Chapter2, Shelley or the Heartlessness of Ideas Summary and Analysis

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an heir to an English title. Like Rousseau, Shelley also believed that man had the right to reconstruct society with the use of his intellect. Shelley believed that poets had a special place among legislators and stated his beliefs in an essay entitled a Defence of Poetry. Poetry was the only thing that could fill the moral vacuum.

Shelley was a great English poet and used his poetry to spread his political and moral messages. He had a taste for secret societies and the conspiracy theory of history. Shelley began writing in his teens and his father paid to have the poems published. He developed his anti-religious views as a teen. His father paid to have his poems published so he wouldn't write his anti-religious...