Romanticism

During the late 18th century, Romanticism thrived in Britain. It typified the Classicism and Neoclassicism in the Enlightenment. As a opposition of physical materialism and rationalism in the 18th century in Britain, Romanticism extolled the beauty of nature, the individual emotions and intelligence. Percy Shelley, one of the most preeminent representative poets during British Romanticism period, largely defined Romanticism on both the passion and beauty of nature and the despair of his own life. “Shelley was a poet for whom the millennial promise of the French Revolution had not been realized but might still be achieved. He despised the reactionary politics of the postrevolutionary period and worked tirelessly to inspire that transformation …show more content…
O’Connor) Therefore, Shelley’s poetry exemplifies the goodness and the beauty of nature and connects the naturalism to the true world around him. In Shelley’s poems, unconventional patterns are his uniqueness. “The impossibility of a final end is one of the most salient themes in Shelley’s corpus...In order to address the possibility of the final end of mutability, we would do well to confront a poem that seems to assert the impossibility of such an end.” (Donahue, Luke.) Ode to the West Wind is the best example of this type of unconventional writing pattern. At the end of the poem, “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!” and “Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth, / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!” (ll. 63–64, 66–67). “Shelley divorces his words from ‘living thought’ and inscribes them on dead leaves, but the scattering of the leaves allows his words to be reread and kept alive. The wind that threatens to …show more content…
However, since Shelley abhorred the realistic materialism, he put his desire into his poetry and used these innocent and pure natural metaphors to foreshadow his aversion to the reality and his fervent adoration to the nature. In To a Skylark, “ ‘Skylark-Image’ belongs to Shelley’s realm of fabulation, where to be ‘helplessly excited by one thing at a time’ and to vanish from sight is a good thing, the source and point of vitality. ‘To a Skylark,’ that textual ‘Scorner of ground,’ ...casting off the world of ‘profitable relations between two things.’ ” (Pyle, Forest) The skylark was such a purified metaphor that it implied the desire of Shelley’s deep heart. Skylarks, always considered as the most innocent symbol, are birds of daylight which indicates that they are departed from darkness. Shelley was inspired by skylarks and he implied his joyness of feeling painless from skylarks into the poem. In the poem, Shelley imagined himself to live without all human materialism and complexity. Likewise, in To a Skylark, most natural metaphors exemplified the transient beauty of nature. “ Shelley presents the rose at the moment of its full maturity --- past the bud stage, but not yet declining to the defloration stage.” ( Fleming McClelland) Since Shelley was interested in science, he explicitly explained the living process of roses. In