Shelleys Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc Essay example --

For Shelley, poetry moves beyond descriptive communicability; it defers meaning, destabilizes understanding, and defamiliarizes perception. Poetry "awakens and enlarges the mind," he says in A Defense of Poetry, "by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thoughts" (961). The poet-figure envisions new realities and new emotions, the likes of which invalidate, if not eradicate, intimations of referential meaning. "Poetry," Shelley states in his Defense, "lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar" (961).[1] In "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and in "Mont Blanc," Shelley offers an intriguing, though perplexing, look at the functioning of the human mind under the influence of nature, inspiration, and poetic creativity. Composed during a tour of the vale of Chamonix between June 22 and August 29, 1816, nearly twenty years after the composition of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Shelley's poems can be read, as some critics have done, as a "Wordsworthian experience" (Brinkley 45). Shelley and his literary precursor share a similar interest in some of the ways the mind works in and reacts to Nature. But whereas Wordsworth finds solace in Nature -- a setting wherein he behaves as a "lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains, and of all that we behold / From this green earth ("Tintern Abbey," 104-106)[2] -- Shelley ultimately finds it spiritually and intellectually dissatisfying. Although they both use the natural setting and landscape as their subject, the parallels between Shelley's poem s and Wordsworth's remain somewhat perfunctory. Nature, for Shelley, is nefarious. The universe of Shelley's "Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Bla... ... 24:2 (1986 Dec): 45-57. McNulty, J. Bard. "Self-Awareness in the Making of 'Tintern Abbey'." The Wordsworth Circle 12:2 (1981 Spring): 97-100. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Alastor." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 834-852. --- "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 852-855. --- "Mont Blanc." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 855-860. --- A Defence of Poetry. Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 956-969. Storey, Mark. The Problem of Poetry in the Romantic Period. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc, 2000. Wordsworth, William. "Tintern Abbey." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 240-244. --- 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 250-269.