Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems
Shelley's visionary masterwork: a lyrical drama in which Prometheus is finally unchained and the tyrannical Jupiter overthrown, leading to a transformed universe. Together with "Ode to the West Wind," "To a Skylark," and "Adonais" (his elegy for Keats), this volume contains his most sustained achievement. His idealism, his belief that poetry genuinely changes the world, remains either naive or heroic depending on the reader.
Shelley wrote a drama in which nothing dramatic happens: Prometheus suffers nobly, Jupiter falls in a single scene, and Act IV is a cosmic victory pageant with no people in it. The abstractions (Demogorgon, Hours, Spirits) sing gorgeously and mean vaguely. Read the shorter odes in this volume first; the title work demands a tolerance for radiant fog.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
