Hamilton Barber Romanticism Unbound in the Story of the Modern Prometheus The most remarkable thing about Frankenstein is the ability to label it in so many different ways with so many genres, ranging from horror to science fiction to fantasy, and have them all be correct. Mary Shelley, at such a young age, crafted a narrative so intricate, involved, and revolutionary that it is still worthwhile to be writing essays on it in college almost 200 years after it was written. As the author, she is often credited with enormous creative genius, and rightly so, as is evident with any read through the novel. It is important to realize, however, just how much influence her contemporaries, the Romantic poets, had on the ideas she formulated. Throughout …show more content…
Like most of Byron’s work, especially in Childe Harold, this sort of reflective quality of Nature is heavily employed. Most notably in Harold, in Canto 3 is the section on the Thunderstorm in the Alps. “Far along, / From peak to peak, the rattling crags among / Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud, / But every mountain now hath found a tongue” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto 3 lines 864-866). Notice the striking similarity to the scene in Shelley in which Victor finally meets his Creature: “a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains” (Shelley 92). The distinct mood created by the fragmented, rocky landscape, the thunderous cracks of the calving glacier in Shelley’s description and the thunder in Byron’s, the echoing off of the mountains… the connection is obvious, and the state of mind similar - one of dread, of terror, of impending …show more content…
In the case of the Romantic poets, they seek to attain this awe-inspiring, or sublime, moment with as personal an experience as possible because of the inherent weight that will be added to their words. For William Blake, the whole undertaking of Songs of Innocence and Experience is a quest for capturing this, as is evident with the unparalleled manners of printing, copying, and illustrating his poems. The questions he poses are grasping at something far larger than himself; it is humbling to hear him ask: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry” (The Tyger lines 21-24). He grapples with these ideas so grand that it takes two poems, expressing two views of a similar situation, to do the idea justice. The idea of loss of innocence and corruption of the popular views of God ring resoundingly loud throughout the whole of this collection and echo within the heartstrings of the reader as the sublimity for which Blake was grasping hits home. Similarly, then, Frankenstein’s quest for playing God and instilling in an inanimate collection of body parts the spark of life is just as much a grasping for the sublime as Blake’s questioning of the very God Frankenstein is trying to (at least symbolically) become. Upon finding out that he