Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

Prometheus Unbound

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

1820

Drama

Lyric, Mythology

Chained for years to a rock by Jupiter for giving fire and knowledge to man, Prometheus, the Titan, defies all expectations of anger or bitterness. Gradually, he forswears all revenge, insists that he wishes no living thing harm, and claims to have forgotten his original curse against his tormentor. Nevertheless, Prometheus knows that Jupiter will fall. Out of this strangely passive attitude on the part of his epic hero, Shelley builds a great dramatic song of cosmic love which has moved readers sensitive to his ethereal music.

Utilizing a greater variety of verse forms than appear together in any major English poem, Shelley celebrates the change of heart in Prometheus by demonstrating that his hero's discovery of love triggers its affirmation throughout the entire universe. Not only is Asia, Prometheus' wife, raised from her cave in the Caucasus and freed to rejoin her husband by the power released through his loving heart, but even the moon and earth dance in their orbits in heavenly sympathy and self-discovery.

Jupiter is overthrown by Necessity, embodied in the terrifying Nemesis of Demogorgon, who rises in the form of Jupiter's own child to cast the tyrannical father from his throne. Demogorgon coincides his judgment on Jupiter with Prometheus' declaration of universal love. Necessity is not the instrument of revolutionary destruction, determinism, or any rational critique; necessity is the unfolding force of love.

Shelley's great song of liberty and love is his answer to 18th century rationalism as well as a rebuttal of Aeschylus' intention in his unfinished trilogy on the story of Prometheus. The great Greek tragedian had planned to reconcile Prometheus and Zeus (Jupiter) through the Titan's revealing of the secret that the head of the gods feared: that Zeus's son, born of his marriage to Thetis, would overthrow him. Shelley could imagine no such understanding between love and evil. Prometheus Unbound is one of Romanticism's greatest contributions to the doctrine that “Love Conquers All.”

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Prometheus Unbound." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0445.
APA 7th
Shelley, P. B. (2015). Prometheus Unbound. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Prometheus Unbound." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.