Romanticism 2: Electric Boogaloo

He was gutted.

He was already the God of forethought and champion of oppressed mankind. If I were him, and someone approached me with the God of Romanticism title as well, I'd sigh and make a big show of it but take it on anyway. Prometheus, however, took in all in his stride.

Prometheus was just your ordinary Greek God, who, after moulding the entirety of mankind out of clay, wanted to do us one better and steal some fire from Zeus to help us out even more. What a nice guy.



For all of his efforts, he was chained to a rock by Jupiter and an eagle was sent to pick out his ever-replenishing liver for 30,000 years. An overreaction, perhaps, but I guess he was kind of asking for it by stealing from Zeus.


The reason that Prometheus was hailed as the 'God of Romanticism' was because he seemed to perfectly embody the zeitgeist at that point: namely the 'Liberty, Egality, Fraternity' of the French Revolution. He was a creative force - the bringer of fire, creator of mankind, and responsible for the renewal of humanity. His myth inspired lots of lovely Romantic literature, poetry, art and music, some of which you can have a peek at below if you're so inclined.


Beethoven - The Creatures of Prometheus (1801)

Lord Byron - 'Prometheus' (1816)
Mary Shelley - 'Frankenstein, or; the Modern Prometheus' (1818)
Percy Shelley - 'Prometheus Unbound' (1820)

Percy Shelley - Ozymandias

Percy Shelley just loved a bit of Prometheus. He had seen the huge bust of Ozymandias/Ramses II displayed in the British Museum and was inspired by it. Shelley's poem, aptly named 'Ozymandias', contains further examples of his Prometheanism (what a word); it has revolutionary, anti-government tones which resonate even today in light of the recent Egyptian revolt against Mubarak.  He empathises with the man who has sculpted the bust of Ozymandias and even suggests that this man was mocking the features of the tyrant which he was so diligently carving into stone. Subversive!

Here's the sonnet in its entirety:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away". 

Seeing as the sonnet form is usually used to elevate its subject (ladies/guys writing mushy love crap to each other), its usage was ironic. When you also consider the desperately proud 'I am King of Kings!', allusions to an 'empire of sand' and that cheeky sculptor, it seems that Percy had penned a critique of British imperial power under the guise of poetry.

This.

John Keats - 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'

Keats was inspired after visiting the British Museum and viewing the Townley Vase.

The Ode celebrates the artistry of the urn - and to reflect this, the language used in the Ode itself is ridiculously ornate and creative. Keats really went for it. You can read it here. Keats knew he was dying of TB as he wrote this, which is probably why the urn inspired him so deeply.

In the poem, the urn is considered as a art object; Keats holds art up as a supreme value and stresses that the beauty of the urn will far outlast the ashes of whoever is contained within it.

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'; that is all
  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"

A quote from the personified urn itself - Keats is adamant that beauty and truth are the most important things on earth. It's starting to sound a bit like Moulin Rouge.

Keat's Ode has often been thought of as a protest against the devaluation of art found in the industrial capitalism of the day.



After these men - Shelley, Keats, and Byron - hung up their quills and billowy silk shirts, there was a shift away from aesthetic Prometheanism to the political Prometheanism found in Kant. But that's for another time.

Thanks for reading!