Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography

Short Percy Shelley biography: Percy Bysshe Shelley was a renowned English Romantic poet, and some historians consider him to be the best lyrical poetry ever written in the English language. Long visionary poems like Adonais and Prometheus Unbound were among Shelley's major works, but he is perhaps best known for anthology pieces like Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy.

Shelley's unconventional life and romantic idealism made him a notorious and reviled figure in his own time, but he became an idol for later generations of poets such as William Butler Yeats and major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Shelley was also noted for his friendship with John Keats and Lord Byron, two of his contemporaries. Shelley married novelist Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Shelley's rebellious nature led him to defy social conventions in the name of freedom and individual expression, and both he and Lord Byron experimented with ideas of free love, leaving a path of pain in their wake, including Shelley's first wife's death. Shelley's animating spirit, Romanticism, was eloquently articulated in his poetry, but his life highlighted the perils of love understood only as an inner necessity, unrestrained by commitment or the needs and dependence of others.

In this article, we are going to delve into Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography and get to know more about the life and works of PB Shelley.

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Information about Percy Bysshe Shelley Poet Biography

Birthdate: 4 August 1792

Birthplace: Horsham, Sussex, England

Deathdate: 8 July 1822

Death place: Gulf of La Spezia, Kingdom of Sardinia (now Italy)

Nationality: English

Spouse: Harriet Westbrook ​(m. 1811; died 1816) Mary Shelley ​(m. 1816)

Age: 29 years old

Is there an autobiography of PB Shelley? No

Life history of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Shelley Life

Sir Timothy Shelley (who would become the second baronet of Castle Goring) and Elizabeth Pilfold had a son named Percy Bysshe Shelley. He grew up in Sussex and obtained his early education from Reverend Thomas Edwards of Horsham, who schooled him at home. In 1802, he enrolled in Brentford's Sion House Academy, then in 1804, he enrolled at Eton College, where he remained until 1810. He enrolled in Oxford University on April 10 of that year (University College).

Shelley's first novel, Zastrozzi, was published in 1810, and it was via the evil title character that he expressed his atheistic worldview. Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire was published in the same year by Shelley and his sister Elizabeth. After attending Oxford, Shelley published Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, a collection of superficially humorous (but actually subversive) verses. Some speculate that a fellow college student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, was his accomplice.

Shelley's controversial pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, published in 1811, was an attack on authoritarian institutions that drew the attention of the school administration. Shelley and Hogg were expelled from Oxford on March 25, 1811, for refusing to appear before the school's administration. Shelley may have been restored if he had recanted his opinions when his father intervened. Shelley's refusal to do so, on the other hand, resulted in a total estrangement from his father.

Percy Shelley biography: Marriage and "free love"

Shelley eloped to Scotland with 16-year-old schoolgirl Harriet Westbrook, daughter of John Westbrook, a coffee-house keeper in London, four months after being expelled. Shelley allowed his undergraduate classmate Hogg and his wife to live with them after their marriage on August 28, 1811, in the style of what is euphemistically known as "open marriage" or "free love." Shelley abandoned his attempt when his wife disapproved and took Harriet to England's Lake District, where he hoped to write. Instead, he became sidetracked by political events and travelled to Ireland to engage in radical pamphleteering, attracting the wrath of the British government.

Shelley wrote and released Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem during the next two years. The poem reflects the influence of William Godwin, a freethinking radical English philosopher. Shelley would frequently leave his 19-year-old wife at home to care for their two children at this time, preferring to spend his time in Godwin's home and bookshop in London, possibly because of his interest in Godwin's daughter, Mary. Mary Wollstonecraft's mother was the renowned feminist educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died while giving birth to her daughter.

Shelley abandoned his wife and children in July 1814 and eloped for the second time with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, accompanied by her stepsister Jane (later Claire) Clairmont, both of whom were just 16 years old at the time. The trio set off for Europe, crossing France on their way to Switzerland. The Shelleys will subsequently write a book about their adventures. The three young people returned to England after six weeks, homesick and destitute. They were welcomed there by an irate Godwin, the one-time champion and practitioner of "free love," who now refused to talk to his "free-loving" daughter, resulting in the breakdown of yet another parent-child bond.

Shelley wrote the poetry allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, in the autumn of 1815, while residing near London with Mary and escaping creditors. He was influenced by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. It received little notice at the time, but it is now considered his first major poetry. Shelley would return to the poetry job of describing the romantic ideal of global peace, presuming to actualize the reign of "love and freedom" in human society through a series of self-serving relationships, beginning around this time.

Move to the Continent

Shelley and Mary, took a second trip to Switzerland in the summer of 1816, prompted by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont. Clairmont had met Lord Byron in April of the previous year, just before Byron's self-exile on the continent. Byron, on the other hand, quickly lost interest in Claire and cut her off, but not before she had enticed Shelley and Mary to Geneva. On the banks of Lake Geneva, the Shelleys and Byron rented adjacent houses. Shelley's poetry was energised by his regular conversations with Byron. Shelley's first substantial work since Alastor, the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, was inspired by a boating trip the two took together.

