How does Shelley's attitude to science differ from that of Wordsworth and Keats?
Answers
Answer:
Wordsworth and Keats have contrasting views on science as compared to Shelly. This can be observed from their numerous works. Wordsworth, in one of his poems, praises the beauty of nature and how science and intellect misshapes it. Keats goes on to say that philosophy is destructive. Shelly, on the other hand, has an appreciative tone towards science and this is portrayed in his works. A.N. Whitehead’s testimony of Shelly’s attitude towards Science says that he was never tired of expressing in poetry the thoughts which it suggests.
Answer:
The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty (now set in a new perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to learn from their experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics, coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley’s revolutionary ardour caused him to claim in his critical essay “A Defence of Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry,” and that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This fervour burns throughout the early Queen Mab (1813), the long Laon and Cythna (retitled The Revolt of Islam, 1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet and prophet, as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. Despite his grasp of practical politics, however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness in his poetry, where his concern is with subtleties of perception and with the underlying forces of nature: his most characteristic images are of sky and weather, of lights and fires. His poetic stance invites the reader to respond with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to the Rousseauistic belief in an underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human nature itself than the behaviour evinced and approved by society. In that sense his material is transcendental and cosmic and his expression thoroughly appropriate. Possessed of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a poet of excitement and power.