Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English poet, one of the most influential leaders of the Romantic movement. Throughout his life, Shelley lived by a radically nonconformist moral code. His beliefs concerning love, marriage, revolution, and politics caused him to be considered a dangerous immoralist by some contemporaries.

He was born on August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, educated at Eton College and, until his expulsion at the end of one year, the University of Oxford. With another student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley had written and circulated a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), of which the university authorities disapproved. He had also published a pamphlet of burlesque verse, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810).

Shortly after his expulsion, the 19-year-old Shelley married his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, and moved to the Lake District of England to study and write. Two years later, he published his first long serious work, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813), a nine-canto mixture of blank verse and lyric measures. The poem was one result of Shelley's friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, expressing Godwin's freethinking Socialist philosophy. Another result of their friendship was Shelley's relationship with Godwin's daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In 1814, after separating from his wife, Shelley briefly toured Europe with Mary.

Returning to England, he produced the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), which anticipated his later important work. During another brief visit to Europe in the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary met the English poet Lord Byron. At this time, Shelley wrote two short poems, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc”. In December 1816, three weeks after the body of his wife, an apparent suicide, was recovered from a lake in a London park, Shelley and Mary were married.

In 1817, Shelley produced Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem that tells a symbolic tale of revolution. It was later reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818). At this time, he also wrote revolutionary political tracts signed “The Hermit of Marlow”. Then, early in 1818, he and his new wife left England for the last time.

During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works. Travelling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with the English poet Leigh Hunt and his family as well as with Byron. Shortly before his 30th birthday, Shelley was drowned (1822) in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn (Livorno) to La Spezia, Italy. Ten days later, his body was washed ashore.

Many critics regard Shelley as one of the greatest of all English poets. They point especially to his lyrics, including the familiar short odes “To a Skylark” (1820), “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), and “The Cloud” (1820). Also greatly admired are the shorter love lyrics, including “I Arise from Dreams of Thee” and “To Constantia Singing”; the sonnet “Ozymandias” (1818); and “Adonais” (1821), an elegy for the British poet John Keats, written in formal Spenserian stanzas. The effortless lyricism of these works is also evident in Shelley's verse dramas, The Cenci (1819), a tragedy based on a case of incestuous rape and patricide in 16th-century Rome, and Prometheus Unbound (1820); these remain, however, profound but unproduceable closet dramas. His prose, including a translation (1818) of The Symposium by Plato and the unfinished critical work In Defence of Poetry (1822), is equally skilful. Other critics, particularly anti-Romanticists who object to the prettiness and sentimentality of much of his work, maintain that Shelley was not as influential as the other British Romantic poets: Byron, Keats, or William Wordsworth.