1. Group
Presenters
Department : Modern Languages
Program : MA Eng(Lit)
Course : Romantics and Aesthetic
course coordinator : Madam Fozia Mansoor
• Hina Nawaz
• Kaneez Fatima
• Inayatullah
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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. 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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7. • 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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8. Trends….cont
• Interest in chaos
and nature
• Changing religious
views
• Rebellion against
authority
• Crime, madness,
suicide
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9. 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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10. • William Blake
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• George Gordon, Lord
Byron
• John Keats
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poets of the Romantic Era
Blake Coleridge
Keats
Shelley
Wordsworth
Byron
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11. 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 11
12. 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
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13. Biography
Life experience
1. 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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14. Biography
General comment
1. 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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15. • Percy Bysshe Shelley tsuguA(4,1792– July 8,
1822citnamoR hsilgnE rojam eht fo eno saw )
eht gnoma eb ot deredisnoc ylediw si dna steop
egaugnal hsilgnE eht fo steop laciryl tsenif.
• 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 dna ,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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16. • 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 eht ot noticudortni eht etorw dna ,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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17. 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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18. 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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19. 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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20. 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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21. 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. 21
22. 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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23. 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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24. 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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25. 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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26. 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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27. 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 dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
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28. 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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29. 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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30. 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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31. 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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33. 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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34. 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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35. 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.“
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