The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject

Nature's great law, and law of all men's minds?-- To its own impulse every creature stirs; Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers!

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

In his poetry as well as in his life Shelley was indeed 'a beautiful and ineffectual angel', beating in the void his luminous wings in vain

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.