Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet born August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England.[4][6] Widely considered one of the finest lyric poets in the English language, he is perhaps most famous for anthology pieces such as "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind," "To a Skylark," and "The Masque of Anarchy."[8][12][14] His major works included long visionary poems such as "Prometheus Unbound," "Alastor," "Adonaïs," "The Revolt of Islam," and the unfinished "The Triumph of Life."[12]

Early Life and Family Background

The eldest son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, with one brother and four sisters, he stood in line to inherit not only his grandfather's considerable estate but also a seat in Parliament.[6] Shelley was the heir to rich estates acquired by his grandfather, Bysshe (pronounced "Bish") Shelley. Timothy Shelley, the poet's father, was a mild-mannered, conventional man who was caught between an overbearing father and a rebellious son.[1] From 1790 to 1792 and again from 1802 to 1818 he served as a member of Parliament, representing the Whig Party, which stood for everything Percy grew to detest.[1]

Shelley's mother, Elizabeth Pilfold, came from a landowning family. The eldest of seven children (which included five girls and two boys), the young Shelley was particularly close to his three sisters, who admired his wild imagination and his capacity for mischief (two of his sisters did not survive infancy).[1]

Education and Early Rebellion

He grew up in Sussex and obtained his early education from Reverend Thomas Edwards of Horsham, who schooled him at home. In 1802, he enrolled in Brentford's Sion House Academy, then in 1804, he enrolled at Eton College, where he remained until 1810.[8] Shelley was educated at Syon House Academy (1802–04) and then at Eton (1804–10), where he resisted physical and mental bullying by indulging in imaginative escapism and literary pranks.[1]

In 1804, at the age of twelve, he went off to Eton College, the boys' boarding school. The other boys teased him mercilessly. Shelley was a classic bully target - bookish, awkward, dainty in appearance.[7] This abuse may have first sparked the flame of protest which, during his school days at Eton from 1804 until 1810, earned him the name of "Mad Shelley." At school, however, he proved himself to be a very capable and intelligent student.[5]

He attended Eton College for six years beginning in 1804, and then went on to Oxford University.[6] In 1810, Shelley enrolled at University College, Oxford, to begin his spectacularly unsuccessful college career.[10] Although University College, Oxford, where he enrolled in 1810, came as something of a relief, within a few months he was expelled along with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg for refusing to acknowledge or deny authorship of a pamphlet entitled "The Necessity of Atheism."[4][6]

Key Influences and Mentors

While he was there, he discovered the works of a philosopher named William Godwin, which he consumed passionately and in which he became a fervent believer; the young man wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution, and devoted his considerable passion and persuasive power to convincing others of the rightness of his beliefs.[29]

Shelley's ideas are clearly locatable within a tradition of English radicalism and libertarianism, but the big influence early in his life was Godwin. Under Godwin, Shelley developed a philosophy of rational anarchism, the essence of which was self-governance based on the supremacy of reason — the argument being that since the state exists only to restrain vice, it would naturally wither away as people became more enlightened.[21]

As a schoolboy, Shelley was profoundly influenced by the philosopher and anarchist William Godwin and by his book "Enquiry concerning Political Justice." Godwin's "Enquiry" declared, "There are three principal causes by which the human mind is advanced towards a state of perfection; literature…; education; and political justice, or the adoption of any principle of morality and truth into the practice of a community." Shelley believed men of letters and literature were the key to creating a just society; he collapsed the distinction between politics and poetry.[26]

Professional Development and Literary Career

He began writing poetry while at Eton, but his first publication was a Gothic novel, "Zastrozzi" (G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, 1810), in which he voiced his own heretical and atheistic opinions through the villain Zastrozzi.[6] Two years later he published his first long serious work, "Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem." The poem emerged from Shelley's friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, and it expressed Godwin's freethinking Socialist philosophy.[6]

