Percy Shelley's Mont Blanc, And William Wordsworth's The Prelude

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Recommended: Role of Nature in Shelley's poems

Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1816) and William Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” (1805), both tell the story of the individuals meetings with an impressively, beautiful mountain landscape. In Mont Blanc, Shelley describes the icy glacial capped peaks of the Swiss Alp’s, whereas in The Prelude, Wordsworth describes his meetings with nature and his interactions with the landscape. Both these poems focus on the beauty of the landscape, and thrive off their own personal experiences which they have had with nature. These poems however have a strong representation of the sublime and the effects this theory has on them personally and sensually. Beauty is also present in these poems; however there is a difference as beauty indulges in the aesthetic experience of equilibrium and synchronization, whereas the sublime focuses on the senses such as your mind and imagination. Leighton (1984) believes you can see the difference as, ‘the picturesque world would be exemplified by variety, the beautiful by smoothness and the sublime by magnitude’, showing just how differentiated they are. Both these poems both have different meanings and morals, and both authors have different beliefs …show more content…

Infinity plays a role of provoking a sense of the sublime, in the case of Burke’s theory, and remains a prominent factor within the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The sublime therefore occurs at the threshold between the sensible and the super sensible, where the senses fault and the imagination is used to escape the usual means of understanding. This allows the reader to open up their mind to different aspects of the sublime, and not just focus on the beautiful. Philip Shaw writes, ‘it is the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a thought or sensation is

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