The reader of Shelley’s poetry repeatedly comes upon beautiful slumbering human forms that exist in charged non-relation to a social world. A close reading of these forms as they appear in “The Witch of Atlas” suggests that they represent a fantasy of “the aesthetic” as that which is radically closed to human concerns. In contemporary accounts, Shelley himself is often represented as one who is not of the world, who is only minimally attached to life. I would argue that the Shelley circle’s posthumous constructions of “Shelley” as an other-worldly or unworldly figure are informed by an attentive reading of Shelley’s poetry, which figures the aesthetic as that which does not matter in terms of human economies of desire and exchange.