Prometheus Unbound : one of Shelley’s masterpieces.
... mood. He shared with Shelley a spontaneous flow, a rapid inspiration, though one cannot put on an equal footing the rhetorical rush of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the visionary fire of Prometheus Unbound. Byron began Page 59 his poetic career by dictating oriental tales to his valet while dressing for dinners to which he had been invited: not in the least an irrational method... mysticism. Shelley had not the definite mystic experience, but the tendency for it was ingrained in him, as proved by various long rhythm-rolls and short song-snatches, ranging from Prometheus Unbound to the fugitive yet unforgettable "I can give not what men call love." Perhaps the most unexpected and implicitly beautiful summary of it is in the Skylark . Oppressed by a sense of mortal... fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after — even this Thompson is not in fact so far from Shelley as we might imagine; he has no locutions alien to the poet of Prometheus Unbound — the latter may not have used them all but they are in his vein; that "labyrinthine ways of my own mind" which Thompson's admirers have made much of has actually been anticipated in the Shelleyan ...
... and conception and its involvement is cosmic. In this respect Keats's Hyperion and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound are nearer to it. The idea Spirit, behold The glorious destiny nascent in Shelley's earlier work, Queen Mab, finds its fuller poetic expression in Prometheus Unbound. If this is a veritable cosmic lyric, Savitri is a cosmic epic. Prometheus, the man undergoing... cosmic heart's throb, Sri Aurobindo felt and comprehended it fully. Yet if Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is epic poetry of the future, I wouldn't hesitate in venturing to state that Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a wonderfully revealing and prophetic poetic utterance as it is, lyric poetry of the future. As one enters comparatively the modern age one finds poets, including world-dramatists ...
... life within the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason" . 22 This occurs in the more elevated Wordsworthian passages as well as in parts of Shelley's Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and of his fragment, The Triumph of Life; also in sections of Keats's Hyperion, here and there in the famous Odes and almost wholly in the fragment of an Ode ending with the line,... and it tried "to resuscitate the attitude of chivalry and the troubadours". But there was much more in it for Shelley. Epipsychidion, that apostrophe to Emilia Viviani which, together with Prometheus Unbound and Adonais , is considered by Sri Aurobindo 30 as the most typical work of Shelley's of long breath, is not just a rhapsody of Mediaeval love: at its most blazing it seeks to kindle to ...
... grace that Heaven allows to doomed institutions and forfeited powers. Like Kansa of old, it seeks to confirm its failing grip on the world by murderous guile and violence or like the Jupiter of Prometheus Unbound gropes for safety through vain diplomacies and the martyrdom of the champions of suffering humanity. Poor in invention except in the cunning variation of savage tortures or petty brutalities ...
... did read an interesting book by John Drew on India and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford) with many valuable things about Shelley's indebtedness to India. (After all he called the soul-figure of Prometheus Unbound 'Asia', did he not?) Yeats the Initiate was not a systematic book but papers written over the years. But I think WBY would have liked it. (4.11.1987) From K. D ...
... about the Middle Ages and Romanticism, I suppose. NIRODBARAN: You said the other day there has not been any successful blank verse in England after Shakespeare and Milton. What about Shelley's Prometheus Unbound? SRI AUROBINDO: I didn't say there is no successful blank verse. Plenty of people have written successfully, such as Byron, Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustom and some others. But there are ...
... AUROBINDO: It depends on what you mean by experience. An idea or a thought may be an experience; feeling is also experience. PURANI: In comparing Shelley and Milton, Abercrombie says that Prometheus Unbound does not have as great a theme as Paradise Lost and so it couldn't equal the latter in greatness. SRI AUROBINDO: It is not as great because Shelley doesn't create anything there. But the ...
... different from either symbolic or allegorical figures". Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory. Arthurian legends may be the type of concealing images capable of intellectual interpretation. Prometheus Unbound of Shelley can be taken as a symbolic figure. With regard to the function of the symbol in expression Sri Aurobindo says in another letter: "A symbol expresses not the play Page 11 ...
... Aurobindo : It depends upon what you mean by "experience". An idea may be an experience, a feeling may be an experience. Disciple : In comparing Shelley and Milton he says that '' Prometheus Unbound " is not as great a theme as " Paradise Lost ". Sri Aurobindo : It is not great because Shelley does rot create anything there. But the theme is equally great. Disciple : He ...
... negativity of the Earth is supremely Positive, like the eruption of an unknown volcano that brings us an unknown Treasure: our new Means. An invasion of the divine Fire on the Earth, the hope of Prometheus unbound. The junction of heaven and earth through the walls of our grave. That Fire un-earths everything: good and evil, the beautiful and the hideous, truth and falsehood – life and death – as though ...
... of a cloud. Here are all the materials for one of those intangible harmonies of woven & luminous mist with which Shelley allures & baffles us. The personages & scenery are those of Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound & the Witch of Atlas. But Kalidasa's city in the mists is no evanescent city of sunlit clouds; it is his own beautiful & luxurious Ujjayini idealised & exempted from mortal affection; like a ...
... he uses the pure lyrical form for his greatest sight, for what would now be called his "message". When he turns to that, he attempts always a larger and more expansive form. The greatness of Prometheus Unbound which remains, when all is said, his supreme effort and one of the masterpieces of poetry, arises from the combination of this larger endeavour and profounder substance with the constant use ...
... Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon Burns inextinguishably beautiful. Here again is Shelley describing, in the song of the Fourth Spirit in the First Act of his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, the poet: Nor seeks or finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aerial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake ...
... about it, as also has in its high moments the not infrequent recourse by him to a semi-Miltonic diction without Milton's compactness. Shelley in sections of Adonais and in large tracts of Prometheus Unbound (minus the lyrics), Keats in Hyperion and even Byron in some of his rare forceful sincerities have to a marked degree the same source of inspiration. But there has entered into that source ...
... lucidly to the mind, and it suffers also by an unsteady poetic fire in the various parts. If Chattopadhyaya makes something even less colossal yet large and poetic enough, if he fashions a new Prometheus Unbound, essays and finishes another Hyperion or rebuilds a Paradiso, in terms of a fresh and mature mystic originality, he will stand like a giant in the dawn of a new era, his masterpiece gathering ...
... forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind. Not that Shelley is without fight: after all, he has written Prometheus Unbound and its grand close is as heroic, as loftily strong, in the midst of the world's wreckage as this apostrophe to Toussaint. The difference, however, is that Shelley is bravely defiant while Wordsworth ...
... He yearned to liberate the world from the obscurantism of priests and the despotism of kings. Mind and body clear of shackles - such was the visionary drive behind his great lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound. From that "something afar" where there is freedom from our sorrowful sphere he longed to bring a new light, love and liberty to that sphere. For what was initially seen at a distance was the ...
... in his favorite occupation: Page 8 reading. Nothing seemed to escape this voracious adolescent (except cricket, which held as little interest for him as Sunday school.) Shelley and "Prometheus Unbound," the French poets, Homer, Aristophanes, and soon all of European thought – for he quickly came to master enough German and Italian to read Dante and Goethe in the original – peopled a solitude ...
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