Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Fatimah Alzahrani

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The English romantic poet (1792-1822) ranks as one of the greatest lyric poets in the history of English

both students were expelled from the university.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place near Horsham, Sussex, on Aug. 4, 1792. He was the first son of a wealthy country squire. Shelley as a boy felt persecuted by his hardheaded and practical-minded father, and this abuse may have first sparked the flame of protest which, during his Eton years (1804-1810), earned him the name of "Mad Shelley." In the course of his first and only year at Oxford (1810-1811),

Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg issued a pamphlet provocatively entitled The Necessity of Atheism. Their "atheism" was little more than a hieroglyph connoting their general revulsion against establishment authoritarianism. However, both students were expelled from the university ….

His life and works :

Shelley eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen year old daughter of a coffee-house keeper. This created a terrible scandal and Shelley's father never forgave him for what he had done. Shelley moved to Ireland where he made revolutionary speeches on religion and politics. He also wrote a political pamphlet A Declaration of Rights, on the subject of the French Revolution, but it was considered to be too radical for distribution in Britain.

His life and works :

In 1814 Shelley returned to England he fell in love and eloped with Mary, the sixteen-year-old daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

For the next few years the couple travelled in Europe.

His life and works :

On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to

Lerici in his schooner ,There were those who believed his death

was not accidental. Some said that Shelley was depressed in those days and that he wanted to die;

others say that he did not know how to navigate; others believed that some pirates mistook the boat for Byron's and attacked

him ,and others have even more fantastical

stories.There is a mass of evidence, though

scattered and contradictory, that Shelley may have been murdered for political reasons.

His life and works: Shelley's body washed

ashore and later, in keeping with quarantine regulations, was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. The day after the news of his death reached England, the Tory newspaper The Courier gloated: "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is .God or no ….

He is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Mask of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the

English language ….

Ode to the West Wind poem

Ode to the West Wind summary

The speaker of the poem appeals to the West Wind to infuse him with a new spirit and a new power to spread his ideas. In order to invoke the West Wind, he lists a series of things the wind has done that illustrate its power: driving away the autumn leaves, placing seeds in the earth, bringing thunderstorms and the cyclical "death" of the natural world, and stirring up the seas and oceans.

The speaker wishes that the wind could affect him the way it does leaves and clouds and waves. Because it can’t, he asks the wind to play him like an instrument, bringing out his sadness in its own musical lament. Maybe the wind can even help him to send his ideas all over the world; even if they’re not powerful in their own right, his ideas might inspire others. The sad music that the wind will play on him will become a prophecy. The West Wind of autumn brings on a cold, barren period of winter, but isn’t winter always followed by a spring?

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