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Group Presenters

Department : Modern LanguagesProgram : MA Eng(Lit)Course : Romantics and Aestheticcourse coordinator : Madam Fozia Mansoor

• Hina Nawaz• Kaneez Fatima • Inayatullah

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Biography of Persy Bysshe Shelley

English Romantic poet

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Flow of Thoughts• An overview of Romantic Poetry• Characteristics of Romantic Poetry• Trends of Romantic era • Comparison Between Romanticism and

Classism • Poets of Romantic Period• Writing style of PB Shelley• Themes in poetry of shelley• Work of PB Shelley

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An overview of Romantic poetry

• Following are the general characteristics of Romantic poetry

Five “I” of Romanticism • Imagination• Idealism• Individuality • Intuition • Inspiration

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Romanticism• Use creative imagination• Focus on nature • Importance of myth and

symbolism• Focus on feelings and

intuition• Freedom and spontaneity • Simple language • Personal experience,

democracy and liberty• Fascination with past

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Romanticism• The Romantic Period most often includes the years

1789-1832.• The period is designated by the beginning of the

French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the Parliamentary reforms in England in 1832.

• The Romantics placed importance on the use of creative imagination, nature, myth and symbolism, feelings and intuition, freedom from rules, spontaneity, simple language, personal experiences, democracy, and liberty and held a fascination with the past, including ancient myths and the mysticism of the Middle Ages. The Romantic poets are often called the “nature poets.”

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• Changing political and social conditions

• Reaction against Industrial Revolution

• Revolt against Enlightenment and literary styles

• Working long hours in dangerous factories

• Development of modern cities

Trends

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Trends….cont• Interest in chaos

and nature• Changing

religious views • Rebellion

against authority• Crime, madness,

suicide

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Neoclassic Trends:

• Stressed reason and judgment

• Valued society• Followed

authority• Maintained the

aristocracy• Interested in

science and technology

Romantic Trends:

• Stressed imagination and emotion

• Valued individuals

• Strove for freedom

• Represented common people

• Interested in supernatural

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• William Blake• William Wordsworth• Samuel Taylor

Coleridge• George Gordon, Lord

Byron • John Keats• Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets of the Romantic Era

Blake Coleridge

KeatsShelley

Wordsworth

Byron

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Thoughts of British Romantic Poets

“…I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” William Blake

“ Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.” William Wordsworth

“Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Blake

Coleridge

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Thoughts of British Romantic Poets“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who

cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” George Gordon, Lord Byron

“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” John Keats

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they

were not familiar.” Percy Bysshe Shelley

Biography

Life experience1. The eldest son of a wealthy country

squire, Shelley was born in 1792. From his childhood, he possessed a fierce independence of spirit and bitterly hated all forms of tyranny.

2. At Eton, he read widely, including political theory and romantic tales.

3. At Oxford, he and Thomas Hogg published The Necessity of Atheism and defiantly refused to answer questions about this work put to them by university authorities, so they were expelled.

4. Though he lived a brief life, he had a stormy emotional history. Though he loved quite a few women, there is a curious innocence in his love. He married Harriet Westbrook to save her from parental tyranny; he ran off with Mary Godwin because he loved her; he entertained friendships with other women because he always thought that he saw profound spiritual qualities in ladies he loved.

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Biography

General comment1. Shelley (1792 ～ 1822) was a revolutionary

and idealist, a dedicated seeker of an ideal world where love and the brotherhood of man would prevail. His poetry expresses his spirit of rebellion, his pervasive melancholy, his love of man and of freedom. He used the objects of nature, which he worshiped, as images of his internal state.

2. What makes Shelley a great poet is the sheer music and matchless spontaneity of his verse. Few poets have matched his clear-flowing melody and his lyric suggestion of a sublime world beyond the physical which man has never seen but which he knows must exist. His world stirs up sensations which bring each reader to the mystery of life, the attempt to find something beyond the present and tangible.

3. The following list of his works is designed to call

attention to his greatest achievements: Queen Mab (1813); The Revolt of Islam (1817); The Cenci (1819); Prometheus Unbound (1819); Ode to the West Wind (1819); The Cloud (1820); To a Skylark (1820); Adonais (1821).

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• Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyrical poets of the English language. • Lyrical poems are a form of poetry that does not attempt to tell a story but is of a more personal nature instead.• He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. • Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him a notorious and much denigrated figure during his life.

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• He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats • He is famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron; an untimely death at a young age was common to all three. He was married to the famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and wrote the introduction to the 1818 edition of the novel.

Mary Shelley

• In 1814 Shelley fell in love and eloped with Mary, the sixteen-year-old daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. For the next few years the couple travelled in Europe. Shelley continued to be involved in politics and in 1817 wrote the pamphlet A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout the United Kingdom. In the pamphlet Shelley suggested a national referendum on electoral reform and improvements in working class education.

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Over view of Shelley's poetry

• Shelley singer of lyrics• Shelley’s love of Nature• Shelley’s Myth Making Power• Shelley’s Idealism• Shelley’s Symbolism• Shelley poet of love• Shelley’s Philosophy of life

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Shelley’s writing style• The central thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley’s era

• Beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley’s treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matter

• Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness.

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Shelley’s writing style• Shelley’s intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art.

• The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good.

• Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person.

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Themes of Shelley’s poetry

• The Heroic, Visionary Role of the Poet• The Power of the Human Mind• Autumn• Ghosts and Spirits• Christ• Mont Blanc• The West Wind• The Statue of Ozymandias

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The Heroic, Visionary Role of the Poet•In Shelley’s poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some extent, the

figure of Shelley himself) is not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist but a grand, tragic, prophetic hero.

