In Pursuit of an Ideal : an Aestheic Quest For Shelley's Poetic Thought

A. Al-Sheikh, Samir.

	In Pursuit of an Ideal : an Aestheic Quest For Shelley's Poetic Thought
Journal of Misan Researches
Article 1, Volume 6, Issue 12, 2010, Pages 293-307
Author
Samir. A. Al-Sheikh
Abstract
Absract: The present study purports to investigate Shelley's poetic – aesthetic paradigm . The study falls into three parts and a conclusion. Part one considers some fundamental concepts such as " Poetics " ," Aesthetics ", " World-view" and explores the fountains of the Shelleyan aesthetic philosophy. In theory , Shelley is a Platonist and his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty " is taken as a poetic manifestation of his romantic idealism . Part two purports to analyze Shelley's longer poems . i.e. "Alastor ; or , The Spirit of Solitude " and "Epipsychidion" as illustrations of the poet's aesthetic pursuit . Then , it concedes to investigate two more poems , that is, "The Sensitive Plant" and the lyrical drama "Prometheus Unbound" . The allegorization of Love and Beauty sustains the poet to build up his dream – like world and to realize his world – view . Part three embraces Shelley's heroines as imaged in the works analyzed . It also discusses poetic imagination , the faculty that poetry works on . This human power is explored in relation to the doctrine of Love . The study is rounded up with concluding remarks deduced from the Shelleyan basic poetic works 1. Introduction: Western Culture witnessed dramatic changes in the aesthetic and literary sensitivity in the late eighteenth century . The new intellectual orientation or Romanticism is realized as a reaction against the rigid premises and conventions of Classicism. What characterize the new cultural impulse are the strong emotion and the ravish appeal to imagination. There is a tendency to have insight into the beauty of nature, the glamour of childhood and the triumph of liberty . The philosophers and poets of the age put an immensely higher appreciation on man's intellectual facilities and on his visionary dreams. They speculate that man has insight beyond sense to the infinite by and through the power of imagination. In theory, the Romantics exalt the subjective, the imaginative, the supernatural, the spontaneous and the visionary. The poets are mostly preoccupied with the issues of poetics and politics . They consider the human situation their own . Of the Romantics in English literature who glorifies Beauty as a doctrine for universal union and Love as a supreme power to liberate mankind is Shelley .

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