shelley

As reckless and brilliant in his poetry as in his life, Shelley poured out the great body of his major work in less than a decade, and drowned off the coast of Tuscany at the age of twenty-nine. Active, mischievous and highly imaginative as a child, he was conventionally educated at Syon House Academy, Eton and University College Oxford; an upbringing that made him deeply unhappy and rebellious. At Oxford he read radical authors Godwin, Paine, Condorcet dressed and behaved with provoking eccentricity and in March 1811 was expelled for circulating a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley married twice although disapproving of matrimony, as well as royalty, meat-eating and religion. His first wife Harriet drowned herself; his second was Mary Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Shelley eloped with her when she was seventeen, along with her 15-year-old step-sister Jane “Claire” Clairmont: their triangular relationship endured for eight years. The Summer of 1816 was spent on Lake Geneva with Byron where Mary began Frankenstein. Harried by creditors, ill-health and ‘social hatred’ Shelley took his household permanently abroad, to Italy in the Spring of 1818. Misfortune pursued them: their daughter Clara died in Venice, their son William in Rome and Mary suffered a nervous breakdown, yet the twelve months from the Summer of 1819 saw Shelley’s most extraordinary and varied burst of major poetry. He completed Prometheus Unbound, wrote The Mask of Anarchy, Ode to the West Wind, the satirical Peter Bell The Third, his long political odes, To Liberty and To Naples, the Letter to Maria Gisbourne and The Witch of Atlas. Much of this work was inspired by news of political events, which also produced a number of short, angry, propaganda poems, including Song to the Men of England and England 1819. He also wrote several pure lyric pieces including To a Skylark and The Cloud. In mid 1821 news of the death of Keats in Rome produced the great elegy Adonais. In April 1822 he moved his household to an isolated house on the bay of Lerici. He was drowned in August 1822 in his small boat the “Ariel” along with two others, whilst returning from a visit to Byron and Leigh Hunt at Livorno. The circumstances of the shipwreck are shrouded in mystery and some people have suggested that Shelley’s failure to save himself was intentionally suicidal. He was cremated on the beach at Viareggio where his body was washed up, and his ashes interred in the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome where lay already his son William, and John Keats. Also a philosophical and political essayist, and a gifted translator from German, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Arabic, he has taken his position as a major figure among the English Romantics: the poet of volcanic hope for a better world, of fiery aspirations shot upwards through bitter gloom.

"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821.