‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no’. So wrote a Tory reviewer after Shelley’s premature death. Cruel as the remark is, the reviewer accidentally lights upon the questions that had preoccupied the poet throughout his short life: is there a God and is there life after death? Madeleine Callaghan discusses this as a crucial facet of her new book, Eternity in British Romantic Poetry for the bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley's death.