Essays on Percy Bysshe Shelley

William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley are iconic poets who continue to be read in the modern world. They are both canonized as classic Romantic’s but what does this mean? The movement of Romanticism began with the French Revolution in the 18th century which heavily influenced the works of writers and poets in relation to their...

Percy Shelley participated in a European movement that began many decades before his birth, which was aimed at finding new intellectual order in classical literature that might liberate Europe from an oppressive structure of monarchy, aristocracy, and religious dogma of the early 19th century. Because of Shelley’s early knowledge of the classic myths acquired during...

John Keats’ assertion that the “Poet […] has no Identity” and thus is constantly reinventing himself holds true in the poetic works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man constantly considering the Romantic concept of the ever-changing self. Stephanie Burt and David Mikics outline, in The Art of the Sonnet, the restructuring of the traditional sonnet...