"Prometheus Unbound" and Shelley's Prefatory Defense Against Critics

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Bohn

Joe Bohn

ENG344W-01

Prof. Hubbell

December 5, 2000

“Prometheus Unbound” and Shelley’s Prefatory Defense Against Critics

Towards the end of the 18th century, Great Britain experienced an unprecedented influx of innovation: the hydraulic printing press, gas lighting, steam-powered mills, optical glass and the first electric battery. Amidst all of this progress, authors found it increasingly feasible to publish their own literary works for mass consumption. Yet, while they were now able to make their works more readily accessible to the public, they were now also faced with the dilemma of having to choose a specific audience. And if this wasn’t troubling enough, the author was now to be held accountable by literary critics with respect to any content, which could remotely be regarded as upsetting, radical or offensive. Authors like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Shelley were at the mercy of critics who were bent on politicizing any literary work and slandering authors at the slightest hint of a political agenda. Percy Shelley, in particular, attempted to defend himself the Preface of his Aeschylean epic drama, Prometheus Unbound, with anticipation of the critic’s narrow-mindedness, ready to denounce any legitimacy to their claims (MM 1407-1409)

Perhaps, it’s best to begin discussing Shelley’s defensiveness by looking to and contrasting him with his predecessors, one of which was Wordsworth. In earlier works, like Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth addressed his contemporaries and spoke mostly with regard to the glories of his youthful days. In later works, like The Excursion, he preached against pessimism, and in other works, like Michael, A Pastoral Poem, he depicted the demise of man’s grace in the face of modern industrialized society. He meant to urge his fellow man to become more in tune with the essential passions that are first learned during that time of innocence, which we call youth. He believed that mass media and mass culture threatened to reduce our mind’s “discriminatory powers” to a state of “savage torpor” (Abrams 575). He felt that the poet was singularly responsible for humanizing the world  (Abrams 586). Unfortunately, Michael… like many of Wordsworth’s other works proposed no solution that might help preserve the essential passions. Perhaps for this reason, Percy Shelley later felt compelled to answer the calling, the riddle proposed by his predecessor—on how to restore man’s grace. This response is present, but disheartening, in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

        Coleridge, like Wordsworth, found it necessary to disarm critics. In his Biographia Literaria, he claimed that his main poetic intent was to modify “the colours of the imagination” and excite “the sympathy of the reader” by directing his energies towards supernatural characters or instances (MM 750).

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In Conciones ad Populum, one of Coleridge’s most politically charged commentaries, he remarks on his disapproval of the French Revolution, an opinion that would have likely been supported by many, therefore not remotely radical or offensive in content (MM 684-686). In light of the failure of the French Revolution, it is perhaps through Coleridge’s writings that Shelley decided to take his stance regarding the effectiveness of passive resistance, as he describes in The Masque of Anarchy.

In 1792, Thomas Paine, a revolutionist pamphleteer, was convicted of seditious libel because of his justifications of revolution in The Rights of Man. It ...

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