PERCY BYSSHE

SHELLEY
(1792-1822)
BRITISH LITERATURE
TEACHER CLAUDIA CAAS
ROMANTICISM
(1800-1850)
 The Romanticism

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was

an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that
originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century .
was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as
well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the
medieval rather than the classical.
 It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the
aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of
Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic
source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on
such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe
especially that experienced in confronting the new
aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature.
The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated
with multiple processes, including social and political
changes and the spread of nationalism.
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Was born 4 August 1792 on Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, England
was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some
as among the finest lyric, as well as epic, poets in the English
language.
Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and
writers that included Lord Byron; Leigh Hunt; Thomas Love Peacock
and his second wife Mary Shelley.
His other major works include a groundbreaking verse drama The
Cenci (1819) and long, visionary poems such as Queen Mab (later
reworked as The Daemon of the World).
 Shelley's close circle of friends included some of the most important
progressive thinkers of the day, including his father-in-law, the
philosopher William Godwin and Leigh Hunt. Though Shelley's poetry
and prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers
and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested for
either blasphemy or sedition.
Shelley became a lodestone to the subsequent three or four
generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite
poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
He was admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw,
Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan.
Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience was apparently influenced by
Shelley's non-violence in protest and political action.
MAYOR WORKS OF PERCY
SHELLEY
 Zastrozzi (1810)
St. Irvyne (1811)
The Necessity of Atheism (1811)
An Address, to the Irish People (1812)
Queen Mab (1813)
Alastor (1814)
The Revolt of Islam (1818)
Ozymandias (1818)
The Masque of Anarchy (1819)
Men of England (1819)
Rosalind and Helen (1819)
Prometheus Unbound (1820)
Adonais (1821)
Epipsychidion (1821)
Hellas: A Lyrical Drama (1822)
Queen Mab (Daemon of the World)

published in 1813 in nine cantos with seventeen notes, is

the first large poetic work written by Percy Bysshe Shelley
(17921822), the English Romantic poet.
 SUMMARY
The poem is written in the form of a fairy tale that
presents a future vision of a utopia on earth, consisting of
nine cantos and seventeen notes. Queen Mab, a fairy,
descends in a chariot to a dwelling where Ianthe is
sleeping on a couch. Queen Mab detaches Ianthe's spirit
or soul from her sleeping body and transports it on a
celestial tour to Queen Mab's palace at the edge of the
universe.
 Queen Mab interprets, analyses, and explains Ianthe's dreams. She shows
her visions of the past, present, and the future. The past and present are
characterised by oppression, injustice, misery, and suffering caused by
monarchies, commerce, and religion. In the future, however, the condition
of man will be improved and a utopia will emerge.

Queen Mab returns Ianthe's spirit or soul to her body. Ianthe then
awakens with a "gentle start".

Of the seventeen notes, six deal with the issues of atheism, vegetarianism,
free love, the role of necessity in the physical and spiritual realm, and the
relationship of Christ and the precepts of Christianity.

The theme of the work is the perfectibility of man by moral means.

 CANTO 1 Y 2
Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
The subject, not the citizen; for kings
And subjects, mutual foes, forever play
A losing game into each other's hands,
Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.
 CANTO 3

Heaven's ebon vault,

Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.
 CANTO 4
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubduable array.
 CANTO 5
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!

Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all

The wanton horrors of her bloody play;

Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,

Shunning the light, and owning not its name,
Compelled by its deformity to screen

With flimsy veil of justice and of right

 Its unattractive lineaments that scare
All save the brood of ignorance; at once
The cause and the effect of tyranny;
Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;
Dead to all love but of its abjectness;
With heart impassive by more noble powers
Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;
Despising its own miserable being,
Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.
 When did begin the
Romanticism?

1785
1815
1800
 Was famous of the majorEnglish
Romantic poets
Lord Byron
Leigh Hunt
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mention at least two Works of Percy
Shelley
Queen Mab(Daemon of the World)
The Cenci
ozzimandias