To a Skylark

Percy Bysshe Shelley was part of the British romantic literary movement. The first generation of romantic poets writing in English included William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Shelley was part of the second generation of British Romantics; he was a friend of Lord Byron’s and an admirer of John Keats. All three of these second-generation poets died young. The poetry and prose of the romantics often turned to the marginalized and oppressed. For example, romantic poets believed poetry should be written in the language of the working class; that is, it should have conversational diction (accessible word choices) and not heavily rely on obscure allusions or forms. However, Shelley was the most radical and political in his generation of Romantic poets.

The romantics shared a central idea about the importance of imagination in poetics. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Shelley believed “poetry produces humanity’s ‘moral improvement’ not by teaching moral doctrine but by enlarging the power of imagination” (p. 1215). This draws from Shelley’s essay on poetics, “Defense of Poetry.” The British romantic poets also focused on nature, the sublime, mystery, and beauty in their verse. They often acted in opposition to ideas from the previous era, the Enlightenment, prioritizing personal experience and emotions over detached rationalism.