Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Parenthetical Citations
- Introduction: A Philosophical Poet (of Ordinary Language)
- The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry
- Chapter 1 The Everlasting Universe of Things as Shelley Found It in 1816: “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
- Chapter 2 Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote for: The Signature of “Ode to the West Wind”
- Chapter 3 Knowing What We Do (With Words): Act I of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 4 Recounting Reverses, Recovering the Initiative: Act II of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 5 The Congregated Powers of Language: Act III of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 6 Resounding Celebrations and Constraining Commissions: Act IV of Prometheus Unbound
- Coda: A Voice to Be Accomplished
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Knowing What We Do (With Words): Act I of Prometheus Unbound
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Parenthetical Citations
- Introduction: A Philosophical Poet (of Ordinary Language)
- The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry
- Chapter 1 The Everlasting Universe of Things as Shelley Found It in 1816: “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
- Chapter 2 Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote for: The Signature of “Ode to the West Wind”
- Chapter 3 Knowing What We Do (With Words): Act I of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 4 Recounting Reverses, Recovering the Initiative: Act II of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 5 The Congregated Powers of Language: Act III of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 6 Resounding Celebrations and Constraining Commissions: Act IV of Prometheus Unbound
- Coda: A Voice to Be Accomplished
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“And we cannot say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust.We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly.
The first imitated action of Prometheus Unbound shows its title character doing something very appropriate for a divinity said to have, “[given] man speech, and speech created thought,/Which is the measure of the Universe” (II.iv. 72–3). It shows an uncharacteristically forgetful Prometheus struggling toward the fully recalled (and reheard) words of a curse he knows himself to have once uttered. And then when Earth responds to her dismayed son's, “Were these my words, O Parent?” with a terse, “They were thine,” he disowns them:
It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;
Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine.
I wish no living thing to suffer pain. (I. 302–5)
In building toward this palinode, the opening of Prometheus Unbound introduces its protagonist as a responsible but baffled agent of the word. “Be it dim and dank and grey/…[or] Be it bright,” Prometheus wants to get straight just what he has breathed forth into the “atmosphere of human thought” (I. 676–80). But his words have gotten away from him.
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- Information
- The Constitution of Shelley's PoetryThe Argument of Language in Prometheus Unbound, pp. 57 - 94Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009