Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography

Dromo's Den

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822). An English revolutionary and lyric poet of the highest rank. Shelley was of old English stock. His grandfather, Bysshe, who was born in America and on his removal to England as heir to a small landed estate enriched the family by wealthy marriages, was made Baronet in 1806. Shelley, the eldest child of Timothy and Elizabeth (Pilford), was the hope of this new establishment. He was born at Field Place, Warnham, near Horsham, England, on Aug. 4, 1792. He studied first under the Rev. Thomas Edwards, of Horsham, then in a middle-class school known as Sion House Academy, near Brantford, also kept by a clergyman named Dr. Greenlaw. At this school the sensitive boy was persecuted by his fellows to such an extent that he developed a fierce hatred of oppression. At the same time he began to love science ardently, although his temperament was romantic rather than scientific. At the age of 13 he went to Eton, where he again showed his hatred of tyranny. In October, 1810, he went to University College, Oxford, where his father had been before him. The boy displayed literary precocity, and his family indulged him in a taste for early publication; at Eton he had published Zastrozzi, a wild romance, and at Oxford he wrote a second tale, St. Irvyne, and various ventures in verse. After a scant six months’ residence he was expelled from the university on account of a tract, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), which he had published and circulated. Though he was only a youth of 18, English radicalism of the stripe of Godwin’s had declared itself in him in many ways, and before his faculty for verse had ripened or manifested itself with any distinctness his mind was given to materialistic and individualistic ideas, projects of social and political reform, and to their advocacy in prose tracts. He carried his independence into his actions. At this youthful time his conduct was undisciplined by judgment, and his mind was unsettled in intellectual principles. He was by nature impulsive and by habit uncontrollable; his ardency showed itself by quick execution as well as by emotionalism. His home was never a comfortable abiding place for him, and disagreement with his family, stolid and conventional people, was an increasing factor until it brought about complete alienation. His expulsion from Oxford was followed the next summer by a romantic marriage, one rather of pity than of love, with the 16-year-old daughter of a retired London tavern keeper, Harriet Westbrook, with whom he had become acquainted through his sister. They eloped and were married in Edinburgh and thereafter lived a wandering and debt-harassed life in different parts of England and in Ireland, whither Shelley went in 1812 with a view to political agitation of which his Address to the Irish People, Proposals for an Association, and his public speech at Dublin on O’Connell’s platform are memorials. He became a subject of government surveillance as a dangerous character. His position was improved by the financial arrangements made when he came of age in 1813, but his domestic life had become troubled, and coldness had come to exist between husband and wife. In July, 1814, he eloped with Mary Godwin, putting in practice the principles he held and dealing openly with Harriet, for whom he made provision; but misfortune followed, and in 1816 Harriet committed suicide by drowning, and a few months later their two children were denied to Shelley’s custody by the famous decision of Lord Eldon, on the ground that Shelley was an atheist. About a fortnight after the news of Harriet’s death reached him he married Mary Godwin. Shelley soon after left England and spent the remainder of his brief life in Italy, going from city to city, finally settling in the neighborhood of Pisa. On July 8, 1822, he sailed from Leghorn to Spezia, where he had settled for the summer. A squall overwhelmed the little craft in which Shelley was, and he was drowned. The body, which was thrown up on the shore at Viareggio, was burned, and the ashes, except the heart, which was unconsumed, were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. He had several children, of whom only one survived him, Percy, who inherited the title on his grandfather’s death.

