Essay about One of the Writers of the Romantic Movement: Percy Shelley

“As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition, I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none and related to none. ‘The path of my departure was free,’ and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.” (Shelley 109)

Throughout Shelley’s work, the creature struggles to conform to society, alone from his first moments - abandoned by his creator - he is given no proper upbringing, and abhorred by society. He grows up in hiding and fear, his only interactions with others ending in violence. Hence, seems only natural that his desperate need to conform would lead to violence. The need to “belong” is an essential “human” desire, however this sense of belonging his completely dependent on one’s upbringing.

This is one of the ways in which Shelley, then, both embraces and simultaneously contests this particular romantic ideal. The moment which Shelley describes in Frankenstein is neither a moment recalled from her personal experience, such as a contemplative moment in nature, nor is the narrative voice her own, yet she is still portraying a particular quest to achieve the sublime. That quest, of course, is Victor Frankenstein’s effort to create a living being out of raw material in his laboratory. It is particularly curious that this quest occurs within the confines of Victor’s private, secluded laboratory, which is unlike the natural, pastoral environments of so many romantic texts. Yet, note the nature imagery in the following line, in which Victor expresses his feelings about the undertaking in one of the important quotes from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley : “No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success," he tells the reader, recalling the heady project in his lab. “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through…. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me" (Shelley 51). Victor Frankenstein is aromatic character to the extent that he reflected the romantic writers’ emphasis on a new way of seeing. The romantics believed that it was individual and

Mary Shelley used this poem to show the freedom of one's future and the change(s) that will come with it. The poem also mentions one little thing such as a dream or a “wandering thought” can ruin a bigger idea. In the story, it was recently addressed that before the poem, “If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free”. This passage can be implying that the non-essential things in life are the things that poison us or make us change. The poem’s purpose in this part of the book is to amplify the speaker's last words of the paragraph that state, “...we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that word may convey to us.”. It makes the message of “things will change” very clear to the

Romanticism is a philosophy that has played an important role in the development of western culture. This philosophy also had a great effect on Marry Shelly's famous novel, "Frankenstein". Though it is easy to find its influence in the story, it is unclear whether or not Marry Shelly supported the movement..

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, a poem that discloses the relationship between nature and human beings: how nature can affect one’s emotion and behavior with its motion and sound. The words the author adopted in this poem are interconnected and related to each other. They are simple yet profound, letting us understand how much William Wordsworth related his works to nature and the universe. It also explained to us why William Wordsworth is one of the greatest and the most influential English romantic poets in history. As Robert DiYanni says in his book, “with much of Wordsworth’s poetry, this lyric reflects his deep love of nature, his vision of a unified

Before delving too deep into Shelley's novel, it is very important to label the ideologies and connections behind Romanticism as a literary period, and a literary movement. The poetry and prose of the Romantic movement meant to show a obvious connection to the imagination. Romanticism, at it's most basic understanding, which was mainly active through the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, can be separated from the preceding Enlightenment by recognizing that in the Enlightenment, there was a “preoccupation with reason in

Lord Byron’s works, such as Don Juan and other poems reflect not only the suave and charming characteristics of the Romantic Period, but they also reveal the nature of Byron’s uncommitted and scandalous life. Byron, like most Romantic era authors, was very unpredictable and opinionated in all of his writings. From the hatred of his upbringing, to the love of adventure, and also to the love of meaningless relationships with various women were majorly influenced and illustrated through all of his works and especially in “Don Juan.” Yet he still managed to infiltrate his poems with charm, romance, and heroism. Byron was a perfect fit for the Romantic Period and his poems and he was therefore known as a great contributor towards the era.

Shelley Percy is one of the most highly regarded Romantic poets of the 19th century. Many of Shelley’s poem tell about the nature of the human condition. In many of his poems Shelley use elements of nature (seashells, the wind, the ocean, etc.) to discuss truths about the human condition. Percy Shelley examines the one consistent characteristic of being human in his poem “Mutability”. In his poem “Mutability” Shelley shows the fragility and unpredictability of the human condition.

