A Study on Shelley's Myth Making Art in the Poems Alastor and Queen Mab

The purpose of present paper is to deal with myth making art in Shelley’s poem’s Alastor and Queen Mab. In the Introduction to C.D. Locock’s edition of Shelley’s Poems1 A. Clutton-Brook begins his assessment of Shelley’s poetry with a censure. Disapproving the merit of Shelley’s early works, he observes: Shelley has often been praised as a poet rather for what he attempted than for what he accomplished. He was, perhaps, the most ambitious of all our great poets; especially in his earlier years, when he had little understood of the nature of his own powers or even of the proper functions of poetry. Then he regarded poetry as a kind of maid-of-all-work to be set to any task that his enthusiasms might suggest.2