Percy Bysshe Shelley

«Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted»

A revolutionary thinker

• He was born in Sussex in 1792.

• His private life was restless.
• Revolutionary propaganda against Catholicism and
English rule (The necessity of Atheism-1811).
• Innovative ideas.
• He died very young in 1822 because of an accident.
 Freedom and love
• He expressed his radical political view in his works. He
believed that any type of institution, be it church or state,
commerce or money, education or marriage, led to
superstition and selfishness, and that man can express his
utmost capabilities only if he’s free from eternal resraints.
• Love is the principle of all actions, the force that can
overcome any political, moral and social cobentions.
Through love the world can be improved. He didn’t
believed in God but in some powers pervading the
universe, in particolar he though that the principles of
freedom and love are the remedies for the faults and evils
of society.
Different views of nature
• A refuge from the disappointment and injustice of the ordinary world; the approach
between man and nature provides him with images and symbols for creation of his
cosmic schemes.

• A living force, a moral guide and a source of consalation and happiness, joy and
pleasure. Pantheistic view so he identifies the nature with the divine.

• An essential role in poetic creativity because it stimulates the poet to find natural
symbols that could reflect his emotions and feelings.
Imagination
• Poetry is the creative expression of the imagination in order to change the reality of the
material world.

• Is a synonymous with intuition, the power to see into the life of things and is in
connection with the memory.

• According to coleridge imagination can be divided into two phasis, primary and
secondary imagination. The first is the one that can be experienced by everybody and is
linked to perception while the second can be only experienced by the poet, he can
dissolves and dissipates the images related to past experiences in order to create a ‘new
world’.
Poets’s task
• The poet is a prophet and a titan challenging the cosmos; he has to help mankind to
replace tyranny with ideals of love, freedom and beauty.

• The poet has more sensibility than common man and he uses this power for penetrating
the heart of things. He becomes a teacher who shows man how to understand their
feelings and improve their moral being, but he remains a man speacking to men.

• The poet is a great philosopher, he can employs his soul in the poetic process because
he can fuses his emotions and his feelings thanks to his imagination. So his work is the
reflection of this procedure.