Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE

SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE (1792–1822), English poet.

Born on 4 August 1792, into a family of privilege and social standing, Percy Bysshe Shelley voiced the yearnings of the underclasses and revolutionized English poetry. He saw his father, Sir Timothy Shelley (1753–1844), a Sussex squire and a member of Parliament, as an unredeemable tyrant, and maintained a lifelong concern with throwing off oppression.

His schooling at Syon House Academy (1802–1804) extended the sense of oppression he associated with his father to include all of society. Similarly, during the six years he spent at Eton he loathed life and developed a sense of isolation and a fear of violence. Before going up to Oxford in 1810, Shelley wrote several tales and poems characterized by their appeal to the lurid. At Oxford he was free of Eton, but was dejected by the atmosphere of established privilege and intellectual mediocrity. His publication in 1811 of The Necessity of Atheism represented a direct challenge to authority, and he was expelled as a result.

Breaking with his father, Shelley moved to London, where he drifted into a close friendship with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a London tavern owner, and in 1811 eloped with her to Edinburgh. They took up residence in the Lakes, where Shelley was influenced by the writings of the dissenting philosopher and atheist William Godwin (1756–1836), and by the poet and man of letters Robert Southey (1774–1843), who helped Shelley connect religion and social criticism.

The most intense education in practical politics came during a six-week stay in Ireland in 1812. Self-education, he believed, would remove prejudice. A good life built on atheism, free love, republicanism, and vegetarianism informed Shelley's first major poem, "Queen Mab" (1813), a work more philosophic than poetic.

In 1814 Shelley began an affair with Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1816 his wife, Harriet, with whom he had two children, committed suicide. Shelley and Godwin eloped to Switzerland that same year. Shelley went through months of introspection following the upheaval caused by his actions. His verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816) issues from his probings. It is a psychological meditation leading to an ideal vision of beauty. On a return to Switzerland he developed the idea of the confrontation between a sensitive mind and brutal, unthinking matter in "Mont Blanc" (1817) and began a friendship with Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron; 1788–1824). Shelley wrote his longest poem, and the last of his youth, "The Revolt of Islam," in 1818. Believing that the essence of revolution is moral and social, Shelley rose to a new dimension of literary maturity.

In 1818 Shelley moved permanently to Italy, where he produced the bulk of his poetic works, many of which were first published in Posthumous Poems (1824). Awash in personal difficulties, he considered his relationship with Byron in "Lines Written in the Euganean Hills." In Venice with Byron he wrote "Julian and Maddalo," a major poem of psychological analysis. In Naples he wrote "Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples," in which he concludes that Christianity suppressed ancient connections to nature at the cost of human development. Contemplating the ancient artifacts in Rome, Shelley arrived at the belief that power and imperialism were destroyed by the forces of human love, freedom, and nature. "Prometheus Unbound" is the result of Shelley's intense concentration and speculation. In it he shows that the immanence of a moral and political revolution achieved through suffering leads to hope.

The most popular of Shelley's works, The Cenci (1820), embodies his reaction to a culture of hypocrisy. Perhaps the greatest political poem ever written, "The Mask of Anarchy" was completed in twelve days. In Pisa in 1820 Shelley wrote "A Philosophical View of Reform" and the "Ode to Liberty," showing how human freedom in culture arises inevitably. "The Ode to the West Wind," "To a Skylark," and "The Cloud" give expression to an escape into a purer world of creative possibilities. Composing "The Witch of Atlas" provided another release of frustrated emotion. "Epipsychidion," another flight, is an erotic love hymn, and a review of his emotional life at twenty-eight.

Shelley's best-known prose appears in A Defense of Poetry (1821), where he notes that poetry has a moral and political function to enhance freedom in society. In "Adonias," he attacks reviewers and gives tribute to contemporaneous poets. Shelley's revolutionary ideals moved him to write Fragments Written for Hellas supporting Greek independence. Steeped in Dante, Shelley wrote his last major poem, "The Triumph of Life," in 1822. The sparse style and lack of personal emotion distinguishes the poem from his earlier works. On 8 July 1822, Shelley's sailing boat went down in the Gulf of Spezzia less than a month from his thirtieth birthday, and he drowned.

Critical perceptions of Shelley have followed two paths since the nineteenth century: the poet of abstraction challenging the limits of poetry and language, or the working-class hero. Hailed as the most lyrical of poets, who seeks aesthetic value in bodiless consciousness, he is equally evaluated as the champion of poetry in the service of politics, culture, and society.