During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works, including the lyrical drama "Prometheus Unbound" (C. and J. Ollier, 1820).[6] "Prometheus Unbound," lyrical drama in four acts by Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1820. The work, considered Shelley's masterpiece, was a reply to Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound," in which the Titan Prometheus stole fire from heaven to give to mortals and was punished by Zeus (Jupiter).[17]

Personal Life and Relationships

At age nineteen, Shelley eloped to Scotland with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook. Once married, Shelley moved to the Lake District of England to study and write.[6] The resulting estrangement from his father was completed when Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the 16-year-old daughter of a coffee-house keeper.[4]

The following year he met his hero William Godwin, the author of "Political Justice," and fell in love with his daughter Mary, a radical and an idealist like himself. The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist who wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Women," Mary later wrote "Frankenstein" and "The Last Man," two novels that remain popular and influential today.[4]

In 1814, while still married to Westbrook, he eloped with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. They married on December 30, 1816, shortly after Harriet's death by suicide.[1]

Traveling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with the British poet Leigh Hunt and his family, as well as with Byron. On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the Don Juan.[6]

Political Radicalism and Social Activism

Antiauthoritarian to the core, Shelley's anarchism was fundamentally atheistic and elected reason and nature (in the romantic sense) as the source and origin of moral judgment. We see early expressions of these ideas in "Declaration of Rights" (1812), a Painean-style pamphlet of enumerated statements that Shelley wrote at the tender age of twenty.[21]

"The Mask of Anarchy," Percy Bysshe Shelley's furious response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Described as "the most famous political protest poem in English," it was a ferociously passionate attack on those ruling Britain and the system they perpetuated. Shelley, by then living in Italy, had heard the news that demonstrators for democratic reform had been attacked (and eleven of them killed) in St Peter's Fields in Manchester.[22]

Shelley went further than his peers Keats and Byron, explicitly satirising the government and calling for a radical transformation of society in poems such as "The Mask of Anarchy" and "The Revolt of Islam." His writings have inspired generations of working class activists with their emphasis on mass movements overthrowing the oppression and hypocrisy of the ruling order.[23]

Major Works and Literary Achievement

Shelley is perhaps best known for classic poems such as "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind," "To a Skylark," "Music, When Soft Voices Die," "The Cloud" and "The Masque of Anarchy." His other major works include a groundbreaking verse drama "The Cenci" (1819) and long, visionary poems such as "Queen Mab" (later reworked as "The Daemon of the World"), "Alastor," "The Revolt of Islam," "Adonaïs," "Prometheus Unbound" (1820)- widely considered to be his masterpiece—"Hellas: A Lyrical Drama" (1821), and his final, unfinished work, "The Triumph of Life" (1822).[16]

Shelley's heroic Prometheus strikes against oppression as represented by a power-mad Jupiter. This brilliant but uneven work represented the culmination of the poet's lyrical gifts and political thought.[17]

Legacy and Influence

Shelley influenced a range of literary and political figures. He was cited as an inspiration by later writers including Robert Browning, Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Hardy. He was subsequently admired by twentieth-century cultural and intellectual figures of the European left such as Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno.[22]

Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets, the generation that came to prominence while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were settling into middle age. Where the older generation was marked by simple ideals and a reverence for nature, the poets of the younger generation (which also included John Keats and the infamous Lord Byron) came to be known for their sensuous aestheticism, their explorations of intense passions, their political radicalism, and their tragically short lives.[29]

However, Shelley was also read by working-class audiences in his own time and afterwards. There are numerous references in the book to examples of his writing, both poetry and prose, being disseminated through the widely-read radical press (often in defiance of state repression). Suffragette and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst decorated a hall with quotations from Shelley's poetry (the suffragette motto 'deeds not words' derived from 'The Mask of Anarchy').[22]

Few authors have fluctuated in popularity as much as Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died two hundred years ago this summer, and it should come as no surprise that where he is most derided, the source of alienation is almost invariably the radicalness of his politics. He is most unpopular, predictably, among those we would consider to be conservatives or reactionaries.[21]