The Trait of Inner Resistance in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetic Imagination

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.63345/ijrsml.v13.i12.6

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Dr. Jyoti Devi

Maharaja Agrasen Himalayan Garhwal University

Uttarakhand, India

jjamwal096@gmail.com

Abstract— This study is an inquiry into that trait of inner resistance that features in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetic imagination, arguing that he always finds the seeds of political, ethical, and imaginative dissidence in the inner life of the human mind. Rather than framing the exercise of resistance only in terms of out right rebellion against externalized authority, the various acts of resistance staged in Shelley poetry repeatedly are acts of refusal within: resistance to intellectual conformity, emotional submission, moral complacency, and fixed systems and of meaning. Through an intensive reading of selected poems and prose compositions, alongside Shelley’s analytical reflections on the role of imagination and poetic agency, the research reveals the central role of on inner resistance as a generative even power, reshaping the apprehension of layers like desire and moral awareness, within which, they manifest as social or political critique. The study underscores how the power of Shelley’s imagination defies the impulse to allow a poem to close itself by contradicting itself, questioning itself and using indirection to keep poetry open to possibility rather than committed to dogma. This inward resistance is shown to both ethic and aesthetic; ethical in that it demands self discipline, empathy, and nonviolent transformation; and aesthetic in its rejection of transparent language and its stability of interpretation. By accordingly situating Shelley’s work within important, larger Romantic debates about abstraction and distraction (imagination, subjectivity, freedom, etc.) the paper contends that inner resistance is not the retreat to private feeling of mere emotion sanctioned but instead it is a consciously and strategically poetic practice with which Shelley imagines lasting forms of human and political freedom. The research is a contribution to the study of Shelley in that it delineates inner resistance as a principle of unifying the poem’s lyric, dramatic, and theoretical writing, and provides an understanding of the workings of the poetic imagination as a sustained mode of resistance in historical and moral crisis.

Keywords— Inner Resistance, poetic imagination, Romanticism, politic ethics, Shelley

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