Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 - 8 July 1822) was one of the leading poets of the English romantic movement.

He was born at Field Place, Warnham, Sussex and was a member of an aristocratic family. His father was a Member of Parliament. During his time as a schoolboy at Eton College he experience a lot of bullying. He went on to Oxford Univisity but in 1811 was compelled to abandon his studies there after issuing a pamphlet advocating atheism, The Necessity of Atheism. In the same year he married Hariet Westbrook, his landlord's daughter, and got to know the philosopher William Godwin. He went to Ireland where he attended nationalist demonstrations and wrote a pamphlet supporting Irish independence: this attracted the attention of the British authorities.

His marriage was unhappy and he often left his wife and his daughter Ianthe. Before long he fell in love with Mary (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, William Godwin's 16-year-old daughter, and in 1814 he travelled with her to Switzerland, accompanied by her half sister Jane (later known as Claire) Clairmont. Six weeks later the penniless trio returned to England, where William Godwin - who had earlier advocated free love - declined to give them financial help.

Two years later, in 1816, Shelley and Mary returned to Switzerland, at the invitation of Claire Calirmont who was staying there and who used their presence to lure Lord Byron to Geneva. Claire and Byron had had an affair, but he had then lost interest in her. At the end of that summer, Shelley, Mary and Claire returned to England. A few months later, in December 1816, Shelley's wife Harriet drowned herself in London, and he married Mary shortly after. As Mary Shelley she became a famous author, author of, among other works, Frankenstein. One reason for the marriage was to have custody of Shelley's children by Harriet, but in the end the courts awarded custody to Harriet's parents.

Shelley and Mary lived in the Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where another firend of Shelley was also living - the novelist Thomas Love Peacock. Among his other friends were Leigh Hunt and John Keats.

In 1818 Shelley, Mary and Allegra (Claire Clairmont's daughter by Byron) traveled to Venice, where Byron was staying. Shelley lived in Italy from then until his death. He died on 8 July 1822 in a boating accident in the Gulf of Spezia.

Shelley's poems reflect a longing for freedom and harmony and an opposition to all forms of authoritarianism. He regarded religion and law as ideological tools of governments. These views attracted a lot of criticism in his life. Despite his unconventional views and lifestyle, his poems were widely read in the more strait-laced and conventional later nineteenth century.

Some of his Works

• Zastrozzi (1810)
• St Irvyne (1810)
• The Necessity of Atheism (1811)
• Queen Mab: a Philosophical Poem (1813)
• Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815)
• Mont Blanc (1816)
• Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1817)
• Laon and Cythna (1817)
• The Revolt of Islam (1817)
• Ozymandias (1818)
• Plato, The Banquet (or Symposium) - translation from Plato (1818)
• The Cenci (1819)
• Ode to the West Wind (1819)
• The Masque of Anarchy (1819)
• Men of England (1819)
• England in 1819 (1819)
• The Witch of Atlas (1819)
• A Philosophical View of Reform (1819)
• Julian and Maddalo (1819)
• Prometheus Unbound (1820)
• To a Skylark (1820)
• Adonais (1821)
• Hellas (1821)
• A Defence of Poetry (published in 1840)
• The Triumph of Life (1822, unfinished, published posthumously in 1824)