Who did Shelley write poetry for?

Answer 1

Shelley had radical political ideas (in modern parlance he would probably be considered a communist) and one of the reasons he wrote poetry was to persuade ordinary people to realise their social oppression, and to provoke them to band together into labour unions and institute socialist societies. But poetry is not a very sensible way to preach politics to working people.

Shelley also wished to promulgate his socialist and mystical ideas among the educated classes of Europe. (Remember that Shelley grew up during the age of revolutions which followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars). Poetry was intensely fashionable during the first decades of the nineteenth century, and Shelley had some success with popularising a radical philosophy in such poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, and Swellfoot the Tyrant.

And then Shelley had a taste for very young women (including Mary Shelley and her half-sister Claire Clairmont). Poetry is excellent bait for impressionable girls, and Shelley had considerable success with his tickling.

Answer 2

Shelley wrote poetry for a wide audience, aiming to inspire and challenge readers with his radical ideas and artistic vision. He believed in the power of poetry to encourage social and political change, and his works often addressed issues of freedom, justice, and the human experience.

Answer 3

Sonnets were intensely fashionable - almost at fad levels - between the 1580's and the first decade of the 1600's. Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is first published in 1591, Shakespeare's sonnets appear in 1609 - almost twenty years later.

Sonnets then became less fashionable, and are very rare in English literature between 1645 and 1775. Poetry had shifted away from its predilection from typical Sonnet topics. Young love , wild nature, and religious ecstasy are all comparatively absent from eighteenth century poems: the tone of the era is the urbane, disaffected banter you find in John Pomfret's The Choice.

But at the end of the eighteenth century, sonnets begin to make a comeback. In particular, women poets (still something of a rarity) begin to publish sonnets; and most of all Helen Maria Williams (1762 - 1827) begins to write sonnets more private and more intense than English lyric poetry has been for some time.

Helen Maria Williams is also something of an early 'personality'. Not only is she a woman who writes poetry and is educated (already challenging to the sensibility of most traditional English gentlemen); she has political ideas, she is an abolitionist, and after a spell in prison, she forms a relationship with a married man.

Helena Maria Williams was an extreme feminist, by the standards of the times (around 1800). She was villified in most quarters, but the early Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Christopher North) sympathised with both her ideas and her lifechoices (the early Romantics themselves were political radicals with innovative ideas about male and female social roles).

By 1800 or so, the sonnet was reinvigorated as fresh, politically unruly, and socially challenging (rather like rap was in the 1980's).

It was a natural form for the young Shelley (also fresh, politically unruly, and socially adventurous - or at least, sexually dubious) to turn to.