Percy Bysshe Shelley: Romanticism and Enlightenment Philosophy of Liberty.

This paper aims at studying Shelley's poems as exemplifying the philosophy of Enlightenment. Shelley's poems on 'Napoleon,' 'Ozymandias' and his 'Poetical Essay' show him as a Romantic writer who strongly believed in European Enlightenment philosophy. His poems are musical treats, highly spontaneous, metaphorical, allusive and romantic in style, but the core content of his poems is the Enlightenment philosophy of his contemporary Eurocentric thought. Shelley was a voracious reader, as exemplified by Mathew Arnold, and absorbed the ideologies of philosophers and thinkers hailing from the middle classes and universities, and his poems reveal the highly volatile period during which Europe shifted from monarchy to democracy through revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]