Utopian Desire in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetry

Abstract

This study has considered the Utopian desire in Percy Bysshe Shelley's major poems. It describes Shelley's idealism and Utopian desire based on the creative power of love. Shelley's Utopia is an imaginary land in which love creates, while hatred brings about destruction. Shelley can be considered as the culmination of the Romantic Movement in English literature. He looks at nature primarily as a realm of overwhelming beauty and aesthetic pleasure. His works deal with the subjective world of ideals that is more real to him than the world of facts. He is a poet of idealism and love, a representative of hope and liberty, who desires to change the world to Eden before the fall of man. His idealism is based on the elimination of all sorts of tyranny and oppression to terminate a liberal and humane world. Since Shelley's Utopia is governed only by justice, love and beauty, good triumphs over evil when love dominates man's heart and society, because according to him, love is a harmonizing power that joins and supports the elements to bring about creation. Shelley’s seclusion from the world of men and his dissatisfaction and failure in the actual life lead him to a higher world that is created by poetry and ruled by love and beauty, a Utopian Land that affords relief from what is unbearable in the social world and is much more beautiful and more perfect than the external world.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n8p267