Queen Mab Revisited, Necessity, and Embodiment of Vision in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas
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This article aims to scrutinize how Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas brings to light the protagonist’s perceptions of an ideal world in reaction to sustaining issues of human wretchedness and necessity which in turn entail diverse paradoxical occurrences. The writer’s The Mask of Anarchy and Peter Bell the Third, composed after the traumatic incident of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, prompt him to revisit his earliest work Queen Mab one year later in order to obtain a practical view of counteracting human misery caused by a wide range of political and social oppressions of his era. Shelley’s frustrating experiences with the ironic limitations of reform result in him embracing the inevitable dual facets of humanity. Unlike in Queen Mab, this positive awareness of necessity serves to elucidate the author’s rejuvenated sense of vitality and love, which he considers to be the ultimate source of human yearning for freedom from the enslavement of distress and despondency. Shelley’s insightful vision, vigorously expounded in The Witch of Atlas, enhances underlying thoughts on poetry and the writer which he embodies in his later literary works, such as Epipsychidion, Hellas, and A Defence of Poetry. The paper explores a variety of his related poems and prose writings in order to enrich readers’ understanding of the formation and development of his prominent poetic thoughts regarding the three interconnected thematic concerns. These diverse works reinforce the poet’s enduring and frustrating reflections on the paradoxical and irresolvable aspects of the real world and unyielding human aspirations.
Abstract
This article aims to scrutinize how Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas brings to light the protagonist’s perceptions of an ideal world in reaction to sustaining issues of human wretchedness and necessity which in turn entail diverse paradoxical occurrences. The writer’s The Mask of Anarchy and Peter Bell the Third, composed after the traumatic incident of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, prompt him to revisit his earliest work Queen Mab one year later in order to obtain a practical view of counteracting human misery caused by a wide range of political and social oppressions of his era. Shelley’s frustrating experiences with the ironic limitations of reform result in him embracing the inevitable dual facets of humanity. Unlike in Queen Mab, this positive awareness of necessity serves to elucidate the author’s rejuvenated sense of vitality and love, which he considers to be the ultimate source of human yearning for freedom from the enslavement of distress and despondency. Shelley’s insightful vision, vigorously expounded in The Witch of Atlas, enhances underlying thoughts on poetry and the writer which he embodies in his later literary works, such as Epipsychidion, Hellas, and A Defence of Poetry. The paper explores a variety of his related poems and prose writings in order to enrich readers’ understanding of the formation and development of his prominent poetic thoughts regarding the three interconnected thematic concerns. These diverse works reinforce the poet’s enduring and frustrating reflections on the paradoxical and irresolvable aspects of the real world and unyielding human aspirations.
참고문헌 (17)
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