Shelley’s Unorthodox Methods: Reassessing the Cliché of the “Ineffectual Angel”
Résumé
This article stems from the observation that most critical investigations of Shelley’s early poetry in the last decades have endeavored to make sense of it by detecting in his first poems the budding presence of the great lyric poet Shelley was to become, neglecting how practical Shelley was in his youthful years. By paying a closer look to some of Shelley’s early poems, this article seeks to reassess the cliché of the “ineffectual angel,” shedding new light on how Shelley forged an original conception of poetry as a medium of radical critique through a sustained engagement with print culture, notably pamphlets and caricatures.