This language resonates beyond the fictional world of this novel and links in complex
ways with the concerns of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who likewise focuses on this theme
in "Alastor" (lines 20-23, 75-82, and 116-28), where both the narrator and the Poet
whose story he tells are obsessed with uncovering secret lore; in the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty," stanza 5, where Shelley recounts his own youthful investment in the supernatural;
and in "Mont Blanc," esp. ll. 139-41, where the mountain itself is represented as
holding secrets the poet would penetrate. "Alastor" was published in March of 1816,
and the other two poems were written that summer. In addition, the theme is continually
sounded in The Revolt of Islam, the long narrative poem he composed while Mary Shelley
was simultaneously writing Frankenstein: (see esp. Canto II, sts. 11-12, 20; Canto
IV, sts. 3, 6-8, 12). There Shelley gives a strong political tilt to the notion of
suppressed knowledge.