Pursuit of Freedom in the Poetry of P. B. Shelley and Muhammad Al-Shaltami

Abstract

The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and the Libyan poet Muhammad Farhat Al-Shaltami (1945-2010) were influenced in their writing by circumstances they experienced that shaped their poetry and empowered their thematic and stylistic representations. They are distant both historically and geographically, but they share a longing for disseminating their ideas of freedom and resisting all types of oppression among people. The aim of this comparative analysis of the two poets is to compare their approaches to the pursuance of freedom and the use of poetic images of nature in their poetry. There are numerous romantic features in Al-Shaltami’s poems, which relate his poetry thematically and stylistically to that of Shelley’s. This comparative study highlights the shared principles of human thinking. The two poets show a mutual interest in disseminating their words as depicted in their poetry through an appeal to the senses and by building a vivid identification between their feelings and the dynamics of the elements of nature.

Keywords: nature, dissemination, romanticism, regeneration, comparative.