Shelley’s Ideals and Political justice; The Mask of Anarchy as an example.

Abstract

This paper discusses the political activities and ideals that Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) lived by and called for in his poetry and life. As a romantic poet, he believed in many liberal ideals that shaped his active live and affected his political view. Shelley protested against injustice through his words and actions, and made multiple severe statements that attack the politicians and those in power. This paper discusses his poem The Mask of Anarchy and states his passive resistance's notion in accordance with the poet's era. The poet himself lived an active resistance and a liberal lifestyle but in this poem he encourages people to have a pacifist attitude in their resistance . The paper analyses the poem line by line in order to discover the ideals in which Shelley tried to express to the English society and to the workers who suffered from the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester.