Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Shelley is a contradictory and challenging figure. His writing is at once the most passionate and in­tense of all the Romantic poets, and yet the most intellectual, the fullest of philosophical specula­tion and technical experiment. And although he was the most committed of the Romantic poets to social action, to improving the lot of all people, his political writing is harder to grasp and less accessible than that of the others. He made brilliant innovations and experiments in poetic language, and he wrote a magnificent essay on the meaning and importance of poetry (The Defence of Poetry, 1821). Yet it is precisely Shelley's stylistic experi­ments and his fervent ambition to push language into the realm of the inexpressible that make him at times forbiddingly difficult. In his personal life Shelley was uncommonly generous, responsive, and sympathetic to the sufferings of others —yet his fierce devotion to ideals about what human life could attain sometimes put him out of touch with the immediate feelings and needs of those around him. One thing is certain: the only way for any reader to come to terms with Shelley as a man and a writer is with an open mind and a willingness to envision new possibilities for human experience and expression.

Like Byron, Shelley was born into an upper-class family. His father, Timothy Shelley, was a rather conservative Member of Parliament from Sussex, a county just south of London. Shelley was sent to Eton, the famous private school, where he was mercilessly taunted by the other boys because of his slight, unathletic build and his imaginative, ec­centric manner. They called him "mad Shelley." It was at Eton that Shelley first became determined to fight against the forces of injustice and oppres­sion in life. In 1810 he went to Oxford University, where he and a close friend wrote a pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism." Shelley re­fused to deny that he had written the pamphlet when called before the authorities, and he was ex­pelled after only six months at Oxford.

Shelley then went to London, where he fell in love and eloped with Harriet Westbrook, an attrac­tive, warmhearted girl who Shelley thought was being oppressed by her father. Harriet was sixteen when they were married, Shelley eighteen. Both families were, of course, unhappy about the mar­riage and Harriet and Shelley had to live on their own with little money. They went to Ireland for a time to work for Catholic emancipation and im­proved living conditions for the poor. Returning to London, Shelley joined the circle of the radical social philosopher William Godwin, whose wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, had been one of the earliest and most effective advocates for the rights of women. In 1814 Shelley fell in love with Mary, the brilliant daughter of Godwin and Mary Woll­stonecraft. Committed to the idea that human re­lationships should not be restricted by law or social convention, Shelley went to live with Mary in France for a time.

When Shelley returned with Mary to England, he found himself branded a revolutionary and a social outcast. He was happiest living abroad, and he spent the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, where he was visited by and became friends with Byron. But a crisis arose later that year—Harriet drowned herself in a fit of despair. Shelley was stricken with grief and re­morse, and to make matters worse, the courts de­nied Shelley custody of the two children born to him and Harriet. Like Byron, Shelley felt himself an alien and an outcast in his own country. In 1818, soon after he and Mary were married, they left England for Italy, where Shelley would live for the rest of his life.

Shelley's four years in Italy, from 1818 until his death in 1822, were a time of poor health, of finan­cial difficulty, of restless moving about from place to place, and of further personal tragedy. In 1818-1819 two of his children by Mary, Clara and Wil­liam died. Yet Shelley was able during these years to produce an astonishing amount and range of magnificent poetry. In 1818 he began the philo­sophical drama that many readers consider his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound. In 1819 he completed Prometheus Unbound and wrote his great "Ode to the West Wind. In 1820 he produced a visionary satire called The Mask of Anarchy and a delicate philosophical nature-fable called The Sensitive Plant. The year 1821 saw the publication of Epipsychidion, a difficult and experimental poem about the transcendent possibilities of human love, and of Adonais, Shelley's great elegy on the death of John Keats. In 1822 he completed Hellas, a lyrical drama about the Greek war of lib­eration against the Turks. At his death he was at work on The Triumph of Life, which some readers think would have been his finest work had he lived to complete it. In addition to these major works, Shelley wrote in each of these years many of the in­tense, beautifully crafted shorter lyrics for which he is so well known.

The last two years of Shelley's "Italian Period" were happier than the first two. He and Mary fi­nally settled at Pisa, where they were joined by a group of close friends who came to be known as the "Pisan Circle." Byron left Venice to live with them for a time. Shelley's accidental death came sud­denly and in a manner almost miraculously pre­dicted in the famous concluding stanza of Adonais:

. . . my spirit's bark is driven,

Par from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

Trie massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

Shelley loved boats and frequently used them as images or symbols in his poetry. On July 8, 1822, he and his friend Edward Williams set out in Shelley's small boat, the Don Juan, to sail across the Gulf of Spezzia. A violent storm arose and both Williams and Shelley, who could not swim, were swept overboard. Their bodies were found on the beach several days later, where they were cremated by a group of friends, including Byron. Shelley's ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, near the grave of Keats.

Byron said of Shelley that he "was, without ex­ception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in compari­son." Matthew Arnold thought that Shelley's character was too sensitive for a really great writer and called him a "beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." But Shelley was not ineffectual, and he was not so cut off from the realities of life as Arnold suggests. Al­though dedicated to the idea that by perfecting their own natures people could liberate themselves from the pain and injustice of present existence, Shelley had a shrewd and informed comprehension of the complexities of earthly life. And his gener­ous, unselfish personality also contained elements of sophisticated playfulness and good humor —he was not beyond laughing at himself. Intellectually, he was an immensely learned and well-read man capable of more refined and original philosophical thinking than any other English Romantic, includ­ing Coleridge. And as a poet, as Wordsworth said, "Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style."