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Percy Bysshe Shelley, from the early 19 th century, was the most determinedly professional writer of all the English Romantic poets. This is seen in not only his symphonic poems like the Ode to the West Wind, his lyrical sonnets such as Lines written among the Euganean Hills amongst The Cloud, To a Skylark and many others, his political rhymes like The Revolt of Islam and Queen Mab and his narrative verses like Adonai's, Alastor and Epipsychidion. It is also obvious in his poetic dramas with Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci as prime examples and his famous essay The Defense of Poetry. In Shelley s view, the poet is a dreamer, a visionary who must use these dreams and visions to persuade men to shake off the chains of the past, of custom, of selfishness, and to press onward to the vital task of constructing a world characterized by kindness, generosity, and love.
Shelley was born the eldest son of a wealthy squire on August 4 th, 1792 at Field Place near Horsham. He attended Eton, the most famous of the English public schools, where he was bullied by older boys and resented their tyranny and became determined to fight against all forms of tyranny. At university, Shelley began reading books by radical political writers due to the influence of Sir Francis Burdett, the radical M. P who he met through his father and who really impressed him.
He read the book Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, by William Godwin who was an atheist and anarchist. Godwin s optimistic view of the nature of man appealed to Shelley s native idealism, his readiness to believe the best of man. Following the example of the master, Shelley became an atheist. Then came the Necessity of Atheism, a pamphlet expressing his support of Atheism and attacking the idea that Christianity is forced upon people.
March 25 th, 1811 would be the date that Oxford University expelled Shelley for these pamphlets. Shelley then moved to Scotland with his sixteen-year-old bride Harriet Westbrook e creating a terrible scandal which he never received his father s forgiveness for. Revolutionary speeches on politics and religion in Ireland was next for Shelley and after his A Declaration of Rights pamphlet on the French Revolution was deemed too radical, he returned to England to pursue radical politics. He met William Godwin whom, by this time; he had developed a philosophical correspondence with, renewed his friendship with Leigh Hunt and realized he couldn t handle having only one woman in his life. Shelley formed a strong friendship with Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont and spent a lot of time with them. During this time the feelings between Mary and Percy developed into mutual passion and Shelley was torn between his loyalty for his wife and his love for Mary in the end he chose Mary.
After revealing this to William Godwin, who was appalled by the whole thing, Mary and Percy ran off together with Jane too. Percy and Mary then got married after Harriet committed suicide, but the two would only be married for six years seeing Shelley the died on July 8 th, 1822. Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned while sailing at the age of thirty. The Ode to the West Wind is the most symphonic poem in the English Language, says Stephen Spender. The poem published with Prometheus Unbound in 1820 is written with the verse form, terms rima, like the Dante poem Divine Comedy which to a lower extent had an influence on Shelley for this work: The stanza is made up of interlinking three-line units with the rhyme scheme a b a b c b c d c, continuing thus to the end of the stanza: O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn s being, (a) Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead (b) Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, (a) Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, (b) Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, (c) Who chariots to their dark wintry bed (b) The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, (modified c) Each like a corpse within its grave, until (d) Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow (modified c) Her clarion o er the dreaming earth, and fill (d) (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) (e) With living hues and odours plain and hill (d) Wild spirits, which art moving everywhere; (e) Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! (modified e) According to Shelley, one day a particular tempestuous wind past him while he was in a wood by the Arno River that flows through Florence. In this particular poem, Shelley takes a vision and stretches it to the point that it should awaken thoughts about the future: Scatter, as from an un extinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind, If Winter comes, can spring be far behind? The first two stanzas, which have irregular sonnets (modified c and e), carry the type of movement, the gust if you will, of the wind. The third talks about the slowing down of the movement, while the next resumes with the movement from the first stanza and the poem culminates in a magnificent trumpet blast the trumpet of a prophecy, indeed.