Suicides and Second Marriage

Tragic events overshadowed his return to England. In the late autumn, Fanny Imlay, Mary Godwin's half-sister and a member of Godwin's household, committed suicide. Harriet Shelley, Shelley's estranged and ostensibly pregnant wife, drowned herself in the Serpentine at Hyde Park, London, in December 1816. Shelley and Mary Godwin married on December 30, 1816. The marriage was partly meant to assist Shelley to retain custody of his children from Harriet, but it was in vain: the children were placed with foster parents by the courts.

The Shelleys settled in the Buckinghamshire village of Marlow, near Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock. Shelley was a member of Leigh Hunt's literary group and met John Keats there. Laon and Cythna, a large narrative poem that challenged religion and depicted a pair of incestuous lovers, was Shelley's major work at the time. After only a few copies were printed, it was quickly pulled, then modified and reprinted as The Revolt of Islam in 1818. Under the pseudonym "The Hermit of Marlow," Shelley produced two revolutionary political writings.

Move to Italy

The Shelleys and Claire left England in early 1818 to transport Claire's daughter, Allegra, to her father, Byron, who had relocated to Venice. Shelley was inspired to write once more after meeting with the elder and more established poet. Julian and Maddalo, a barely disguised representation of his boat voyages and chats with Byron in Venice, finished with a visit to a madhouse, was written in the latter half of the year. Shelley's "urbane style" first appeared in this poem. He then wrote Prometheus Unbound, an epic verse drama with talking mountains and a petulant demon who overthrows Zeus. Shelley died in Rome from a fever, and his infant daughter died the following year during yet another home move.

During this time, the Shelleys lived in a variety of Italian cities. In Rome, Shelley finished Prometheus Unbound and spent the summer of 1819 in Livorno writing The Cenci, a tragedy. The Peterloo Massacre occurred this year, and it appears to have influenced Shelley's best-known political poems, The Masque of Anarchy, Men of England, and The Witch of Atlas. His most popular piece at the time, The Witch, is undoubtedly his most well-known. The essay The Philosophical View of Reform is the most extensive explication of his political views. In 1821, he penned Adonais, an elegy to John Keats.

Shelley arranged for Leigh Hunt, a poet and editor who had been one of Shelley's early supporters in England, and his family to travel to Italy in 1822. Shelley wanted to collaborate with Byron and Hunt on the development of The Liberal, which would be edited by Hunt. The journal was envisioned as a vehicle for them to distribute their provocative writings and take on conservative publications like Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review.

Shelley's death at 29

Shelley was sailing back from Livorno (where he had recently set up The Liberal) to Lerici aboard his schooner (the Don Juan) on July 8, 1822 (less than a month before his 30th birthday). The yacht has a fascinating backstory. As a homage to Bryon, Edward Trelawny (a member of Shelley's literary group) christened the boat the Don Juan. Shelley changed the name to Ariel because she disliked it. Byron became irritated and had the name Don Juan painted on the mainsail, which the Shelleys found offensive. After all, it was the Shelleys' boat. Some sense irony in these seemingly insignificant quarrels between those who consider themselves designed to guide others through their philosophical and political writings.

Despite the fact that this yacht was custom-built for Shelley in Genoa, Mary Shelley asserted in her "Note on Poems of 1822" (1839) that the boat's construction had a flaw and was never seaworthy. The boat did not capsize but sank when a severe storm sprang up, and Shelley drowned.

Shelley's body washed up on the beach near Viareggio, where he was eventually cremated. Edward Trelawny took his heart from the funeral pyre, unconsumed, and kept it until Mary Shelley died, while his ashes were placed in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, beneath a tower in the city walls. In University College, Oxford a reclining statue of the drowning Shelley by artist Edward Onslow Ford may be found.

Poetry

Shelley's lyrical output, like that of many other Romantic poets, was under-appreciated during his short life. His impact on English poetry, on the other hand, would be enormous. He became typical of the Romantic era's ardent, youthful, troubled creativity in both his outlandish life and his brilliantly fantastic poetry. Shelley was, according to Yeats, his single greatest influence and one of the finest poets in English history.

Shelley was associated with the Lake School Poets, and he did live in the Lake District at one point during his career. He certainly shares Wordsworth's disdain of overly ornamented poetic forms in favour of simpler, prose-like lines, the "language truly employed by men." What he didn't have with Wordsworth was his tolerance, if not appreciation, for older poetic traditions. Shelley thought that the old must continually be tossed out to create room for the new, both in his life and in his poems. He aspired to paint natural objects in dazzling colours from his imagination. His poem "Mont Blanc" is the clearest illustration of this.

Shelley, on the other hand, cannot be classified as a Lake Poet. In his poetry, he doesn't have any of Wordsworth's pastoral lyricism, which he described as "pictures of humble and rustic life (where) the vital passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can realise their maturity." Nature occurs in Shelley's poetry in the form of a volcano, a mountain peak, or a hurricane: majestic, powerful, and out of the ordinary. Furthermore, supernatural and mythological epics make up a large part of Shelley's mature work. Shelley's masterpiece in this genre, Prometheus Unbound, is a prime example.