ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on nineteenth-century writers, at one time or another in their careers chose to confront political issues in their work. The ideas that Mary Shelley had most in mind were political ones, and as G. M. Matthews has pointed out in his brilliant essay 'A Volcano's Voice in Shelley', much of Shelley's poetry bears testimony to his 'perception of revolutionary activity in the external world and in the human mind - of irrepressible collective energy contained by repressive power'. For Shelley was politically a revolutionary poet - 'He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people's side'. Lionel Stevenson thinks that Shelley may well have had an important part to play in the shaping of Sir Charles Tennyson's resolve. Paracelsus is laying claim to the sort of mystical insight which Tennyson had also felt in himself, and which is a common enough feature of Romantic poetry.
