Bring out Shelley’s
idealism underlying his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”. / Attempt a critical
appreciation of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”.
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
enunciates the basic philosophy lying at the root of all Shelley’s poetry.
Beauty to Shelley is the archetypal beauty, something like the antecedent idea
or conception of beauty in the mind of the creator prior to its manifestation
in any individual object. He is acutely sensitive to its fitful inconstancy,
its sudden, surprising ebb and flow. Shelley has the most complex and
interesting attitude towards beauty. His vision includes the whole of human
history, the high peaks of man’s efforts over which this eagle of intellectual
beauty alight for a moment in the light of its golden wings, instead of being confined
to separate object. This beauty is ‘intellectual’ because it can only be
apprehended by an intuition that is mainly philosophical in character.
In this Hymn Shelley expresses
for the first time his Conviction that mankind can be brought into contact with
moral truth through a sense of the beautiful. It can be perceived by the mind
as well as the body so that Keats’s “beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty” becomes
a living and inspiring ideal of life for Shelley. He addresses the awful shadow
of some unseen power, which ‘visits with inconstant wing” the world of nature:
“The awful shadow of some unseen
power
Floats though unseen among us –visiting
This various world with an inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flowers to
flower”
