Percy Bysshe Shelley

By Marten Newland

Jeff KopecJeff Mac

BASIC INFORMATION

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792 - 1822)Category:  English Literature

Born:  August 4, 1792Field Place near Horsham, Sussex, England

Died:  July 8, 1822Viareggio, Italy

His LifeThe son of a prosperous squireEntered Oxford in 1810, where readings in philosophy led him toward a study of the empiricists and the modern skepticsIn 1811 he and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg published their pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which resulted in their immediate expulsion from the university.The same year Shelley married a 16-year-old Harriet WestbrookHis first important poem, Queen Mab, privately printed in 1813In 1814 Shelley left England for France with Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin. During their first year together they were plagued by social ostracism and financial difficulties. After Harriet Shelley’s suicide in 1816, Shelley and Mary officially married. In 1818 Shelley and Mary left England and settled in Italy. On July 8, 1822, Shelley was drowned while sailing in the Bay of Spezia, near Lerici.

His Life in DepthShelley, England's greatest lyric poet, came of a family of some importance and power. His father was s Sussex county gentleman and a Whig member of Parliament; his grand-father, who became a baronet, had amassed a great fortune. Shelley, the eldest son, accordingly grew up with the prospect of becoming a man of wealth and title. At Eton, he proved a good classical scholar, but was not very happy, for he was by nature revolutionary and unconventional. He was known as ‘mad Shelley’ and ‘Shelley the atheist’, and his enthusiasm for studies in electricity, chemistry, and astronomy, and the exciting experiments he conducted, gave rise to many stories. The persecutions which he endured and witnessed at school gave him a lifelong detestation of tyranny and violence.  Shelley went to Oxford full of plans for changing the system of society --- ideas partly picked up from the literature of the French Revolution. Being convinced that religious faiths were harmful to man's happiness, he and his friend. T.J. Hogg, put forth a small study in logic, called The Necessity of Atheism. The Oxford authorities objected, and when Shelley and Hogg declined to discuss the matter, they were sent down. This to Shelley at 18 was a disaster, for he lost a valuable education at Oxford. 

Life ContinuedHe fell out with his father and became a wan-derer; though he would eventually inherit a fortune, he had no ready money. When he was 19, he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a girl of 16 whom he scarcely knew but whom he thought he should rescue from a tyrannical family. They were married in Edinburgh, and went to Keswick where Southey was kind to them. From there Shelley, always full of schemes, went on a quixotic expedition to redress the wrongs of the Irish; from Lynmouth shortly afterwards he distributed a seditious pamphlet called The Rights of Man, scattering some copies by balloon and putting others into bottles and throwing them into the sea. In 1813 he printed and published privately an extraordinary poem, Queen Mab, which expressed his protest against religion, his hatred of all forms of tyranny, and his belief in a new golden age. In his glorification of revolutionary ideas, Shelley had sought out William Godwin, author of Political Justice, who had married Mary Wollstonecraft, author of The Rights of Women. His marriage with Harriet having proved a complete failure, Harriet was found drowned in the Serpentine, and her two children by Shelley became the subject of a lawsuit. Shelley was not only deeply shocked by the tragedy but also suffered the bitterness of losing his children. He married Mary Godwin, and they tried to settle at Marlow, on the Thames. There, in 1816, he wrote Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, the first long poem to show his true genius; next year he wrote a long imaginative poem on liberty and love, The Revolt of Islam, which was inspired by the French Revolution and contains many fine passages of description and dramatic narrative. 

Life Continued……By this time Shelley had become a friend of Leigh Hunt and Peacock and had met Keats. Finally in 1818, partly to escape prejudice and insult, and also Godwin's constant demands for money, and partly because of Shelley's illnesses, the Shelleys decided to seek peace in Italy. There Shelley gave up his dream of reforming the world by direct political action and decided that he could accomplish most by passing on his own inspiration to others through his poetry. In this belief he composed his Prometheus Unbound, a poem to be enjoyed for its incomparable music, its colour and story, as well as because it contains Shelley's noblest ideas. To this period, too, belong his Lines written in the Euganean Hills and Julian and Maddalo, an autobiographical poem based on a happy visit to Byron in Venice At this time Shelley wrote his finest lyrics --- The Could, The Skylark, the Ode to the West Wind, and others, the music and intensity of which show Shelley to be entering on a new stage of personal and imaginative greatness. The Shelleys moved restlessly from place to place, and they suffered much unhappiness. The strain of constant travelling told on his health, and they both had to endure the great misery of losing their much-loved children William and Clara. They also found that the calumny and hate from which they had hoped to escape followed them even to Italy. In daily life Shelley was gay enough, however, the leading figure in their circle of friends in Pisa, where they eventually settled. 

