Elegy is a lyric genre in which a poetic voice confronts the threat of its own dissolution and locates an enduring, living form with which to frame an entry into a pantheon of the poets.  It is an inaugural genre, most attractive to a poet on the cusp of his (or her) literary career.  From the outset, Adonais, the pastoral elegy that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote for his fellow poet, John Keats, strikes an odd note.  It is it written at a time when pastoral elegy had become both obsolete and explicitly maligned.  Furthermore, Adonais comes from the pen of a poet both mature and even infamous. Alastor, the long elegiac poem that anchors Shelley's first published poetic work, comes closer to fitting the traditional pattern.  Though ending on a dismal note, Alastor marks a poetic birth, not least of all through a pointed refusal of the traditional tropes of elegy that defines the terrain of Shelley's own surpassing genius.  Five years later, however, in Adonais, Shelley adopts the conventions of pastoral elegy with a tenacious energy.  The resulting poem has struck many as bound by mortality and marked by despair.  Rather than going forward, like Milton's Swain, "to fresh Woods, and Pastures new," Adonais is by turns tired out, overwrought, and spectacularly suicidal.

To understand Adonais, a poem so fiercely traditional that it seems anachronistic, we need to consider both its handling of the conventions that it inherits from the tradition of pastoral elegy and how Shelley's use of them reflects and responds to the condition of the poet in the early 19th century.  Shelley's poem is driven by the profound shifts in the profession of poetry occasioned by the rise of print culture and a marketplace of letters.  These developments altered relations between readers, writers, and texts.  Where the manuscript circles wherein literary work circulated in an earlier age allowed writers a high degree of influence over both the material dimensions of their texts and how they might be read, print culture opened these intimate relations to third parties such as publishers, printers, and periodical review.  Adonais, as it frames the death of Keats in the context of a vicious paper war, makes these concerns central to its elegiac work.  As Shelley knew from his own experience, publishers and reviewers shaped the field of reading and writing in distinctive ways, and with palpable impact on writers' lives.  In a larger sense, weaker bonds between writers and readers, and the emerging strength of the market, allowed writers and readers to imagine each other differently.  Readers gained increased sway as buyers and consumers of literary material, and writers acquired cultural prominence, or notoriety, as the owners of their works.