Prometheus Unbound & To a Skylark

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PROMETHEUS UNBOUND & TO A SKYLARK by Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound Analysis Prometheus Unbound by Shelley is the most ambitious poem of the Romantic Movement. His Prometheus is compared to the Satan of ‘Paradise Lost’. However, he deliberately makes his arch-rebel his hero, gives him all the virtues, and ends the poem with his triumph. Thus; the new ideas of an age of revolution are expressed through his myth. But men can form new ideas of the universe much more quickly than they can make new myths to express them; and for a poet not only to treat a myth in poetry, but also to invent the myth itself, is a task of almost difficulty. The myth provides to express man’s life experiences and the experiences of generations. Shelly’s myth expresses his own limited experience and peculiar ideas. It seems that Shelly was born with an overpowering desire for perfection and an idea of it by which he tested all real thins and found them wanting. His object is not to reconcile himself to reality. Reality seems to him to suffer from an organic disease of which it must be cured before he could consent to it. The idea of things he expresses in his myth. All that is good in suffering humanity is represented by Prometheus; Jupiter the tyrannous and external evil by which humanity is oppressed. Jupiter is suddenly and mysteriously overthrown, and Prometheus is freed. At once the universe is cured of its disease, and all things rejoice in common. This myth does not express any general conception of the nature of things; for the great mass of men, however they may think about the order of the universe, have a sense that evil is in the nature of man and to some extent his own fault, not imposed upon him by a celestial tyrant. Their minds are tortured with trying to discover the origin of evil. However, even the
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