Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822) was one of the major English romantic poets and is esteemed by some scholars the finest lyric poet in the English language. He is perhaps most widely famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy; but his major works were long visionary poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism made him a notorious and much denigrated figure in his own time, but he became the idol of the following two or three generations of poets including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats. He was also famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, and like them, for his untimely death at a young age. He was married to the equally famous novelist Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Shelley's spirit of rebellion led him to flaunt the conventions of society in the name of freedom and individual expression. He and Byron experimented with notions of free love. His animating spirit, the spirit of Romanticism, was expressed not only in his poetry, but his life as well. While this focus on transcending boundaries is part and parcel of his artistic genius, it should be noted that it was not without cost to those who were closest to him, and, given Shelley's popularity and influence, perhaps to others as well.

Life

Education and early works

Shelley was the son of Sir Timothy Shelley, later the second baronet of Castle Goring, and his wife, Elizabeth Pilfold. He grew up in Sussex, and received his early education at home, tutored by Reverend Thomas Edwards of Horsham. In 1802, he entered the Sion House Academy of Brentford. In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College. On April 10, 1810 he went to the University of Oxford (University College). His first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi in 1810, in which he gave vent to his atheistic worldview through the villainous Zastrozzi. In the same year, Shelley, together with his sister Elizabeth published Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. After going up to Oxford, he issued a collection of ostensibly burlesque but actually subversive verse, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. It is beleived by some that a fellow collegian, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, may have been his collaborator.

In 1811, Shelley published a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which gained the attention of the school adminstration. His refusal to appear before the school's officials resulted in his expulsion from Oxford on March 25, 1811, along with Hogg. He could have been reinstated, following the intervention of his father, had he recanted his avowed views. Shelley however refused leading to a total break with his father.

Married life

Four months after being expelled, 19-year-old Shelley eloped to Scotland with 16-year-old schoolgirl Harriet Westbrook, daughter of John Westbrook, a coffee-house keeper in London. After their marriage on August 28, 1811, Shelley invited his college friend Hogg to share their household – and also his wife, according to the ideals of free love. When Harriet objected, Shelley abandoned this first attempt at open marriage and brought Harriet instead to England's Lake District, intending to write. Distracted by political events, he shortly afterwards visited Ireland to engage in radical pamphleteering popular at the time. His activities earned him the unfavorable attention of the British government.

Over the next two years, Shelley wrote and published Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. The poem shows the influence of English philosopher William Godwin, and much of Godwin's freethinking radical philosophy is voiced in it. By now unhappy in his nearly three-year-old marriage, Shelley often left his wife and two children alone while he visited Godwin's home and bookshop in London. It was here that he met and fell in love with Godwin's daughter, Mary. Her mother was the famed feminist educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died giving birth to Mary. Shelley became enamored when Mary made fun of his "sissyfied" name (Percy) and he quickly grew fond of his "sassy wench."

In July 1814, Shelley abandoned his wife and children and eloped for the second time with a 16-year-old: in fact two 16-year-olds, as he ran away with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin the author of Frankenstein and invited her step-sister Jane (later Claire) Clairmont along for company. The threesome sailed to Europe, crossed France and settled in Switzerland. The Shelleys would later publish an account of this adventure. After six weeks, homesick and destitute, the three young people returned to England. There they were met by an engraged Godwin, the one-time champion and practitioner of free love now refused to speak to his free-loving daughter.

In the autumn of 1815, while living close to London with Mary and avoiding creditors, Shelley produced the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. It attracted little attention at the time, but has come to be recognized as his first major poem. At this point in his writing career, Shelley was deeply influenced by William Wordsworth's poetry.

