Shelley on Dramatic Purpose

Percy Bysshe Shelley, composing Prometheus Unbound, portrait by Joseph Severn (1823)

My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.

–Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound,” Preface (1820)