49 pages • 1 hour read
Percy Bysshe ShelleyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Although written more than two decades after its tectonic impact on European history, Alastor owes much of its sense of both liberation and tragedy to the French Revolution. The revolution against the French monarchy majorly impacted the poets who have since been grouped as the Romantics, a name they never actually used to define themselves. Britain, locked within its own ages-old monarchial system, watched how after centuries of mistreatment and routine abuse, the working class of Paris rose up against the entrenched monarchy and demanded liberty and equality for all. That the revolution began with such heady and tonic optimism, touting a new era of individual dignity and opportunity, and so quickly collapsed of its own irony into anarchy in the streets and chaos in the government impacted Shelley, indeed Shelley’s entire generation. Like the philosopher-poets who instigated the French Revolution, Shelley’s Poet is at heart self-possessed, gentle, educated, but blasted by disappointments in the real-time world and ready to strike out toward an ideal. Shelley was a free thinker, a radical philosopher who vigorously advocated a wide variety of liberal ideas—workers’ rights, suffrage for women, the virtue of civil disobedience, pacifism, abolition, atheism—who saw in the monarchy a corrupt manifestation of unlicensed control by amoral elites that suffocated the individual and denied the individual the right to explore themselves, to assert the intellectual curiosity that Shelley was sure every person possessed.
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mutability
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Prometheus Unbound
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Masque of Anarchy
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Triumph of Life
Percy Bysshe Shelley
To a Skylark
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Appearance Versus Reality
View Collection
British Literature
View Collection
Mythology
View Collection
Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics
View Collection
Poetry: Mythology & Folklore
View Collection
Popular Study Guides
View Collection
Romanticism / Romantic Period
View Collection
Romantic Poetry
View Collection
Short Poems
View Collection