A Critical Study of P. B. Shelley‟s „Prom...

A Critical Study of P. B. Shelley‟s „Prometheus Unbound‟

Author Name : Mr. Rabichandan Kumar

ABSTRACT This study has been undertaken to evaluate the drama, „Prometheus Unbound‟penned down by P.B. Shelley critically and analytically. This paper embodies the critical analysis of the lyrical drama, „Prometheus Unbound‟.P.B. Shelley is one of the major poets of Romantic Revival who has been more interested in changing the Socio -Political ethos on the one hand and establishing a type of Golden Millennium in the field of English Poetry. The most representative poet of the age like Wordsworth wrote after 5 years P.B. Shelley‟s death, “P.B. Shelley is one of the best artists of us all; I mean him is workmanship of style”. It is significant that Wordsworth used the word „artist‟ and not „poet‟. What he seems to have meant is that P.B. Shelley was an able craftsman but wrote about the wrong things for Mathew Arnold and Leslie Stephen Shelley‟s poetry was like a rainbow colored mist into which Godwin‟s „paradoxes‟ have been transmitted. Poe, Melville, George Henry Leves, Swinburne, and Francis Thompson where ardent Shelleyan. Browning admires P.B. Shelley with qualifications as did. Tennyson and William Morris, Lamb, Hazlit, Carlyle, Kinsley and Markstwainwere anti-Shelleyan. The main objection had been to Shelley‟s subject matter but the intensity of this objection gradually started to wear off.Shelley aroused a similar reaction to his personality.To the earliest critics he was a monster of impiety and immorality; to the later he was pure unearthly spirit. Another paradox was that while critics reiterated their dissatisfaction with his poetry. He was accepted as one of the greatest English poets. Arnold has gone to the extent of describing him as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void hisluminous wings in vain”.But before passing such sluggish remarks one must not ignore the contemporary social-milieu which witnessed the birth and growth of romantic poetry. „Prometheus Unbound‟ is essentially a modern morality play or spiritual drama. It is not concerned with the story of particularhero but with process from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, and from death to life. The process is cosmic and the characters are symbols of two elemental forces-life and death, good and evil, the former symbolized by Prometheus and later by Jupiter. The weapons used in this conflict are a spiritual one, the side of the crude and comparatively gross and material on the part of Evil, the Good being synonymous with life and Evil with death. „Prometheus Unbound‟ fully illustrates the truth of Arnold‟s dictum that a great work of art is the product of the union of two factors of Forces- a gifted man and congenial moment. This is what Eliot advocates by the „Tradition and Individual Talent‟, with his inborn love of freedom, absolute and unqualified wrote in an age when the atmosphere was deeply charged with a passion for liberty and the finest fruit of this union was this drama in four acts.