Shelley’s works contain two easily distinguished strains: one, the propagandism of opinion which is associated with his "passion for reforming the world"; the other, the expression of his personality, his essential being, in the creation of lyrical beauty by spontaneous and half-unconscious art. He adopted from early youth radical formulas of Anglicized French thought, certain beliefs regarding the perfectibility of man, the evil of social institutions like property and marriage, and the inviolability of the individual. He had an active philosophical mind and an active philanthropic spirit; to these two, and to the necessity for expression inherent in his powerful genius, his first works were chiefly indebted. Three times he did, in effect, utter his whole mind. In Queen Mab (c.1813), his first important poem and the one by which he was long the most widely known, he put forth all he had learned and thought. In it are amalgamated his first essays in verse and prose to make a whole view of the world and of society. In The Revolt of Islam (1817–18), a more imaginative and elaborate poem, setting forth the moral revolution of the world under the form of a romantic epic, he did the same thing again. In Prometheus Unbound (1820), though in forms of much higher poetry, he achieved the task still a third time. To say that in the social part of these great works he put Godwin’s philosophy into verse is a very imperfect description. The principles of Godwin were no more than the chrysalis that released the butterfly; the poet transformed the philosophy of his teacher, and it came forth as poetry with a different potency and meaning. Yet the intellectual units of his thought were to be found in English radicalism. Shelley, however, never stiffened into any formula, but constantly and increasingly responded to fresh knowledge. The most efficient new element in his earlier development was Greek. In Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam this is not felt; in Prometheus Unbound it is the soul of the poem. Philosophically the study of Plato changed him from a materialistic atheist, of a Lucretian type, to a pantheist, though the term as applied to him is a crude one; and under Æschylus he became a master of choral myth, and under the impulse of Greek imagination generally, a symbolic poet. In becoming less didactic and more imaginative in style, less Latin and French and more Greek and Italian in inspiration, less definitely dogmatic and more intuitive, prophetic, and personal in method, he changed from a respectable minor poet of intellectual and descriptive power and emotional abandon to a great lyrical master of the imagination. Mystery is a constantly increasing element in his work and almost measures his growth; in thought it plunges him into depths which he describes as speechless, and in the sensuous world it fills the atmosphere of the verse with light, color, and fragrance and embodies forms of nature and idealities of character which overpower and distract his readers. This presence of mystery is most obvious in the series of works which are more personal and disengaged from any preoccupation with the present world. In Alastor (published 1816) it is not sufficient to cloud the narrative or the picture, but is a mood; in such poems as The Sensitive Plant (1820) and The Witch of Atlas (1820), apparently simple in fable, the evasiveness of the meaning is constant, like a retreating echo in the woods; in Epipsychidion (1821) the mystery has made the poem one only for elect readers. In the Adonais (1821), which after Alastor and Queen Mab is probably most easily read in a popular way, the mystery, though deep and pervasive, goes naturally with the theme of early death, in which both Keats and Shelley are the answering chords. So, too, on the purely intellectual side, the prose Defense of Poetry (1821; published in 1840) discloses to a careful reader the ground of mystery in all Shelley’s later thinking. Apart from the major works of the poet stand the brief lyrics and the odes and the many fragments, which are also divided between a predominant social interest, as the Ode to Liberty, and a personal inspirational interest, as the Lines to an Indian Air. In his growth he never lost touch with the present world, of which fact Hellas (1822) and The Masque of Anarchy (1819; published in 1832) are capital examples. In his dramatic attempts, seeking objective artistic results by effort, he was off the line of his genius, and neither The Cenci (1819) nor Charles I, of which only a few scenes exist, reaches an excellence comparable to that of his other achievements. The most obvious quality of his verse, melody, is so readily felt that he is placed without any division of opinion among the great lyrical poets of England with the first. In other respects, though his fame is now established, in the minds of many he is regarded as vague in meaning, hysterical in feeling, loose and diffuse in style. He was the poet of abstract and ideal love and set forth under that conception the concrete beauty and order of the universe as he saw it and of man’s life as he desired it to be.

His personal character was such as to draw about him many devoted friends, of whom some, as Leigh Hunt, Byron, Peacock, Trelawny, and Horace Smith, are well known; and he also attracted women, who are chiefly known by the verse in which, as in life, he idealized them. The charm he exercised is best seen in their own words. In fact every one who knew him seems to have loved him. He was by nature generous and gave so liberally of his scanty means as to keep himself always poor. He was constant in friendly kindness to all associated with him, and he at all times went about doing charity among the poor. He was violent in indignation against actual wrong, but gentleness characterized him. His later years were full of sadness from one or another cause.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 810-811.