Professional paper
Religion, Imagination and Revolution in William Blake’s “The Tyger” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”
Neven Brlek
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The Romantic era represented a considerable artistic and philosophical paradigm shift towards subjectivity in perceiving and portraying the world around us, and thus heavily relied on the fusion of several distinct topics: religion, politics, social matters, nature, art, etc. In the context of British Romanticism, or more precisely British Romantic poetry, one might point out the importance of the “great six” poets: William Blake,
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and John Keats. This paper comparatively takes into consideration Blake and Shelley, and singles out two of their poems which are generally considered to represent some of their finest work – Blake’s “The Tyger” and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”. The comparison of the poems yields, in spite of their rarely being considered as companion pieces, great philosophical and poetic resemblances. Both authors saw nature, albeit in unique ways, as a logical extension of the poet’s imagination and of religious considerations, which becomes evident upon reading the poems. The similitudes demonstrated here serve as evidence of the complex entanglement of Romantic ideologies, both on the level of a single author or a single poem and on the level of time and place (turn-of-the-nineteenth-century England). Furthermore, the paper situates the said poems in a broader European political context and delineates the possible influence of that context on their creation.
Keywords
romanticism; religion; Blake; Shelley; imagination; revolution
Hrčak ID:
241254
URI
Publication date:
4.4.2020.
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