Shelley's Poetry
Shelley's Poetry

Author: S. Haines

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1997-02-24

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0230376851

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Shelley's detractors since Hazlitt have noticed a division in the 'self' of his poems. A central reasoning core fears the passions surrounding it and distrusts the language expressing it. A few of his admirers offer an alternative view of the poems as symbolical pointers to a non-linguistic reality transcending passion; most miss the point, justifying their admiration by referring to the poems' systems of thought. This reading of Shelley's major poems and critical prose finds the adverse case more convincing.

Shelley and the Sublime
Shelley and the Sublime

Author: Angela Leighton

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1984-03

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780521250894

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This book presents a major reassessment of Shelley's poetry. Whereas other criticism has stressed the philosophical and political concerns of his poetry in isolation, Angela Leighton argues that Shelley's philosophy and politics are presented as problems of poetic utterance and are this inseparable from his aesthetics. The author begins by tracing the origins of Shelley's poetic theory in eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime. She then discusses the effect of such a theory on the language of seven of Shelley's most important poems including 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty', Prometheus Unbound, 'Ode to the West Wind', 'To a Skylark' and Adonais. In these poems the task of political change is expressed as the prerogative of the inspired poet, who desires to reunite the fallen language of poetry with the original impulse of inspiration that it supplants. This significant contribution to Shelley studies will interest all serious students of English Romantic poetry and aesthetics.