Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (born August 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England—died July 8, 1822, at sea off Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]) was an English poet who, with John Keats and Lord Byron, was a major figure among the second generation of English Romantic writers. Of the three, Shelley was the most politically radical. His passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language.

Early life, education, and expulsion from Oxford

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. 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. 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).

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. Between the spring of 1810 and that of 1811, he published two Gothic novels and two volumes of juvenile verse. In the fall of 1810 Shelley entered University College, Oxford, where he enlisted his fellow student, the similarly anti-authoritarian Thomas Jefferson Hogg, as a disciple. But in March 1811, University College expelled both Shelley and Hogg for refusing to admit Shelley’s authorship of a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. Hogg submitted to his family, but Shelley refused to apologize to his.

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Marriage to Harriet Westbrook and Queen Mab

Late in August 1811, the 19-year-old Shelley eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, the younger daughter of a London tavern owner. By marrying her, he betrayed the acquisitive plans of his grandfather and father, who tried to starve him into submission but only drove the strong-willed youth to rebel against the established order. Early in 1812, Shelley, Harriet, and her older sister Eliza Westbrook went to Dublin, where Shelley circulated pamphlets advocating political rights for Roman Catholics, political autonomy for Ireland (which was ruled by Britain), and freethinking ideals. The couple traveled back to England, to Lynmouth, Devon, where Shelley issued more political pamphlets, and then to North Wales, where they spent almost six months in 1812–13.

Lack of money finally drove Shelley to moneylenders in London, where in 1813 he issued Queen Mab, his first major poem—a nine-canto mixture of blank verse and lyric measures that attacks the evils of the past and present (commerce, war, the eating of meat, the church, monarchy, and marriage) but ends with resplendent hopes for humanity when freed from these vices.

Relationship with Mary Godwin and the “haunted summer” of 1816

In June 1813 Harriet Shelley gave birth to their daughter Ianthe, but a year later the poet fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the 16-year-old daughter of radical social philosopher William Godwin and his first wife, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Against Godwin’s objections, Shelley and Mary Godwin eloped to France on July 27, 1814, taking with them Mary’s stepsister Jane (later “Claire”) Clairmont. Godwin quickly became pregnant with Shelley’s child. Following travels through France, Switzerland, and Germany, they returned to London, where they were shunned by the Godwins and most other friends. Shelley dodged creditors until the birth of his son Charles (born to Harriet on November 30, 1814), his grandfather’s death (January 1815), and provisions of Sir Bysshe’s will forced Sir Timothy to pay Shelley’s debts and grant him an annual income.

Settling near Windsor Great Park in 1815, Shelley read the classics with Hogg and another friend, Thomas Love Peacock. He also wrote Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude, a blank-verse poem, published with shorter poems in 1816, that warns idealists (like Shelley himself) not to abandon “sweet human love” and social improvement for the vain pursuit of evanescent dreams. In February 1815 Godwin gave birth to a daughter, Clara, who died within days. The following January Godwin and Shelley’s second child, William, was born.

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By mid-May 1816, Shelley, Godwin, and Claire Clairmont hurried to Geneva to meet with Lord Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair. They frequently gathered at Villa Diodati, a mansion in Cologny that Byron had leased for the summer, which proved to be a period of remarkable creativity for the group, perhaps inspired by the unusually gloomy weather. (The summer of 1816’s atypically cold and stormy weather is thought to have been caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia.) During this memorable summer, Shelley composed the poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc,” both of which employ standard Romantic conventions of the transcendent qualities of beauty and nature. “Mont Blanc,” a five-part meditation on power in a godless universe while contemplating the highest mountain in the Alps, was a vehicle for Shelley to express his romantic atheism. Also that summer, Mary Godwin began her novel Frankenstein, instigated by Byron’s suggestion that the group make a contest out of inventing ghost stories.

(Read Britannica’s article about the “haunted summer of 1816.”)

Shelley’s party returned to England in September, settling in Bath. Late in the year, Harriet Shelley drowned herself in London; although she was pregnant when she died, it is unlikely that Shelley was the father. On December 30, 1816, Shelley and Mary were married with the Godwins’ blessing. But a Chancery Court decision declared Shelley unfit to raise Ianthe and Charles (his children by Harriet), who were placed in foster care at his expense.

