A Study on Love and Beauty in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Lyrical Poems

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P. B. Shelley is a poet of youth. He is established in the literary mind of the nineteenth century as a great poet. Though he was a traitor to the conventional morals, he forgot himself for the eternal love and burned like a living candle in his short life (born, Warnham, Sussex, 4 August 1792 and died at sea, off Leghorn, 8 July 1822). We cannot remember Shelley without thinking of 'mad Shelley', 'debauchee'. He believes his own rightness and avoids all compromises. This character influences his works very effectively. He brings a light of a new age with the spirit of freedom and love (beauty). His poems are loving ones and his sadness is a pain which we seek in vain, therefore he is 'homo desiderium' and goes on pursuing the ideal. Thinking of himself as 'tameless and swift', 'a pardlike spirit beautiful and swift', he writes poems which are violent, sensitive and sweet lyrical cries. One of the main themes of Shelley's poems is a philosophy of love not in the narrow meaning but in the deep meaning. It includes ideal love, ideal beauty and truth. "Alastor" (1815). "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (1816) and "Epipsychidion" (1821) etc. are poems of ideal love in which he tries to catch ideal beauty. In this paper, I will try to examine Shelley's conception of love and beauty through these poems.
1969-09-15