Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the most famous English poets of the 19th century. His works exemplify English Romanticism in varying degrees of joyous ecstasy and despair. Even his works were received in public with the same judgmental pendulum. There was high praise and acclaim as well as criticism for his various writings.
His first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), which due to its themes was labelled as immoral. Shelley’s second work Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire—a joint effort by Shelley and his sister Elizabeth—also met the same fate as Zastrozzi.
He found acceptance and fame with classic anthology verse works such as Ode to the West Wind and The Masque of Anarchy. He is also well known for his long-form poetry, including Queen Mab and Alastor.
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty - a poem
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
It is a poem in seven stanzas by Shelley, written in the summer of 1816. The poem, a philosophical musing, contains references to Shelley’s childhood, when he first recognized the intangible spirit of beauty alive in the world.
By intellectual beauty Shelley refers to a mysterious, intangible awareness that is not accessible through the normal awakened senses but only when one is in a contemplative or subconscious sense.
In the first four stanzas, Shelley describes “the awful shadow of some unseen Power” that passes over the face of the earth, to which humans give the name of “God and ghosts and Heaven.” In the last three stanzas, Shelley recounts his boyhood dedication to this spirit and rededicates himself to intellectual beauty in the present.
Adapted from Shelleyblogarchive
By intellectual beauty Shelley refers to a mysterious, intangible awareness that is not accessible through the normal awakened senses but only when one is in a contemplative or subconscious sense.
In the first four stanzas, Shelley describes “the awful shadow of some unseen Power” that passes over the face of the earth, to which humans give the name of “God and ghosts and Heaven.” In the last three stanzas, Shelley recounts his boyhood dedication to this spirit and rededicates himself to intellectual beauty in the present.
Adapted from Shelleyblogarchive
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