ABSTRACT
An interpretation of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound has very high stakes. One is reading a poem about revolution and the transformation of human society by a great poet whose radical political views meant that this was for him a vital subject. Carol Jacobs's essay exemplifies the disquieting process and the strange results that follow from such a conclusion. Prometheus Unbound is extremely hard to read, not simply because of its 'complexity' but because of the way it sets up and thwarts expectations of certain patterns of intelligibility: renunciation, self-recovery through recollection, prefiguration or prophecy, orientation toward a final goal or telos. One could argue in the wake of her essay, the notion of a Romantic withdrawal from politics to poetic creation: terms within the framework of which a literary historian might interpret the very composition of such a poem but at the price of overlooking what the poem says and demonstrates about a withdrawal.
