19 pages 38 minutes read

Percy Bysshe Shelley

To a Skylark

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1820

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Background

Literary Context

Percy Bysshe Shelley was part of the British romantic literary movement. The first generation of romantic poets writing in English included William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Shelley was part of the second generation of British Romantics; he was a friend of Lord Byron’s and an admirer of John Keats. All three of these second-generation poets died young. The poetry and prose of the romantics often turned to the marginalized and oppressed. For example, romantic poets believed poetry should be written in the language of the working class; that is, it should have conversational diction (accessible word choices) and not heavily rely on obscure allusions or forms. However, Shelley was the most radical and political in his generation of Romantic poets.

The romantics shared a central idea about the importance of imagination in poetics. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Shelley believed “poetry produces humanity’s ‘moral improvement’ not by teaching moral doctrine but by enlarging the power of imagination” (p. 1215). This draws from Shelley’s essay on poetics, “Defense of Poetry.” The British romantic poets also focused on nature, the sublime, mystery, and beauty in their verse. They often acted in opposition to ideas from the previous era, the Enlightenment, prioritizing personal experience and emotions over detached rationalism.

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By Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Nature

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mary Mapes Dodge, George Darley, William Motherwell, George Eliot, John Milton, Clement Scott, George Arnold, Robert Browning, James Thomson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., William Ernest Henley, Denis Florence MacCarthy, William Cullen Bryant, John Sterling, John Clare, Izaak Walton, Matthew Arnold, James Whitcomb Riley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edward Jenner, William Gilmore Simms, Charles G.D. Roberts, Henry Timrod, William Cox Bennett, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, George MacDonald, William Shakespeare, Matthias Claudius, Alexander Hume, James Beattie, Thomas Gray, Craig Franklin, John Cunningham, Norman Rowland Gale, James Gates Percival, Joel Benton, Thomas Heywood, Richard Hovey, Anna Boynton Averill, Charles Sangster, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dora Hill Read Goodale, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Nashe, Henry Wotton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John Howard Bryant, John G.C. Brainard, Thomas Campbell, Eduard Mörike, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, David Gray, William Cowper, W.B. Yeats, William Prescott Foster, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Thomas Carew, William Howitt, John B. Tabb, Jones Very, Henry Fielding, Barry Cornwall, Samuel Daniel, John Keats, Homer, George Francis Savage-Armstrong, John Leyden, Tomas Peter, Thomas Hood, Philip Pendleton Cooke, Richard Watson Gilder, Ethelwyn Wetherald, William Wordsworth, Euripides, Joseph Blanco White, Edmund Clarence Stedman, G.W. Pettee, Robert Tannahill, Ebenezer Jones, John Chalkhill, Abraham Cowley, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Russell Lowell, Andrew Marvell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lisle Bowles, Leanne Yau, Charles Harpur, Sonia, Edith M. Thomas, Charles Kingsley, Lord Byron, Ebenezer Elliott, Benjamin Franklin Taylor, Richard Henry Horne, Jason in Panama, Walter Scott, Hartley Coleridge, Duncan Campbell Scott, Alfred Tennyson, John Davies, Aristophanes, Charles G. Eastman, Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald, William Browne, Robert Burns, Samuel Rogers, Ludwig H.C. Hölty, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Celia Laighton Thaxter
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