Shelley: As Romantic

Wordsworth and shelley have point in common. They unlike the contemporaries intellectualized nature; their music, each glorius in its own way is set to transcedental language. They are not merely poets of nature, they are prophets of nature, they are concerned less to depict than to explain less to marvel at her beauty than to exhul at its inner significance. They are ever oving from external fact to the idea. If wordsworth and shelley have a common end in viw their way of achieving that end is sufficiently distinctive.

Wordsworth procaims peace and order to be the heart of things; shelley, love; shelley’s method is largely diffusive, wordsworth’s concentrative. Shelley finds expression ina cry—sometimes of pan, sometimes of joy—but always at his most impassioned moments a cry; for shelley;s mind was ever over hung with wonderful dreams there is a very little of the visionary in Wordsworth’s spiritual meditation.

A.C. Bradley says that Shelleys ideal of good, whether as a character ot as a mode of life, resting as they do on abstraction from the mass of real existence, bend to lack boy and individuality. But we must remember that shelley’s strength and weakness are clsely allied and it may be that the very abstractness of his ideal was a condition towards it in which his poetry is unequalled. Wordsworth’s emotion to be less lyrical than shelley’s. shelley lacks the emotional discipline of wordsworth. He is an ecslatic dissipation directed upon an idealized self.