Laon and Cythna and move to Italy

In March 1817 the Shelleys settled near Peacock at Marlow, where Shelley wrote his 12-canto romance-epic Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City and Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein. They compiled History of a Six Weeks’ Tour jointly from the letters and journals of their trips to Switzerland, concluding with the poem “Mont Blanc.” In November, Laon and Cythna was suppressed by its printer and publisher, who feared that Shelley’s idealized tale of a peaceful national revolution, bloodily suppressed by a league of king and priests, violated the laws against blasphemous libel. After revisions, it was reissued in 1818 as The Revolt of Islam.

Because Shelley’s health suffered from the northern climate and his financial obligations outran his resources, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont went to Italy, where Byron was residing. They reached Milan in April 1818 and proceeded to Pisa and Leghorn (Livorno). That summer, at Bagni di Lucca, Shelley translated Plato’s Symposium and wrote his own essay “On Love.” He also completed a modest poem titled Rosalind and Helen, in which he imagines his destiny in the poet-reformer “Lionel,” who—imprisoned for radical activity—dies young after his release.

Idealism and regeneration

Thus far, Shelley’s literary career had been politically oriented. Queen Mab, the early poems first published in 1964 as The Esdaile Notebook, Laon and Cythna, and most of his prose works were devoted to reforming society. Even Alastor, Rosalind and Helen, and Shelley’s personal lyrics voiced the concerns of an idealistic reformer who is disappointed or persecuted by an unreceptive society. But in Italy, far from the daily irritations of British politics, Shelley deepened his understanding of art and literature and, unable to reshape the world to conform to his vision, he concentrated on embodying his ideals within his poems. His aim became, as he wrote in “Ode to the West Wind,” to make his words “Ashes and sparks” as from “an unextinguished hearth,” thereby transforming subsequent generations and, through them, the world. Later, as he became estranged from Mary Shelley, he portrayed even love in terms of aspiration, rather than fulfillment:

The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.

In August 1818, Shelley and Byron again met in Venice; the Shelleys remained there or at Este through October 1818. During their stay, little Clara Everina (their third child, born in 1817) became ill from dysentery and died. In “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” (published with Rosalind and Helen), Shelley writes how visions arising from the beautiful landscape seen from a hill near Este had revived him from despair to hopes for the political regeneration of Italy, thus transforming the scene into “a green isle… / In the deep wide sea of Misery.” He also began Julian and Maddalo—in which Byron (“Maddalo”) and Shelley debate human nature and destiny—and drafted Act I of Prometheus Unbound. In November 1818 the Shelleys traveled through Rome to Naples, where they remained until the end of February 1819.

Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci

Settling next at Rome, Shelley continued Prometheus Unbound and outlined The Cenci, a tragedy on the Elizabethan model based on a case of incestuous rape and patricide in sixteenth-century Rome. He completed this drama during the summer of 1819 near Leghorn, where the Shelleys fled in June after their son, William, died from malaria. Shelley himself terms The Cenci “a sad reality,” contrasting it with earlier “visions…of the beautiful and just.” Memorable characters, classic five-act structure, powerful and evocative language, and moral ambiguities still make The Cenci theatrically effective. Even so, it is a less notable achievement than Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama, which Shelley completed at Florence in the autumn of 1819, near the birth of Percy Florence, his only surviving child with Mary. Both plays appeared about 1820.

In Prometheus Shelley inverts the plot of a lost play by Aeschylus in a poetic masterpiece that combines supple blank verse with a variety of complex lyric measures. In Act I, Prometheus, tortured on Jupiter’s orders for having given mankind the gift of moral freedom, recalls his earlier curse of Jupiter and forgives him (“I wish no living thing to suffer pain”). By eschewing revenge, Prometheus, who embodies the moral will, can be reunited with his beloved Asia, a spiritual ideal transcending humanity; her love prevents him from becoming another tyrant when Jupiter is overthrown by the mysterious power known as Demogorgon.

