The Political Symbolism of Prometheus Unbound (1943)

Abstract

Although it has long been recognised that there is a certain political-historical content to Prometheus Unbound, there has, so far, been no attempt to make a consistent interpretation of it in terms of this content.¹ It is the object of this paper to attempt to remedy this defect. In so doing I shall present only interpretations which can be supported by reference to Shelley’s other works, in many of which the same basic ideas are present though, fortunately, minus their symbolic garb.

Bottles containing treasonable papers dropped into the Bristol Channel may have been sufficient to alert the Home Office sleuths, but they have deluded most critics into ignoring Shelley’s political concerns as adolescent adventures. Any study of his correspondence, however, shows how carefully he kept up to date with contemporary political developments, and how frequently these interests are paralleled in the poems on which he was working. It is significant that when he was most directly concerned with the outcome of European or English issues he produced some of his finest poetry, as in 1819, for example, or 1822. Given the attention he paid to the relation between cultural and political developments in A Defence of Poetry, it is not surprising that many of Shelley’s poems are anchored far more firmly in contemporary politics than is often assumed.