An Ecocritical Reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Poetry

This thesis provides an ecocritical assessment of selected lyric poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley that demonstrates how his poetry articulates nonhuman agency and challenges anthropocentric modes of perception. Shelley’s lyric poems as encounters with nature situated in the Romantic period. The study engages with his portrayal of mountain, winds, clouds, and ruins to argue that they are not merely decorative symbols or moral allegories. Rather, they are dynamic ecological systems that exceed human dominance and rationality. In terms of methodology, the thesis uses ecocritical close reading by studying the grammatical, rhetorical and formal functions of the poems. Attention is given to how Shelley’s poetic language assigns agency to nonhuman elements, resists human-centered hierarchies, and destabilizes the distinction between subject and environment. The analysis additionally examines the way in which poetic form through fragmentation, repetition, cyclical movement, and shifts in scale mediates ecological meaning and registers processes that unfold beyond human time and space. By analysing poems including Mont Blanc, Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud, and Ozymandias the thesis demonstrates that Shelley consistently represents nature as active, indifferent, and transformative rather than passive or idealized. These poems reveal an ecological imagination attentive to material processes, environmental change, and the limits of human authority. Ultimately, the study positions Shelley’s lyric poetry as an early articulation of ideas central to contemporary ecocritical and posthuman thought, showing how Romantic literature can contribute to modern ecological discourse by modelling modes of attentiveness, humility, and coexistence with the more-than-human world.