PTE Reading MC Single Answer: Being one of his best works and he never again allowed his art to be influenced by cont…

Being one of his best works and he never again allowed his art to be influenced by contemporary politics. On the contrary, he had the utmost contempt for the age in which he lived, for its crass materialism and complacent belief in progress; and his art is almost entirely an attempt to escape from it. He escaped into the subjects of romantic poetry, in particular, that of Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott. Some of his greatest pictures were inspired by Byron, and he had a Byronic power of self-identification with the forces of the sublime – in particular ‘the roaring of lions and the destructive sword’. Baudelaire said that when an idea shot through his mind his muscles quivered with impatience and his eyes shone like a tiger stalking its prey. At feeding time in the Paris Zoo, he was overwhelmed with happiness.