PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

(1792-1822)

BACKGROUND

  • August 4, 1792

    • Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex

  • *family = Sussex aristocrats* (since early 17thC)

  • grandfather (Sir Bysshe Shelley) =

    • richest man in Horsham

  • father =

    • Timothy: hard-headed, conventional, conservative,

    • member of Parliament

  • mother = Elizabeth

  • 1 brother, 4 sisters

  • PBS = eldest son

    • --> was to inherit grandfather's great estate *

    • (in line for a baronetcy)

    • --> was to inherit a seat in Parliament *

  • 1804-10:

    • attended Eton College (began writing poetry)

    • fitted his station and future

    • *** PBS = bullied:

    • PBS = “slight of build, eccentric in manner, and unskilled in sports or fighting, and as a consequence was mercilessly baited by older and stronger boys. Even then he saw the petty tyranny of schoolmasters and schoolmates as representative of man’s general inhumanity to man, and dedicated his life to a war against injustice and oppression.” ***

    • “mad Shelley”: b/c of his moodiness, shyness, eccentricity, resentful of authority

    • later recounted these years in the dedication to Laon/Revolt:

    • “...‘I will be wise, / And just, and free, and mild, ... / ... for I grow weary to behold / The selfish and the strong still tyrannize / Without reproach or check.’...” (Norton p.1716)

  • 1810: attended Oxford University

  • 1810: published his 1st novel:

    • Zastrozzi

    • Gothic novel

    • title villain = atheist & heretic

    • PBS used Zastrozzi to voice his own opinions

  • 1810: published pamphlet of poetry

    • “Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson”

    • collection of burlesque poetry

    • along with Thomas Jefferson Hogg:

      • another Oxford student

      • self-confident, self-centered

      • shared PBS's love of philosophy & scorn for orthodoxy

  • 1810: published more poetry

    • Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire

    • along with his sister Elizabeth

  • 1811: more creative output, more pamphlets

  • “The Necessity of Atheism”

  • along with JT Hogg

  • “claimed existence of God cannot be proved on empirical grounds” (Norton 1716)

    • *got him expelled from Oxford University

    • (after only 6 months)

    • *could have been reinstated with his father's aide

    • BUT Shelley refused to disavow the pamphlet, declare himself a Christian

    • --> led to a complete break with his father

    • --> $$$$$$ problems for the next 2 years, until he came of age (to inherit)

    • moved to London

  • 1811: PBS = 19

    • eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, 16

    • whom PBS took as a cause to fight injustice:

      • her father, a tavern keeper, had “persecuted her” (PBS) by forcing her to attend school

      • (she = a cause for PBS to fight, not woman to love)

      • ???: PBS believed that marriage was tyrannical & degrading as a social institution (KATE CHOPIN), yet he still married her??

    • moved frequently, lived off allowances from their families (given reluctantly)

  • 1812: travelled to Ireland:

    • to deliver his Address to the Irish People

    • to join the Irish Catholic emancipation movement

    • to help the oppressed & impoverished people

    • (injustice, anti-establishment, socialism)

  • 1812:

    • settled in to England's Lake District, to study, to write

  • 1813: published his 1st serious & long work

  • Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem

    • prophetic poem

    • the journey of a disembodied soul through space

    • Mab shows it visions of a woeful past, dreadful present, utopian future

    • * Mab:  institutional religion (“there is no God!”) & codified morality = roots of social evil

    • (* see BLAKE *)

    • * Mab: “humanity will follow goddess of Necessity, institutions will wither away, and humanity will return to its natural condition of goodness and felicity” (Romanticism*)

    • (Norton 1717)

    • reflects PBS’ friendship with & influence from William Godwin, radical freethinking Socialist philosopher

    • *began love affair with Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin)

 

  • ?? PBS’ convictions:

  • marriage = tyrannical & degrading (but marries 2x),

  • cohabitation w/o love = immoral (so abandoned Harriet)

  • nonexclusive love (marries 2x) then invites Harriet to come & live with him & Mary in France, as a “sister”!

  • Godwin = upset, BUT PBS had taken over his debts even though he himself was in bad finances, BUT Godwin was against marriage & for free love (just not with his daughter!!)

  • --> PBS = an atheist, revolutionary, & immoralist in eyes of society, friends, family

  • --> when he eventually married Mary & moved to Italy, PBS saw himself in the role of ** ALIEN, OUTCAST, scorned & rejected by the very people (humanity) to whom he had dedicated his life with serving their welfare -- a Prometheus (Norton 1717)

 BACKGROUND

  • 1814: PBS and Mary eloped to Europe

    • ran out of money $$$$

    • returned to England

    • November of 1814, Harriet gave birth to their son

  • 1815:

    • February, 4 months later, Mary gave birth prematurely to their son who died 2 weeks later

    • ** PBS's grandfather died --> PBS inherited $$$$$

      • wasted most of it helping William Godwin, Leigh Hunt , and others pay their debts

  • 1816: January, Mary gave birth to another son, William, after her father

    • PBS and Mary moved to Lake Geneva, Switzerland

    • spent time with Lord Byron (George Gordon)

    • ghost stories

    • Byron's contest: each write a ghost story

    • Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    • PBS: Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, a verse allegory

  • December of 1816:

    • Harriet Shelley (pregnant by some unknown lover) apparently committed suicide, drowning herself in a fit of despair in a London park lake

    • PBS and Mary “officially” married 3 weeks later

    • PBS lost custody of the 2 children he had with Harriet, b/c of his "free love" ideas

  • ** public scorn against PBS --> his feelings as alien, exile

    • (1960s hippies: free love, swingers, elopement, anti-establishment, atheist, socialist)

  • 1817:

    • PBS wrote & published Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem

    • poem = pulled b/c of references to incest & attacks on religion

  • 1818:

    • Laon = edited, revised, republished as The Revolt of Islam

    • PBS and Mary leave England for the last time

  • 1818-19:

    • within a 9-month period, 2 children died: Clara & William (children of PBS & Mary)

    • --> her into an apathetic & self-absorbed state, strained their marriage,

    • not helped even by birth of another son (Percy Florence)

  • 1818-1822:

    • moved around Italian cities

    • friends with Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt (English poet)

    • ** period of PBS's greatest works

      • in a period of financial & emotional strain ($$, kids) and without an audience

  • 1819/20: Prometheus Unbound (masterpiece)

  • 1819/20:

    • The Cenci

    • numerous lyric poems (his best):

      • “Ode to the West Wind,”

      • “Ozymandias,”

      • “Ode to a Skylark,”

      • “The Cloud”

    • The Mask of Anarchy (call for proletarian revolution)

    • Peter Bell the Third (satire on WW)

    • A Philosophical View of Reform (political essay)

    • A Defense of Poetry

    • Epipsychidion (love as union beyond earthly limits)

      • see John Donne, American Transcendentalists

    • Hellas (lyrical drama evoked by the Greek war for liberation from the Turks, in which, like Mab, he prophesied a coming golden age)

  • PBS at Pisa:

  • the “Pisan Circle” of friends =

    • Lord Byron, Edward Trelawny,

    • Edward Williams (whose wife, Jane, PBS carried on flirtations & to whom he addressed some of his lyrics)

  • DEATH:

  • July 8, 1822 (29)

  • less than a month before his 30th birthday

  • drowned (along with Edward Williams)

  • while trying to sail his schooner Don Juan in a storm

  • from Leghorn to their summer house near Lerici, on the Gulf of Spezia, Tuscany, Italy

    • violent squall swamped their boat ("Open Boat")

    • washed ashore after several (10) days

    • volume of Keats in one pocket

    • volume of Sophocles in another pocket

    • cremated, in pyre upon the beach (Shore of Via Reggio)

      • his heart refused to burn??

