ABSTRACT
In 'Prometheus Unbound' Shelley attempted to make one of the great poems of the world. It is the most ambitious poem of the Romantic Movement, and one of the most ambitious that ever was written. Shelley compares his Prometheus to the Satan of 'Paradise Lost'; but he deliberately makes his arch-rebel his hero, gives him all the virtues, and ends the poem with his triumph. Shelley's myth expressed only his own rather limited experience and his own peculiar ideas, which were not so much the result as the cause of that experience. In the first act Prometheus is discovered bound to a precipice in the Indian Caucasus. There is always a tendency in the poetic drama to become lyrical, to concern itself more with emotional effects than with the action that causes them; and the more lyrical a drama becomes, the nearer it approaches to music, and particularly to the symphony.
