Shelley’s Idealism in His Poetry: Shelley was a magnificent idealist. “Shelley,” says Elton, “is more constantly a poet of the idealizing type than any other except possibly Spenser. If Byron is a great interpreter of revolutionary iconoclasm, Shelley on the contrary, is a great revolutionary idealist, and a poetic prophet of faith and hope in a world which for the moment had lost both. Byron and Shelley thus represent two sides of the French Revolution—Byron its destructive side and Shelley its constructive and idealistic side. Shelley took the more ideal side of human life. He is fond of painting a gold age of human happiness. Shelley was a reformer as well as a poet. He was a great inheritor and exponent of the ideas of the French Revolution. The ideas as well as the passion of the Revolution glitter and vibrate in Shelley’s poem.
“The devotion to the unseen and unattainable as the only true reality could not exist without a keen sensibility to the tangible and transitory forms in which Shelley’s ideals clothed themselves. His poetry always comes to face with ideas which to most men are unsubstantial and unreal, investing them with a reality which sets at naught the common estimates of life, is naturally of many of his readers a mist of beautiful music and colour in which sense is obscured.” The distinguishing note in Shelley,” says Edmunds, is ideality—the quality of raising every thought and action on to a higher plane, the imaginative faculty of taking into his mind the wisest reaches and loftiest visions.” Love, liberty and nature are treated in the same ideal way. His love soars and fades away into eternity. The territory of liberty he is impatient to make his own and all men’s. Nature is not only flowers and streams, mountains and seas; but the movement of an eternal spirit. And in religion, wherein he has been most misunderstood, what he could not endure with patience was the imperfection and the incompleteness, the unworthy littleness of what passed for Christianity. The effect of his poetry upon the mind is to keep awake our enthusiasms and our purest ideals, and this was what he most desired to do.
