Poetry as Vision: “Mont Blanc” by Shelley

The Shelleyan Power that hides its true shape and secret strength behind or beneath a dread mountain (as in Mont Blanc) speaks forth through the poet’s confrontation with it, which is the very act of writing his work of art, and the Power, rightly interpreted, can be used to repeal the large code of fraud, institutional and historical Christianity, and the equally massive code of woe, the laws of the nation-states of Europe in the age of Castlereagh and Metternich. This faith, this certainty in a Power is the essence of the Shelleyan aesthetic.