Percy Bysshe Shelley

English writer and poet of Romanticism; he was born on August 4, 1792 near Horsham in Sussex into an aristocratic family and died on July 7, 1822 in the gulf of La Spezia. Together with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Byron and John Keats he was one of the most important English romantic poets.[1]

During his time at Oxford University he published his first gothic novel Zastrozzi (1810). At that time he already revolted against the repressive social conventions and was in favor of the ideals for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. [2] In 1811 Shelley was expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity Of Atheism which he wrote together with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Both were neo-platonists, followers of a mythical philosophy, and defenders of atheism. [2] After college his father also disinherited Shelley after his elopement and marriage with 16-year old Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a London tavern owner. He travelled to Wales and Ireland where he also tried to get politically involved. He wrote the political scripts Address to the Irish People and Proposals for an Association in 1812 fighting for more rights of the Irish people.[1] In 1813 Shelley published his first poem "Queen Mab", in which he criticised the social mechanisms of repression [what does this mean concretely? a quote might be revealing].[1] Although still married to Harriet he fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of his friend William Godwin and his wife, the early feminist and writer Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1816 Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine. Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin married and their daughter Clara was born. Later Mary Shelley (1797-1851) became famous due to her novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818). Due to health problems and the fear that his two children of his first marriage could be taken away from him, Percy Shelley and his family moved to Italy in 1818, where two of his children died. In 1819 he wrote the tragedy The Cenci, the only work dealing with real persons. [1]

Shelley's interest of writing shifted from his radically political ideas of reforms to more literary aspects.[2] His work A Defence of Poetry (written in 1821, published in 1840) is a programmatic presentation of the central ideas of Romanticism. Poetry and art were seen as central means to reconcile human suffering and alienation.[2] Another example of romantic poetry is the poem Adonaïs written in the tradition of the English pastoral elegy and written as reaction on the death of John Keats. In 1822 Percy was on a sailing trip when his small schooner sank and he drowned. His body was washed ashore at Viareggio, where, in the presence of Shelley's friends Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, he was burned on the beach. Shelley was later buried in Rome on a cemetery where also John Keats is buried.[3] Mary Shelley returned to England and published in 1824 Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley and in 1839 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Major works

1810

Zastrozzi

1811

The Necessity of Atheism

1813

Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem

1815

Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude

Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit

1817

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City

The Revolt of Islam, A Poem, in Twelve Cantos: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century

History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (written with Mary Shelley)

1819

The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts

Ode to the West Wind

The Masque of Anarchy

Men of England

England in 1819

The Witch of Atlas

A Philosophical View of Reform

1821

Adonaïs

A Defence of Poetry (first published in 1840)

Sources

[1] Drescher, Horst W. Lexikon der Englischen Literatur. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1979.

[2] Hühn, Peter. Geschichte der englischen Lyrik 1. Tübingen, Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 1995.

[3] The Keats-Shelley House. 21 Nov. 2009 <[1]>.