Life Continued Again…..?In the summer of 1822 Leigh Hunt came out to Italy to discuss a new periodical, proposed by Byron, in which Shelley was to take part. Shelley with a companion sailed in his yacht to greet him; but on the return voyage, Shelley's yacht capsized in a sudden squall and he and his friend were drowned. Shelley's body was identified by the volumes of Keats and Sophocles found in his pockets. The bodies were cremated on the shore, and Shelley's ashes were buried next to Keats in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. It was for Keats that Shelley had written his elegy, adonais, in 1821, in which he seemed to predict his own death. Shelley was 30 when he died, leaving unfinished the most original of all his poems, The Triumph of Life, in which his realism appears in all its sharp strength. As we have it, this fragment presents life as a vanity of vanities, but it is almost certain that Shelley meant in the second half to assert the splendours which human beings could attain. Mary Shelley, who was only 25 when Shelley died, wrote his biography and edited and published his poetry, comparatively little of which had appeared during his lifetime and that little received with almost universal abhorrence or indifference. He left much fine prose also, including his famous Defence of Poetry, containing his analysis of the way in which poetry is written and his defence of poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. 

The Romantic Time period

Shelley lived in the romantic time periodThe romantic time period was a time period that began In the late 1700’s all the way the through the 18th century. In this time period people embraced great imaginations, nature, drugs and other stuff.

Romanticism cont

Romanticism started because of the conflict that people were having with the enlightenment era which was an era that frowned upon the using of drugs and affairs and other edgy subjects. The romantics basically went against what people say and did want they want. The romantics attacked the enlightenment because it blocked the free play and creativity of their minds. Also During this period Christianity took a strong root because it went against the enlightenment’s Newtonian religion.

WorksAlastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude The Cenci "The Cloud" "Dark Spirit of the Desart Rude" "Declaration of Rights" A Defense of Poetry (extract) "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" "Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation" "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills" "The Mask of Anarchy" "Mutability" "The Necessity of Atheism" "Mont Blanc" "Ode to the West Wind" Peter Bell the Third Prometheus Unbound Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem Review of Frankenstein The Revolt of Islam "Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue" "To Wordsworth" "The Witch of Atlas"

Shelley’s Poetry

Most of Shelley’s poetry reveals his philosophy, a combination of belief in the power of human love and reason, and faith in the perfectibility and ultimate progress of man. His lyric poems are superb in their beauty, grandeur and mastery of language.

AssessmentMost of Shelley’s poetry reveals his philosophy, a combination of belief in the power of human love and reason, and faith in the perfectibility and ultimate progress of man. His lyric poems are superb in their beauty, grandeur, and mastery of language. Although Matthew Amold labeled him an “ineffectual angel,” 20th-century critics have taken Shelley seriously, recognizing his wit, his gifts as a satirist, and his influence as a social and political thinker.

Shelley’s influences

Shelley had many influences but probably the most influential people in his life were Lord Byron and john Keats. Byron and Shelley actually rented houses next to each other on lake Geneva. In 1821 john Keats died and his death influenced the poem Adonias .

OzymandiasOzymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley I met a traveler from an antique landWho said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away."

Syllable count and Rhyme Scheme

Syllable count is-11,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,11,10,10,10,10The Rhyme Scheme is- A B A B A C D C E D E F E F.

Analysis

Ozymandias is a sonnet It cannot be clearly defined as a certain kind of sonnet so it’s a indefinableIt does have a volta at line 9I think that the sonnet is saying the destructive power of death and the endlessness of the arts

Unknown Words

Visage- image appearanceMocked-to ridicule or make fun ofBoundless- infinite; vast

Shelley Quotes

Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Works Citedhttp://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/percy_bysshe_shelley_2.html

http://dictionary.reference.com/

http://www.sonnets.org/basicforms.htm

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture16a.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley#Byron

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html