On: Percy Shelley

Alastor

• Percy Shelley is a Neo-Platoist
  • the true form, the perfect form exists somewhere else and what we see are imperfect manifestations of that
• Journeys and Enlightenment
  • Alastor is about the journey to a sort of poetic enlightenment
    • there isn’t a conclusion of what that spiritual conclusion/enlightenment would be
  • “secret strength…”
    • taking  away the religious context of morality to explain endurance- a materialist view
    • inspires the individual in a way that isn’t elitist
      • not just inspires but empowers

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

• “the awful shadow of some unseen Power…”
  • going back to the secret strength of things
  • a divine spirit would be far greater than our perceptions of God
    • the earth and the universe are not constrained to this
    • but he also doesn’t want the dark grave to be the end
      • intellectual beauty and imagination to help conceptualize the deeper, the higher, the meaningful
• Wordsworth= the egotistical poet
• Shelley- a vatic poet, the power of the prophesy and the expunction of the ego