Introduction to Byron

In the summer of 1816 Shelley and Mary, living now as a married couple, made a second trip to Switzerland. They were prompted to do so by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had commenced a liaison with Lord Byron the previous April, just before he entered his self-exile on the continent. Byron had lost interest in Claire, and she used the opportunity of meeting the Shelleys as bait to lure him to Geneva. The Shelleys and Byron rented neighboring houses on the shores of Lake Geneva. Regular conversation with Byron had an invigorating effect on Shelley's poetry. A boating tour which the two took together inspired Shelley to write the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, his first significant production since Alastor. A tour of Chamonix in the French Alps inspired "Mont Blanc", a difficult poem in which Shelley ponders questions of historical inevitability and the relationship between the human mind and external nature. Shelley, in turn, influenced Byron's poetry. This new influence shows itself in the third part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron was working on, and in Manfred, which he wrote in the autumn of 1816. At the same time, Mary had been inspired to begin writing Frankenstein. At the end of summer, the Shelleys and Claire returned to England. Claire was pregnant with Byron's child, a fact that would have an enormous impact on Shelley's future.

Personal tragedies and second marriage

The return to England was marred by tragedy. Fanny Imlay, Mary Godwin's half-sister and a member of Godwin's household, killed herself in the late autumn. In December 1816 Shelley's estranged and apparently pregnant wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. On December 30, 1816, a few weeks after Harriet's body was recovered, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married. The marriage was intended, in part, to help secure Shelley's custody of his children by Harriet, but it was in vain: the children were handed over to foster parents by the courts.

The Shelleys took up residence in the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire where Thomas Love Peacock, a friend of Percy, lived. Shelley took part in the literary circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and during this period met John Keats. Shelley's major production during this time was Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem which attacked religion and featured a pair of incestuous lovers. It was hastily withdrawn after only a few copies were published, then edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam in 1818. Shelley also wrote two revolutionary political tracts under the nom de plume of "The Hermit of Marlow."

Travels in the Italian peninsula

Early in 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England in order to take Claire's daughter, Allegra, to her father, Byron, who had taken up residence in Venice. Again, contact with the older and more established poet encouraged Shelley to write. In the latter part of the year he wrote Julian and Maddalo, a lightly disguised rendering of his boat trips and conversations with Byron in Venice, finishing with a visit to a madhouse. This poem marked the appearance of Shelley's "urbane style." He then began the long verse drama Prometheus Unbound, which features talking mountains and a petulant demon who overthrows Zeus. Tragedy struck in 1818 and 1819, when his son Will died of fever in Rome and his infant daughter died during yet another household move.

The Shelleys moved around various Italian cities during these years. Shelley completed Prometheus Unbound in Rome, and spent the summer of 1819 writing a tragedy, The Cenci, in Livorno. In this year, prompted among other causes by the Peterloo massacre, he wrote his best-known political poems, The Masque of Anarchy, Men of England and The Witch of Atlas, probably his most popular works among 19th century audiences, and the essay The Philosophical View of Reform, the most thorough exposition of his political views.

In 1821, inspired by the death of John Keats, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais.

In 1822 Shelley arranged for James Henry Leigh Hunt, the British poet and editor who had been one of his chief supporters in England, to come to Italy with his family; he intended that the three of them—himself, Byron and Hunt—would create a journal, to be called The Liberal, with Hunt as editor, which would disseminate their controversial writings and act as a counter-blast to conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review.

Shelly's grave in Rome

Drowning

On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, the Don Juan. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with the newly-arrived Hunt. The name "Don Juan", a compliment to Byron, was chosen by Edward Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle, but according to Mary Shelley's testimony, Shelley changed it to "Ariel". This annoyed Byron, who caused "Don Juan" to be painted on the mainsail, giving offense to the Shelleys, who felt that the boat now looked like a coal barge. The vessel, an open boat designed from a Royal Dockyards model, was custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. It did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her "Note on Poems of 1822" (1839) that this design had a defect and was never seaworthy.

Shelley's body washed ashore and later, in keeping with his unconventional views, he was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. His heart was snatched, unconsumed, from the funeral pyre by Edward Trelawny, and kept by Mary Shelley until her dying day, while his ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome under a tower in the city walls. A reclining statue of the drowned Shelley, by the sculptor Edward Onslow Ford, can be found in University College, Oxford.

Poetry

Shelley's poetic output, like that of most of the Romantic Poets, was unappreciated during his brief lifetime. His influence on English poesy, however, would become immense in the generations immediately following his death. He was seen in both his rambunctious life and his wildly supernatural poetry as an example of the fiery, youthful, tortured genius so epigrammatic of the Romantic era. Yeats in particular considered Shelley to be his single greatest influence, and one of the greatest poets of English history.

Despite this endorsement, Shelley's place in the canon has always been somewhat ambiguous. This is because Shelley, as a poet, has always been difficult to easily categorize. On the one hand, his poetry—so rich in exuberantly imaginative metaphors and imagery—is closely allied to Wordsworth's poetry of nature and imagination, as put forth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads:

The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to choose incidents and ::situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, ::in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain ::coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual ::way...

In this sense Shelley might be considered allied with the Lake School Poets, and indeed he did reside in the Lake District at one point in his career. Certainly, he is in alliance with Wordsworth in his rejection of over-decorated poetic forms in favor of simpler, prose-like lines, the "language really used by men." (He had, however, almost none of Wordsworth's urbane tolerance for earlier poetic traditions. Shelley, in his life and in his poetry, believed that the old must always be cast out in order to make room for the young.) Moreover, his poetry of nature (Mont Blanc being the greatest example) was written with an intention to clothe natural things in the fantastic colors of the imagination.

Yet Shelley is by no means a Lake Poet. Nowhere in his poetry does one find the kind of tame pastorals which Wordsworth so doted on and referred to as pictures of "low and rustic life... [where] the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity." When nature appears in Shelley's poetry, it is always in the form of a volcano or mountain-top or hurricane: majestic, overpowering, and far from ordinary.

To complicate matters further, much of Shelley's mature output consists of supernatural and mythological epics. Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's masterpiece in this genre, is a key example. Although much of its greatest imagery is drawn from the natural world, it is a wildly fantastical poem of which Wordsworth could have never conceived. Consider these lines:

The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears

Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains

Eat with their burning cold into my bones.

Heaven's winged hound, polluting from thy lips

His beak in poison not his own, tears up

My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by,

The ghastly people of the realm of dream,

Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged

To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds

When the rocks split and close again behind;

While from their loud abysses howling throng

The genii of the storm, urging the rage

Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail.

And yet to me welcome is Day and Night,

Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn,

Or starry dim, and slow, the other climbs

The leaden-colured East: for then they lead

Their wingless, crawling Hours one among whom

—As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim—

Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood

From these pale feet, which then might trample thee

If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.

Prometheus, chained to the rocks of a jagged, wind-swept mountain-top, is here beginning the poem's narrative with a long invective against the gods who imprisoned him there. The story of this poem is derived from the Greek tragedy of Aesychlus, Prometheus Bound, (unlike many of Shelley's other epic poems in a similar vein which were entirely contrived); but Shelley reimagines the myth and departs far from even the somewhat radical 4th century B.C.E. text. He recasts Promtheus as much more than just a demiurge of Greek mythology, ultimately transforming him into a role-model of the tortured, revolutionary artist.

Works of pure imagination such as this draw comparison to Coleridge, Keats,Byron, and, at the furthest extreme, William Blake. But Shelley cannot be easily categorized. His Romantic sentimentality serves to distinguish him from Coleridge and Blake while his metaphysical ponderousness distinguishes him from Byron and Keats. He is a unique figure in British poetry, and remains, to this day, an outcast, which is probably as it should be.

List of major works

• (1811) "The Necessity of Atheism"
• (1815) "Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude"
• (1817) "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"
• (1818) "Ozymandias" [1]
• (1819) The Cenci
• (1819) "Ode to the West Wind" [2]
• (1819) "The Masque of Anarchy"
• (1819) "Men of England"
• (1819) "The Witch of Atlas"
• (1820) "Prometheus Unbound"
• (1820) "To a Skylark"
• (1821) "Adonais"
• (1822) "The Triumph of Life" (unfinished, published in 1824 after Shelley died)

See also

• Romanticism

External links

• Trelawny Recovers Shelley's Body. Trelawny's account of searching for Shelley and his companions after the storm in which they perished.
• Trelawny Burns Shelley's Body. Trelawny's account of overseeing the exhumation and burning of Shelley's body.
• Works by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Project Gutenberg
• Selected Poems of Shelley
• A talk on Shelley's politics (MP3) by Paul Foot of the British Socialist Workers Party: part 1, part 2
• A pedigree of the Shelley family
• [3]

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