Abstract
Prometheus Unbound has provoked a bewildering variety of conflicting interpretations. ‘Of such truths each to himself must be the oracle’, says Asia in Demogorgon’s cave, and a student of the poem’s critics might be forgiven for concluding that the meaning of Shelley’s drama is just such a truth. Newman White protested against this situation in 1925 in an article entitled ‘Prometheus Unbound, or Every Man His Own Allegorist’,1 but his protest has done nothing to deter the poem’s interpreters.
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Notes
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Kramnick (Penguin, 1975), p. 261. The significance of Demogorgon has been endlessly discussed. The fullest account of Demogorgon available to Shelley is Boccaccio’s in De Genealogiae Deorum. Peacock précised Boccaccio’s account in a note to his poem Rhododaphne, but Shelley may well have read the Boccaccio himself. Various interpretations of Demogorgon are summarised by L. A. Zillman, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition, pp. 313–20. The two most interesting single contributions are by G. M. Matthews, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, English Literary History, 24 (1957), pp. 191–228
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© 1981 Richard Cronin
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Cronin, R. (1981). Prometheus Unbound. In: Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16471-4_4
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