SOURCE: “Prometheus Unbound, or Discourse and Its Other,” in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. XLII, 1993, pp. 128-41.

In the following essay, Berthin approaches Prometheus Unbound as a figural and revolutionary text.

Besides literal meanings, poetry generates lateral meanings, by-products which spoil the perfection of the linguistic system. The verbal order is constantly undermined by visual or musical patterns that, anamorphically, dislocate and relocate the political message of the text.

“Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse.”¹ At the threshold of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's warning is clear: born of a “passion for reforming the world,” the poem cannot be limited to a “reasoned system on the theory of human life” (p. 135). Its pragmatic efficacy, that is, the extent to which the work of art leads to action, does not lie only in its overt and legible message...