic, and ecological imaginaries. Central to this genealogy is the recognition that life, consciousness and agency exceed purely physical explanation. In Romantic vitalism, as in contemporary philosophy of mind, organisational complexity proves insufficient to account for inwardness, affect, and presence.

Thus, the brief outline traced in this paper reveals that the ancient articulation of pantheistic vitalism was the beginning of a long intellectual tradition that continues to shape cultural, philosophical, and ecological imaginaries. The arts have become privileged sites for these encounters, where imagination functions as a form of divination, an interpretive act that reveals the mystery of life itself. At the centre of this genealogy stands Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose poetry reconfigured the aesthetic experience as a ‘divine encounter’ with the natural world. Shelley’s poetry does not resolve the explanatory gap between material organisation and subjective vitality; rather, it acknowledges and inhabits it. While subjective experience cannot be fully theorised or conceptually secured, it can nevertheless be evoked, mirrored, and relationally activated through aesthetic form. In this sense, aesthetic experience becomes a mediating space between material processes and lived consciousness, revealing that Romantic vitalism did not fail by turning to poetry but instead anticipated, through poetic practice, the limits of scientific and philosophical explanation when confronted with subjectivity.

Shelley’s reorientation profoundly shaped subsequent aesthetic and philosophical developments. Victorian thinkers such as John Ruskin interpreted natural processes as embodiments of dynamic, quasi-divine energy infused with both ethical and aesthetic significance. Henri Bergson further challenged mechanistic and positivist paradigms by articulating a philosophy centred on duration, élan vital, and intuition—an achievement whose cultural impact was recognised with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, theorists such as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Timothy Morton, among other scholars mentioned in this paper, have extended these insights within ecological, posthumanist, and new materialist frameworks, foregrounding the agency of matter, the vibrancy of things, and the ethical consequences of ontological interdependence. Contemporary eco-poets, such as Gerald Stern, Helen Moore, and Isabel Galleymore, continue this lineage by translating Shelley’s imaginative vitalism into poetic engagements with species, landscapes, and the traces of human and more-than-human life.

Across these literary and philosophical developments, Shelley’s influence remains pivotal. His integration of contemporary science, radical philosophy, and poetic form anticipates modern approaches to ecological awareness and neomaterialist ethics by situating human subjectivity within expansive ecological networks of relation and responsibility. Like Shelley, contemporary eco-poetry foregrounds attentiveness, affective resonance, and imaginative openness as modes of ecological knowing, offering sustained interrogations of human–nonhuman entanglements while recognising the ethical imperative for care and response. As a site of secularised yet vibrant ‘divine encounters,’ this paper has revisited pantheistic vitalism not as a pre-determined doctrine, but as an enduring aesthetic strategy, one that compels a renewed ethical responsiveness to the living, sacred vitality of the world we inhabit.