The figures of veils in Shelley’s poetics have long been understood as an inconsistent and potentially confused contribution to a debate between representational and expressive accounts of language. However, Shelley’s veils are crucial to a broader range of aesthetic and ethical questions in his poetics, and when read alongside the related figures of clothing, armor, uniform, dress and draped curtain, these vestimentary figures underwrite some of the most ambitious of Shelley’s claims: that poetry is infinite and yet tangible, that it contains “eternal truth” while existing within a historical context, and that it does not compete with but underwrites the work of reason.