... to hope till Hope creates
  From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

To write like this is to triumph over death.  It is to cease to be a victim and to become a creator.  Shelley recognized that the world had been bound into slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first intention of God.

In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos.

Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past of God.  He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice the perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday.  He was the devoted enemy of that dark spirit of Power which holds fast to the old greed as to a treasure.  In Hellas he puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof of Mahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are haters of a finer future to-day.

                        Obdurate spirit! 
  Thou seest but the Past in the To-come. 
  Pride is thy error and thy punishment. 
  Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
  Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
  Before the Power that wields and kindles them. 
  True greatness asks not space.

There are some critics who would like to separate Shelley’s politics from his poetry.  But Shelley’s politics are part of his poetry.  They are the politics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope.  Europe did not adopt his politics in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the result is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years later.  Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope, fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic of its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgy of idealism could not have produced.  Shelley must, no doubt, still seem a shocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the House of Lords was described as a revolutionary step.  To Shelley even the new earth for which the Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an extravagant demand.  He was almost the only English poet up to his own time who believed that the world had a future.  One can think of no other poet to whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations.  Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passion was not for that but for the British Empire.  He had the craven fear of being great on any but the old Imperialist lines.  His work did nothing to make his country more generous than it was before.  Shelley, on the other hand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity.  His patriotism was love of the people of England, not love of the Government of England.  Hence, when the Government of England allied itself with the oppressors of mankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have arraigned a German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances.