Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantics, and one of the most radical writers of his age in politics, religion and morals. [1] His major works include the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, the elegy Adonais, the political ballad The Masque of Anarchy and the essay A Defence of Poetry. He drowned off the Italian coast at twenty-nine, before most of his work had found a readership. [2]
Early life and expulsion
Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place near Horsham, Sussex, the eldest son of a wealthy landowner and member of parliament, and heir to a baronetcy. [1] He was educated at Eton College and entered University College, Oxford, in 1810.
Within a year he was expelled for publishing and circulating the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism and refusing to disavow it. [2] The episode estranged him from his father. Shortly afterwards he eloped with the sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, married her in Scotland, and spent the following years travelling in Ireland and Wales agitating for Catholic emancipation, political reform and free thought. His long poem Queen Mab (1813), attacking monarchy, commerce, war and organised religion, was printed privately and later circulated widely in pirated editions among working-class radicals.
Mary Godwin and exile
Through the philosopher William Godwin, whose Political Justice had shaped his thinking, Shelley met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. [1] In 1814 they left for the Continent together. The scandal, and Harriet's death by drowning in 1816, after which Shelley married Mary and was refused custody of his children by Harriet, made him an outcast in English society.
In the summer of 1816 the Shelleys stayed near Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, the visit during which Mary began Frankenstein. [3] Shelley wrote "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc" there. In 1818 the couple left England permanently for Italy, losing two young children to illness.
Major work
The Italian years produced almost all the poetry on which Shelley's reputation rests. Prometheus Unbound (1820) recast the Greek myth as a drama of humanity liberating itself from tyranny through endurance and forgiveness rather than revenge. [2]
News of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in 1819, when cavalry charged a peaceful reform meeting, prompted The Masque of Anarchy, whose closing call to the people to rise "like lions after slumber" became a refrain of later protest movements; the poem was not published until 1832. [4] The same period produced "Ode to the West Wind", "To a Skylark", "Ozymandias" and the sonnet "England in 1819". Adonais (1821) mourned the death of John Keats, and the prose A Defence of Poetry, published posthumously, closes with the claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Death
On 8 July 1822, sailing his boat the Don Juan from Livorno to Lerici, Shelley was caught in a sudden storm in the Gulf of La Spezia and drowned. [1] His body was washed ashore and cremated on the beach near Viareggio in the presence of Byron and Edward Trelawny; his ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near Keats.
Legacy
Shelley's work sold poorly in his lifetime and was often suppressed for its politics and atheism. [2] The Victorians admired his lyrics while playing down his radicalism, an emphasis reversed in the twentieth century. His political poetry influenced the Chartists, and figures from Karl Marx to Mahatma Gandhi cited him. [4] He is now firmly established among the major English Romantic poets.