•The poet has a deep, mystic appreciation for nature, as in the poem. “To Wordsworth” (1816), and this intense connection with the natural world gives him access to profound cosmic truths, as in “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude” (1816).

• He has the power—and the duty—to translate these truths, through the use of his imagination, into poetry, but only a kind of poetry that the public can understand.

•Thus, his poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and through his words, a poet has the ability to change the world for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change. •Shelley’s poet is a near-divine savior, comparable to Prometheus, who stole divine fire and gave it to humans in Greek mythology, and to Christ.

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The Power of the Human Mind•Shelley uses nature as his primary source of poetic inspiration. In such poems as “The Mask of Anarchy” Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester” (1819) and “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination.

•This power seems to come from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for nature’s beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative power over nature.

•It is the imagination—or our ability to form sensory perceptions—that allows us to describe nature in different, original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it exists.

• Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived.

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Autumn• Shelley sets many of his poems in autumn, including “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Ode to the West Wind.” Fall is a time of beauty and death, and so it shows both the creative and destructive powers of nature, a favorite Shelley theme. As a time of change, autumn is a fitting backdrop for Shelley’s vision of political and social revolution

•  In “Ode to the West Wind,” autumn’s brilliant colors and violent winds emphasize the passionate, intense nature of the poet, while the decay and death inherent in the season suggest the sacrifice and martyrdom of the Christ-like poet.

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Ghosts and Spirits• Shelley’s interest in the supernatural repeatedly appears in his work. The ghosts and spirits in his poems suggest the possibility of glimpsing a world beyond the one in which we live.

• In “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” the speaker searches for ghosts and explains that ghosts are one of the ways men have tried to interpret the world beyond.

• The speaker of “Mont Blanc” encounters ghosts and shadows of real natural objects in the cave of “Poesy.”

• Ghosts are inadequate in both poems: the speaker finds no ghosts in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and the ghosts of Poesy in “Mont Blanc” are not the real thing, a discovery that emphasizes the elusiveness and mystery of supernatural forces.

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Christ• From his days at Oxford, Shelley felt deeply doubtful about organized religion, particularly Christianity. Yet, in his poetry, he often represents the poet as a Christ-like figure and thus sets the poet up as a secular replacement for Christ.

• Martyred by society and conventional values, the Christ figure is resurrected by the power of nature and his own imagination and spreads his prophetic visions over the earth.

• Shelley further separates his Christ figures from traditional Christian values in Adonais, in which he compares the same character to Christ, as well as Cain, whom the Bible portrays as the world’s first murderer.

• For Shelley, Christ and Cain are both outcasts and rebels, like romantic poets and like himself.

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Mont Blanc (Name of Mountain)• For Shelley, Mont Blanc—the highest peak in the Alps—represents the eternal power of nature. Mont Blanc has existed forever, and it will last forever, an idea he explores in “Mont Blanc.”

• The mountain fills the poet with inspiration, but its coldness and inaccessibility are terrifying. Ultimately, though, Shelley wonders if the mountain’s power might be meaningless, an invention of the more powerful human imagination.

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The West Wind• Shelley uses the West Wind to symbolize the power of nature and of the imagination inspired by nature.

• Unlike Mont Blanc, however, the West Wind is active and dynamic in poems, such as “Ode to the West Wind.” While Mont Blanc is immobile, the West Wind is an agent for change.

• Even as it destroys, the wind encourages new life on earth and social progress among humanity.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves deadAre driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

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The Statue of Ozymandias•In Shelley’s work, the statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, or Ozymandias, symbolizes political tyranny.

•In “Ozymandias,” (1817) the statue is broken into pieces and stranded in an empty desert, which suggests that tyranny is temporary and also that no political leader, particularly an unjust one, can hope to have lasting power or real influence.

•The broken monument also represents the decay of civilization and culture: the statue is, after all, a human construction, a piece of art made by a creator, and now it—and its creator—have been destroyed, as all living things are eventually destroyed.

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Shelley’s Exploits

• Published The Necessity of Atheism

• Eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook

• Daughter named Ianthe• Often left wife and child• Met Mary Wollstonecraft

Godwin

single click speaker to hear audio clip >>>>

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Shelley’s Complicated Life

• Left pregnant wife for 16-year-old Mary

• Traveled to Switzerland• Claire pregnant with Byron’s

child• Mary Shelley began working

on Frankenstein• Shelley took Claire and

daughter to Venice

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Losses and Views

• Son and daughter died• Wrote Adonais upon Keats’

death• Wrote essay on radical

political views• Essay on vegetarianism• Believed in rights of all living

things

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Shelley’s Works • “Ozymandias”• “Ode to the West

Wind”• “The Masque of

Anarchy” • “To a Skylark” • Prometheus Unbound

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Shelley’s Death

• Drowned during storm at 29• Possibly assassinated• Body washed ashore• Wife kept Shelley’s heart• Shelley cremated on beach• Ashes buried in Rome

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Death - 1822

• Went out boating with a buddy while partying at Byron’s place

• Boat capsized – Shelley drowned• Body cremated, except for the heart, which Mary

kept• Shelley had a book of Keats’ poems on him when he died.

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An Ironic Headline of A Newspaper on Death of PB

Shelley • A London paper took great delight in

announcing Shelley’s death, writing: "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or not.“