With his political beliefs, Percy Shelley was the most radical and outspoken of the Romantic poets. As a student at Oxford, he was expelled for failing to retract a pamphlet on atheism, in the first act of a long and illustrious career of bold, even revolutionary stances. His poem "The Cloud" can be understood as an allegorical representation of a utopian, revolutionary society—one in which collaboration, power-sharing, and transformation are fundamental, and in which hierarchy is rejected. At the same time, the poem can be read as a deeply literal reflection of another one of Shelley's revolutionary stances, namely, his belief in the rights of animals and nature itself.
Shelley's atheism, which sparked his expulsion from Oxford, was not a mere lack of belief in God. Rather, it was at the root of an all-encompassing belief system revolving around the establishment of a secular, non-hierarchical society. "The Cloud" makes clear that Shelley advocated against authority or inequality, believing that each individual's strengths could be of the greatest use when put towards collaboration rather than competition. But, as much as he made these stances known through allegory and metaphor, he also gave explicit voice to them in straightforwardly political writings such as the 1811 pamphlet "Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things." In that essay, he does away with the intermediary speaker of "The Cloud," baldly arguing that "reform must not be the work of immature assertions of that liberty, which, as affairs now stand, no one can claim without attaining over others an undue, invidious superiority, benefiting in consequence self instead of society.” In other words, social change can't be brought about through facile or performative sloganeering, since that almost inevitably centers charismatic individuals, thus perpetuating the hierarchies and inequalities that revolutionary politics theoretically seeks to destroy.
Perhaps because he was so wary of meaningless or self-aggrandizing political language, Shelley thought that poets were important revolutionaries—or, for that matter, anti-revolutionaries. If thoughtless slogans and cliches are politically counterproductive, as Shelley claimed, than who better to be politically productive than poets? Their job is, after all, to use language thoughtfully. In his "Defence of Poesy," Shelley wrote that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," connecting the labors and the consequences of powerful writing with the efforts of lawmakers. For Shelley, poetry had the potential to enact change by acting as a vehicle for "Spirit" (a kind of revolutionary life-force, acting through people but possessing power beyond that of any individual) and as a source of strength and inspiration for its readers. Indeed, he argued, poetry was not merely able to affect other realms, but was the key to making any sense of those realms. "Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life," he argued, proposing that all areas of knowledge would be rendered useless without poets to disentangle them.
One way in which poetry might make sense of the world or promote change is through figurative language. But for those familiar with Shelley's politics, the personified natural forces of "The Cloud" have literal as well as metaphorical resonance. Shelley was himself a firm advocate for the preservation of the natural world and the rights of non-human animals, and his choice to attend closely and nonjudgmentally to the characteristics of a cloud or bird are reflections of that devotion to nature on its own terms. Shelley himself was a vegetarian, and he believed that the rejection of meat would in fact contribute to human happiness by allowing people to live more happily and harmoniously in the natural world. "The whole of human science is comprised in one question: How can the advantages of intellect and civilisation be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life?...I believe that abstinence from animal food and spiritous liquors would, in a great measure, capacitate us for the solution of this important question," he wrote in 1893.
"The Cloud," then, is a reflection of Shelley's politics in a number of ways. Its lush descriptions of a self-sustaining, non-hierarchical, and cyclical society serve as a utopian vision of the secular republicanism that Shelley favored. Furthermore, the poem's technical and imaginative prowess, and the sheer vividness of its descriptions, are a reflection of Shelley's belief in the revolutionary nature of poetry, as well as in the importance of conscious and skilled language use for affecting change. At the same time, Shelley chooses his metaphors carefully, personifying nature but taking care not to deny it its idiosyncrasies. This attention to the natural world hints at Shelley's unusual beliefs about nature itself, expressed through vegetarianism as well as through the condemnation of human dominance over animals.
