How Do These Poems Reveal Shelley(TM)s Views About The Role Of The Poet?(TM) Discuss.

At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley and his fellow poets 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. Shelley believes that through providing us with an interpretation of what nature means, then he is able to provide reason behind the world’s mysteries and effectively guide us to salvation. 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. Since Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he senses in nature are only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to attribute nature's power to God. So amazed at his own ‘power’ he believes that perhaps there was no divine intervention when creating nature but it is the poets who tell us what nature is that grants it reality. This suggests that Shelley truly believed that, as he thoroughly highlights in ‘Ozymandius’, the poets and artists are the true creators in life.

  Shelley’s ‘Ozymandius’ epitomizes Shelley’s work as it gives one clear message, this being, that although powerful, aggressive dictators can ravage lives and landscapes, these people are only temporary and it is the works of poets and artists that lives on throughout history. ‘Ozymandias’ is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this era as it does not fit a conventional petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave with the sestet, by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF. Shelley does this to show that he is breaking out of the norm and not conforming. He does this to show that poets are there to create their own structures rather than simply following the traditional previous structures set for them. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley's most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like ‘England in 1819’ for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. Shelley's description of the statue works to reconstruct the figure of the "king of kings” since at first we see merely the "shattered visage," then the face itself, with its "frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command"; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king's people in the line, "the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed." The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: "'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away." Shelley is able to tear down the greatness of this ‘king of kings’ in 14 lines and with this shows how the role of the poet is to criticise or glorify where needed.

  Poets, Shelley argues, are a force for political change and this belief is demonstrated in ‘Song To The Men Of England.’ The poem begins by addressing the downtrodden masses ‘Men Of England’ directly aiming the entire message of the poem at them. He describes these men throughout the poem in an entirely positive light yet questions why they don’t fight against those who oppress them. Shelley appears highly hypocritical here as he tries to force the working classes of Britain into taking revolutionary action yet he has experienced nothing of the hardships that they suffer through. Shelley believed that he understood the hardships that these people suffered through but believed poets need to be detached from their audience so as to be able to produce works to    excite and inspire them. This poem clearly shows how Shelley fervently believed poets made the real difference in the world by giving inspiration to the people to force change in society.