Evaluate "The Triumph of Life" in light of the opinion that "Shelley achieves the sublime."

There are various definitions of what constitutes the "sublime" in literature. To answer this question, we can employ a summation of the ideas expressed by writers, such as Edmund Burke in the middle of the eighteenth century and Wordsworth and the other Romantics. The sublime can be viewed as that which raises the soul to a "higher" state through intense emotions such as terror and wonder. It can also be seen as some unattainable state of mind, elevated above and beyond normal human experience.
Shelley's "The Triumph of Life" is similar to other poems of his, such as "The Mask of Anarchy," in which the speaker tells of a dreamlike vision where an allegorical version of reality appears to him. Though he was a freethinker, Shelley's imagery is heavily influenced by the apocalyptic vision of Revelation in the New Testament. In his poem, the description of Nature has something supercharged about it, which is heightened beyond "conventional" beauty. The vision itself, in which multitudes of people are surging forth before a chariot driven by a ghostly figure with multiple faces, is a nightmare of terror and wonder. The speaker imagines figures from the past, such as Rousseau and Napoleon, who presumably had attempted to redeem mankind but were defeated. The scene is grotesque and otherworldly. It fits the definition of the sublime as that which exists in a universe beyond human reach.
A paradox in the literary concept of the sublime is that it consists of things that are exalted or elevated, as its more ordinary definition would suggest, and things which are simultaneously terrible. Shelley's dream vision is all of these. The formal aspects of "The Triumph of Life" support this interpretation. He uses the terza rima of Dante, an arrangement of triplets, as he had done in "Ode to the West Wind." This establishes a conceptual link to the visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven in The Divine Comedy. Shelley's verses consist of long, complicated sentences. The fact that he did not live to finish the poem seems emblematic of its overreaching, superhuman quality. One has only to contrast this poem with the quiet, thoughtful manner of Wordsworth's "The Prelude" to see what makes Shelley unique and what distances him from the earlier generation of the Romantics.