By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Mont Blanc’ is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous poems. ‘Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’, to give the poem its full title, is an ode to the mountain, the highest mountain in the Alps, and compares the mountain’s mightiness with the power of the human imagination. This makes it a classic example of a Romantic poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Romantics were greatly interested in a quality that Edmund Burke called ‘the Sublime’: that peculiar mixture of awe and terror we feel when confronted with great forces of nature. Percy Shelley’s poem about Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, is a classic example of Romantic poetry about the Sublime – an ode to nature as a powerful and beautiful force. Shelley composed his poem ‘Mont Blanc’ during the summer of 1816, and it was first published in Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), which – beating Frankenstein by a year – was actually Mary’s first book.