Prometheus Unbound: Reconstitutive Poetics and the Promethean Poet

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores Shelley’s notion of the ‘Promethean poet’: poets who ‘feel not what they inspire’ and are ‘the influence which is moved not, but moves’ (A Defence of Poetry). Shelley’s experimentation with different ‘Prometheus’ personae (distinguishing between the mythological Prometheus, his own ‘Prometheus’ character and an abstract notion of Promethean creativity) is his way of exploring the question of what agency is left to the poet who remains perpetually dissociated from the felicity he inspires in others. I also consider how this psychology plays out at the level of language itself; examining how Shelley’s Promethean creativity aims to reinvigorate inert linguistic modes. I do this by examining how the passages where Prometheus’s curse is repeated by the Phantasm of Jupiter enact a self-reconstitution which aims to find a way of coping with perceived gaps between feeling and linguistic expression.