In the first poem Mutability the author seems to describe clouds as “human life.” Percy goes on to describe that as the night moves on so do we, vanishing into nothing. Personally, I feel the description of life in this poem is extremely gleam and depressing, how can one truly affect the world they live in if no one is truly remembered? He also goes on saying “One mood or modulation like the last” this would mean that any choice we make in our own life truly means nothing. I disagree very much with these statements, even as someone people may think on a broad spectrum that human life may be like “clouds” just like a cloud each life is different and can make a difference on the world we live

Throughout the novel, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, scientist Victor Frankenstein repeatedly meddles with the power of nature while building his creation, without applying the knowledge and consideration of the power of nature and its repercussions. Thus, man should respect the power of nature and its consequences. Nature is omnipotent, therefore, man should obey nature in order to avoid it from its aftermath, portraying Shelley’s point that if man obeys nature, nature will not destroy something. There will be consequences if man does try to discipline nature which displays Shelley’s similar idea that if man tries to counter nature, man will eventually fall. Nature can improve or restore one’s mind who is in misery or someone who is suffering proving all in all, if man accepts and does not ignore the capability of nature, then they will thrive and be joyous and pleasant. Overall, if one does not tamper with nature, nature shall not tamper with one.

Many people do not realize that Romantic Literature, even though it is a little over 200 years old, is still relevant in Contemporary Literature today. In the 1990 film Joe Vs. the Volcano, Gothicism is included throughout the movie. Edgar Allan Poe used Gothicism in many of his poems and short shorties, such as The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher. The characteristics of Gothicism would be, dark, depressing, decay of mental or physical being, and death. All of these characteristics tie into Joe Vs. the Volcano and Edgar Allan Poe’s stories.

The beauty of nature is often overlooked and underappreciated in today’s society. The neglect and lack of respect given to such a beautiful creation by members of society is widely reflected in Romantic poetry. The romantic era began in 1798, where writers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed their opinions and feelings towards nature. Overall such writers typically express a positive outlook on the natural world around them, however some stray the other way. Specifically Coleridge and Wordsworth began to express the feeling of disconnect towards nature. Both writers began to feel as though they could not understand nature and cannot connect with the beauty it gives off as expressed in poems such as “Dejection”, “London 1802”, and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”. Not only did some of these writers begin to feel a disconnect but a select few also begin to feel as though people are disrespecting the balance of nature and are trying to disrupt the balance and manipulate it. Writers such as Mary Shelley, author of the novel Frankenstein, expresses the concern of people taking the laws of nature and twisting them. Writers and people living during this time period not only express an appreciation for nature but also the truth about the human relationship with nature. The relationship between humans and nature is on of mistreatment.

Literary Romanticism is a movement in literature present in the history of virtually every European country, the USA, and Latin America. It lasted from approximately 1750 to about 1870 and was characterized by reliance on the imagination and emotional subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature. The term 'romantic' first appeared in 18th-century English and originally meant "romancelike"—that is, resembling the fanciful character of medieval romances. Romanticism was merely a product of bygone ages as are all works of literature.

Due to Alastor anticipating A Defence of Poetry, clearly Shelley had been considering the role of the poet for quite some time. Shelley writes in the Preface to Alastor ‘The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image’.[6] Furthermore, in A Defence of Poetry, he writes ‘Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters’.[7] This solidifies another step in defining the role of the poet: unifier. A poet unites the characteristics of humans with the beauty of the natural world; which is evident in Shelley’s use of lengthy scenery descriptions. The Poet’s role is to illustrate to the reader these connections in a way that ignites the mind and heightens the sense of identity. When the reader examines the ideas of the poet and observes the connections, they will begin to contemplate the awe of the universe and how it relates to humans. This is the poet’s role – to awaken the imaginations of readers. Shelley states poets ‘are the institutors of laws and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers’.[8] This was also salient in romanticism, where the arts could feasibly