ABSTRACT
PERCY SHELLEY UTILIZED THE FIGURE OF THE TURK AND THE IMAGE OF THE Ottoman Empire as an element in several philosophically and politically reform-minded poems throughout his life. Rarely did he engage with the figure of the Turk as intimately as did Byron, but the presence of the Ottoman Empire as a political entity in these poems pivots on an ironic representation of it as both wholly Other and yet dangerously the Same. Not only is it often a necessary element in Shelley’s Hellenism (which evolved over the years), it exemplifies a certain kind of despotic political system with concomitant repercussions for its population. As Shelley was to assert numerous times, it is the institutions within a society and its government that distinguish one people from another.1
