Intellectual Beauty Essay

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“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
Essay 2

The idea of intellect has travelled many favourable and unfavourable paths on the human evolution timeline in order to reach the present’s day potential. I believe it will continuously evolve to reach new forms, as science has proved humans only use 10 – 12 % of our total cerebral capacity, which in comparison with a human life span, it reached the puberty stage. Obviously, nothing gets destroyed or created; therefore the remaining percentages build the subconscious part of our intellect, which captures all things that operate beyond conscious awareness, creating a mysterious aura around it that makes it beautiful. This intellectual beauty that “floats through unseen amongst us”(line 2), in the poem “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, is interpreted as a “Spirit of Beauty” with supernatural abilities that makes the poet believe, and he also explores it in the poem, the fact that is capable of helping humans realize the ideal of absolute happiness. (“Happiness is in the heart not in the circumstances”) Throughout the storyline of the poem, the “Spirit of Beauty”, takes numerous forms and it is “inconstant” but even thou it lands in the same place: the human heart. In the first part of the poem it is observable how the speaker emphasizes the use of similes to point out the qualities of the Power that “floats” and “visits” to create in the readers mind the idea that the beauty of the intellect is as beautiful as the naturalistic imagery created. The items being compared with the qualities of this Power are immaterialistic(“moonbeams”, “summer winds”, “clouds”, “memory” – stanza 1), suggesting it cannot be sensorial perceived but can infiltrate any “human heart and countenance”. A human heart always pumps blood in and then sends it everywhere in the body; it is never constant, but all this inconstancy

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