Song to the Men of England Summary & Analysis
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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"Song to the Men of England" is English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's call to revolution. The poem's speaker asks the laborers of England a provocative question: why on earth do you go on working to enrich an oppressive upper class when the country's wealth is really in your hands? This radical message was deemed so dangerous that the poem was never published in Shelley's lifetime; it first appeared in print in the 1839 collection Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 20 years after Shelley wrote it (and 17 years after Shelley himself died).

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