      • heart given to wife, Mary (found among her belongings when she died in 1851)

  • Byron:

    • friend, fellow exile

    • swam out to watch the flames

    • of PBS he said: "the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison." (EIL 397)

  • ashes = (after stored in British Consul’s wine cellar) buried in Rome's Protestant cemetery, near the graves of William Shelley (his son) and John Keats

  • heart buried near Mary, in St Peter's Churchyard, Bournemouth

o       Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford

THEMES

  • radical nonconformist

  • hippie, free love, anti-establishment

  • restlessness: w/Harriet as newly weds, w/Mary in Italy

    • frequent moves (Poe, Hawthorne, Crane)

  • freedom: Irish, Greek liberation movements

  • millennialist: Mab, Hellas

    • ring: “Il buon tempo verra” (the good time will come)

  • like BLAKE: power of imagination; redemptive power of love

  • like BYRON: leaves England, feels like an outcast, alien
     

THEMES

  • against social injustice

  • against institutions

  • future = hopeful, utopic, millennial

  • power of hope, love, imagination

  • ---------------------------------------

  • * “The Wall”

  • * “The Authority Song”

  • * Springsteen & the power of love as religion

  • ** common theme of PBS poetry:   nothing lasts

    • “Mutability”

    • “Intellectual Beauty”

    • “Ozymandias”
       

STYLE

  • (-):

  • intellectual & emotional immaturity

  • shoddy workmanship

  • inconsistent/incoherent imagery

  • (+):

  • multiple genres

    • no fixed mental position (ceaseless exploration);

    • even his unfinished The Triumph of Life promised to move in a different direction

  • structure to his symbolism

  • expanded the “metrical & stanzaic resources of verse” (N 1719)

  • range of voice:

    • controlled passion of “West Wind”

    • heroic dignity of Prometheus

    • approximation of the inexpressible w/Asia's transfiguration

    • Adonis's visionary conclusion

  • urbanity

  • “effortless command of the tone & language of a cultivated man of the world” (N 1719)

  • all w/o an audience

    • (Norton 1719)


  •  

STYLE

MATURE PBS =

  • *mature works = informed by

    • his voracious reading

    • tragic deaths of children

    • outcast from society

    • constant philosophical thinking/considering...

      • PBS = an erudite poet

  • *changed ideologies:

    • turned from Gothic novels & radical optimists of late-18thC

    • to Greek tragedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Bible (!!)

    • millennialist; religious

  • evils of society = humanity's own moral failures;

  • radical social reform =

    • now based on a prior reform of morality & imaginative faculties through the redeeming power of LOVE

    • (BLAKE)

  • Plato & Neo-Platonist: 2 worlds:

    • (1) criterion world of perfect & eternal Forms, Ideal world;

    • (2) ordinary world of change, mortality, evil, suffering; a world of sense experience that is but a distant & illusory reflection of the Ideal World

  • David Hume & Empiricists:

    • (tempered his Platonism)

    • *limit of human knowledge

    • limited to valid reasoning based on sense experience only

    • --> Hume's radical skepticism

  • skeptical idealist:

    • Platonism + Empiricism + Hume's Radical Skepticism

    • --> imagination that transcends experience = ideal

      • but unlikely/rare, limits of human knowledge

  • --> HOPE

    • ** “...the HOPE in the ultimate redemption of life by LOVE and imagination is not a certainty but a moral obligation.  We must cling to hope b/c its contrary, despair about human possibility, is self-fulfilling, by ensuring the permanence of the conditions before which the mind has surrendered its aspirations.  HOPE does not guarantee achievement, but it keeps open the possibility of achievement, and so releases the imaginative and creative powers that are its only available means.” (Norton 1718)

    • hope vs. despair, love & imagination/creativity

    • despair

      • thwarts imagination, the only means of achieving, creating, improving;

      • thus despair = self-fulfilling prophecy

    • despair --> psychic paralysis

      • (mental, spiritual, emotional)

      • "can't change things, anything, the world, people"...so nothing gets done

    • imagination/creativity = transcend experience, senses

LINKS LINKS