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Elective English–I

Notes Idealism

Shelley’s unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong disapproving
voice, made him an authoritative and much-denigrated figure during his life and afterward.
He became an idol of the next two or three or even four generations of poets, including the
important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as Lord Byron, Henry David Thoreau,
WB Yeats, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and poets in other languages such as Jan Kasprowicz,
Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy.

Non-violence

Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s passive resistance
were influenced and inspired by Shelley’s non-violence in protest and political action. It is
known that Gandhi would often quote Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy, which has been called
“perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of non-violent resistance.”

Vegetarianism
Shelley wrote several essays on the subject of vegetarianism, the most prominent of which
were “A Vindication of Natural Diet” (1813) and “On the Vegetable System of Diet”.
Shelley, in heartfelt dedication to sentient beings, wrote: “If the use of animal food be, in
consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice
and the barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into
existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery
and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much
better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only
to endure unmitigated misery”; “Never again may blood of bird or beast/Stain with its venomous
stream a human feast,/To the pure skies in accusation steaming”; and “It is only by softening
and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication
or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable
loathing and disgust.” In Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813) he wrote about the change
to a vegetarian diet: “And man ... no longer now/He slays the lamb that looks him in the
face,/And horribly devours his mangled flesh.”
Shelley was a strong advocate of social justice for the “lower classes”. He witnessed many of
the same mistreatments occurring in the domestication and slaughtering of animals, and he
became a fighter for the rights of all living creatures that he saw being treated unjustly.

Legacy

Shelley’s mainstream following did not develop until a generation after his death, unlike Lord
Byron, who was popular among all classes during his lifetime despite his radical views. For
decades after his death, Shelley was mainly appreciated by only the major Victorian poets, the
pre-Raphaelites, the socialists and the labour movement. One reason for this was the extreme
discomfort with Shelley’s political radicalism which led popular anthologists to confine Shelley’s
reputation to the relatively sanitised “magazine” pieces such as “Ozymandias” or “Lines to an
Indian Air”.
He was admired by CS Lewis, Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, Gregory Corso, George Bernard
Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Isadora Duncan, Upton Sinclair, Gabriele d’Annunzio and WB Yeats.
Samuel Barber, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Roger Quilter, Howard Skempton, John Vanderslice and
Ralph Vaughan Williams composed music based on his poems.

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