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fervor. His first rebellion as an Oxford Undergraduate is a challenge to Religion; he produces a pamphlet named “The Necessity of Atheism.” After that, he constantly rebels against the establishment including Oxford, marriage, parents. Shelley’s excessive behavior not only calls for political and poetic reform (“the poets are the unknown legislators of the world”), but also welcomes the revolutionary events that are reshaping Europe. Moreover, in a frenzy, similar to Camus’ “romantic frenzy,” Shelley, as the Romantic hero, moves from place to place, marriage to marriage, affair to affair only to die at 30, but what 30! and how lived! The question is not whether he lived well or not, justly or unjustly, but whether he felt life’s energy, that Blakean proverb “Energy is delight” running through his blood. Like the Byronic hero, Shelley, “incapable of love...and (who) suffers endlessly...” needs to feel alive to Camus’ dismay, by “exalting in a brief and destructive action.”28 Camus considers this action, not as action of rebellion but an action that belongs to the trendy “dandy” as much as he would consider the Homeric heroes deeply romantic in their heroic and rebellious ideals. In opposition to Camus, I believe that the Romantic “dandy” is indeed effusively rebellious: his rebelliousness dwells within his psyche, whether he is born with “its Dionysian instinct or Freud’s Thanatean drive,” the Romantic hero is also acquainted with Hegel’s teleological conception of history and Hegel’s “need for recognition and prestige” struggle.
28 Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1991. 49
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