Act II traces Asia’s awakening and journey toward Prometheus, beginning with her descent into the depths of nature to confront and question Demogorgon. Act III depicts the overthrow of Jupiter and the union of Asia and Prometheus, who—leaving Jupiter’s throne vacant—retreat to a cave from which they influence the world through ideals embodied in the creative arts. The end of the act describes the renovation of both human society and the natural world. Act IV opens with joyful lyrics by spirits who describe the benevolent transformation of the human consciousness that has occurred. Next, other spirits hymn the beatitude of humanity and nature in this new millennial age; and finally, Demogorgon returns to tell all creatures that, should the fragile state of grace be lost, they can restore their moral freedom through these “spells”:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power which seems Omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates…

Prometheus Unbound, which was the keystone of Shelley’s poetic achievement, was written after he had been chastened by “sad reality” but before he began to fear that he had failed to reach an audience. Published with it were some of the poet’s finest and most hopeful shorter poems, including “Ode to Liberty,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” and “To a Skylark.”

Political protest works and poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”

While completing Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, Shelley reacted to news of the Peterloo Massacre in England by writing The Masque of Anarchy and several radical songs that he hoped would rouse the British people to active but nonviolent political protest. Later in 1819 he sent to England Peter Bell the Third, which joins literary satire of William Wordsworth’s Peter Bell to attacks on corruptions in British society. He also drafted A Philosophical View of Reform, his longest (though incomplete) prose work, urging moderate reform to prevent a bloody revolution that might lead to new tyranny. Too radical to be published during Shelley’s lifetime, The Masque of Anarchy appeared after the reformist elections of 1832, Peter Bell the Third and the political ballads in 1839–40, and A Philosophical View of Reform not until 1920.

After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley was stung by hostile reviews into expressing his hopes more guardedly. His “Letter to Maria Gisborne” in heroic couplets and “The Witch of Atlas” in ottava rima (both 1820; published 1824) combine the mythopoeic mode of Prometheus Unbound with the urbane self-irony that had emerged in Peter Bell the Third, showing Shelley’s awareness that his ideals might seem naive to others. Late that year, Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, his satirical drama on the trial for adultery of Caroline (estranged wife of King George IV), appeared anonymously but was quickly suppressed.

In 1821, however, Shelley reasserted his uncompromising idealism. Epipsychidion (in couplets) mythologizes his infatuation with Teresa (“Emilia”) Viviani, a convent-bound young admirer, into a Dantesque fable of how human desire can be fulfilled through art. His essay A Defence of Poetry (published 1840) eloquently declares that the poet creates humane values and imagines the forms that shape the social order: thus each mind recreates its own private universe, and “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Adonais, a pastoral elegy in Spenserian stanzas (a poetic form consisting of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a ninth line of six iambic feet), commemorates the death of John Keats by declaring that, while we “decay / Like corpses in a charnel,” the creative spirit of Adonais, despite his physical death, “has outsoared the shadow of our night.”

The One remains, the many change
and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s
shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

The verse drama Hellas (published 1822) celebrates the Greek revolution against Turkish rule and reiterates the political message of Laon and Cythna—that the struggle for human liberty can be neither totally defeated nor fully realized, since the ideal is greater than its earthly embodiments.

Death

After Byron’s arrival in Pisa late in 1821, Shelley, inhibited by his presence, completed only a series of urbane, yet longing lyrics during the early months of 1822. Most of these were addressed to Jane Williams, the common-law wife of Edward Ellerker Williams, a retired military officer who had befriended Shelley through the poet’s cousin Thomas Medwin. Shelley began writing the drama “Charles the First,” but he soon abandoned it. After the Shelleys and Edward and Jane Williams moved to Lerici, Shelley began “The Triumph of Life,” a dark fragment on which he was at work until he sailed to Leghorn to welcome his friend Leigh Hunt, who had arrived to edit a periodical called The Liberal. Shelley and Edward Williams drowned on July 8, 1822, when their boat sank during the stormy return voyage to Lerici.

(What piece of Shelley’s body did Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley keep after he died?)

Mary Shelley faithfully collected her late husband’s unpublished writings, and by 1840, aided by Hunt and others, she had disseminated his fame and most of his writings. The careful study of Shelley’s publications and manuscripts has since elucidated his deep learning, clear thought, and subtle artistry. Shelley was a passionate idealist and consummate artist who, while developing rational themes within traditional poetic forms, stretched language to its limits in articulating both personal desire and social altruism.