The Role Of The Poet And Life Poets Using A Narrator And Ill Fated Poet

Mary Shelley was a young, well-educated woman from England. She was born on August 30th 1797, in London. Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, was the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. She died giving birth to Mary, leaving her daughter in the care of her husband, William Godwin. The atmosphere that Mary Shelley grew up in exposed her to cutting-edge ideas, which are shown all throughout the novel. Mary Shelley’s lover, Percy Shelley was a young poet, and as he was already married, her relationship with him wasn’t the smoothest.

“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)

life, as he has no control over how he lives and what his choices are,

Shelley uses Victor’s lack of humanity as a metaphor for mankind’s negligence of the dying essence of romanticism in the time the book was written. It is evident in the chapter where Victor uses the serenity of nature to attain tranquility in a troubled mind. The visual imagery created in Montanvert accentuates the

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: there can be many different perspectives seen in a poem. One individual could read a poem as depressing and another can perceive it as a new beginning. One’s views rests on individual perspectives. For example, Edgar Allen Poe’s writing is dark and controversial. In my essay I will argue that Poe was not in his right mind and he was driven mad with evidence throughout his short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”.

Shelley’s novel faces the task of creating a notable message that her audience will appreciate. In order for Shelley to effectively signify that mankind must be able to demarcate the attainment of knowledge, she takes her novel to an extreme. Shelley writes, “Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” (Shelley 40) in order to stress Victor’s extravagant notions. As Joseph Kestner, professor of Romantic and Victorian literature, puts it, Victor positions himself as the head of all hierarchies in denying God as the sole creator of man. The intention of the author for placing Victor at such a high position

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are similar pieces of works because they both emphasize the consequences of defying laws of nature. Both of the stories are told in a third person point of view and in a series of flashbacks. In Frankenstein, Robert Walton tells the majority of the story and in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” it is told by the wedding-guest. The protagonist of both stories challenge nature and get punished for their mistake. Shelley and Coleridge both do a masterful job incorporating romanticism and Gothicism s into their works.

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

Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, references many other works of literature in her renowned book. To name a few of the referenced works there were John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Greek “Prometheus myth”, and the widely known poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Each of these allusions gave a new meaning to Shelley’s story, affecting how each of the readers interpreted her words.

According to Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle (1995), In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), the poem tells us about readers and reading. The poem is related to the acts of reading. The sculptor reads the face of the king, the traveller reads the inscription the narrative ‘I’ listens to the tale, and we read the poem. The poem not only can be read, but also tells us an allegory. It brings up a crucial question of how we can know if our interpretation of reading a literary text is valid and engages with other questions such as who this traveller who reads the inscription is and who the ‘I’ who listens to is, etc. Such questions are examined by the writers to summarize the developments in literary criticism

The naturalistic imagery that pervades Mary Shelley’s Mathilda acts as an underlying theme for the incestuous affair between Mathilda and her father and its unruly consequences. Their relationship is a crime against the laws of Nature and causes Mathilda to become ostracized from the very world that she loved as a child. Shelley’s implementation of naturalistic imagery accentuates the unlawful and subsequent ramifications of the relationship between Mathilda and her father and contrasts the ideals and boundaries of the natural and spiritual worlds.

It is arguable that William Wordsworth had a great influence on many of the great writers from the romantic era, and it is evident that his definition of the sublime “mind to grasp at something towards which it can make approaches but which it is incapable of attaining” did in fact influence Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein (Wordsworth, “From Enlightenment” 84) From the picturesque images of Mount Blanc and Lake Genva, to the frozen North Sea, it feels like Wordsworth’s hand is guiding Shelley’s pen as the foundation for the novel is laid down, and it is this presence of the sublime that makes Frankenstein the masterful piece of art it is with adding in the sublime. With adding in the sublime Shelley was able to create a world of

First, in order to gain context for what Shelley’s worldview was at the time, we must indulge in some historical background for an English romantic poet in the 19th century. Most importantly, we must consider the natural events that occurred the year before this was written: The Year Without a Summer. In 1816, England faced hardship as the country was affected by the climate and at mercy to the freezing temperatures. This traumatic event in Shelley’s life plays a huge role in the poem and inspires many themes in the poem such as the transience of life and the beauty and destruction of the natural world.

Wordsworth recognises in the Preface to the 1802 print of Lyrical Ballads that he and Coleridge, viewed by many as the most influential pioneers of Romantic poetry, are guilty of imbuing a “certain colouring of imagination” throughout their poetry. Indeed, Romantic poetry is often characterised by its fascination with the imagination and the idea that the mind can create a world that transcends the physical senses. In light of this concept that a new and greater world can be forged through poetry, some credence can certainly be found in Jerome McGann’s evaluation that the primary purpose of Romantic poetry is to “set one free of the ruins of history and culture”. However, McGann, in my opinion, also oversimplifies the nuances and implications found throughout Romantic poetry, and seems to dismiss it as somewhat escapist, or reliant on its displacement from reality to convey meaning; ultimately, as a “grand illusion”. Through examination of works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, I mean to propose, firstly, that Romantic poetry varies greatly throughout the period - meaning it frequently defies generic summation. Secondly, that Romantic poets often directly confront their historical and social contexts, and in many ways,