From the first line Many a green isle needs must be the writing is sombrely coloured, as the mariner travels on through the sea scattered with flowing islands which lie In the waters of wide Agony. Shelley is often criticized about his flawed metaphors but reading Lines written among the Euganean Hills, perhaps his lyrical masterpiece, no criticisms can be made. The Cloud is another great lyrical poem which exhibits one of his boyhood interests, natural phenomena, which is especially obvious in this, the final stanza, of the poem: I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the sky; I pass through the pores of the oceans and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a strain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. While at Eton, Shelley read widely in books to do with science itself and scientific issues in the world and, the very fact reminds us that Romanticism cannot be looked at exclusively as a rebellion against the eighteenth century. The new science, for example, helped to shape the neoclassical imagination; it continued to have a strong impact on the Romantic imagination.
To a Skylark, a reflection on the bond of poets to reality, is not a descriptive poem at all, unlike most of his other lyrical rhymes. The skylark is: Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it headed not. The unpopularity of his ideas in many of his works is what it seems he is talking about in this definition of a skylark. The skylark, or a least what it is, is very important to Shelley. With it, he expresses that we have to find ways to understand each other and we must learn compassion.
Shelley concludes by directly relating the skylark to his own mission as poet: Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips with flow The world should listen then- as I am listening now. Religions are wicked, kings are cruel and unnecessary, the spirit of man must be liberated are the main topics brought up with temperance, vegetarianism, and republicanism as secondary themes. It is written in some rhyme less verse of an irregular pattern intermingled with blank verse and after being published in May 1813, it created a sensation by it s violent radicalism. It is Queen Mab, Shelley s first significant yet obscene poem with no poetic grace, which would later be his trademark. When he moved back to London in 1813, Shelley met with William Godwin and completed this poem. This poem seems to have made an attempt to bring a political thought or vision together with a poetic one.
Even though a very daring attempt, one of the most daring experiments in the poetry of the last two hundred years, it fails to do so. In 1817 came Shelley s next revolutionary pamphlet The Revolt of Islam, a long poem of nearly five thousand lines, divided into twelve cantos and composed in Spenserian stanzas. Shelley himself described the poem as follows: It is a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind; its influence in refining and making pure the most daring and uncommon impulses of the imagination, the understanding, and the sense; it s impatience at all the oppressions that lie under the sun: its tendency to awaken public hope, and to enlighten and improve mankind The poem starts with a review of the main events of the French Revolution which lead into the confusing story of Laon and Cythna, two strong-minded youths who are burned at the stake. The poem shows that the failure of the French Revolution had not dampened Shelley s passionate interest in reform. At the same time it shows that for all of his fiery idealism he was able to recognize the facts of life. Shelley and Keats, two world-renowned poets, had admired some of each others works but were never became intimate or close friends or acquaintances.
Adonai's, considered after Lycidas, John Milton s famous elegy composed on the occasion of the death of his friend, Edward King, to be the greatest of English elegies, was Shelley s tribute to Keats. The tribute seemed to be motivated more by Keats availability as a misunderstood slain virtuoso than by the death of Keats the person or friend etc. Adonai's was the name Shelley gave to Keats in this piece and is designed to suggest Adonis of Greek legend: A beautiful youth beloved by Aphrodite, goddess of love, Adonis was killed by a wild boar. He was restored to life by Proserpine on the condition that he spend six months of the year with her and the other six months with Aphrodite.
Proserpine, it will be recalled, lived part of her life in the underworld and is thus a symbol of winter, of the death of the year. Aphrodite symbolizes birth, Spring, and Summer; Keats is dead but will live on forever. Even though this poem or elegy is perhaps one of Shelley s most beautiful works, critics still look down upon certain aspects of it. This poem is impressive as a frieze in its development and execution, but, beautiful as it is, I find the materiel too heavily stylized to be entirely suited to the rapid shifts of Shelley s sensibility. The effect is sculpture in stone, when Shelley works best in light and air, criticizes Stephen Spender. This seems to have more significance than usual seeing Keats, his entire career, couldn t shake the chains of critics, which lead to his demise, and tittle of misunderstood genius in the end.
Shelley was trying to portray this aspect in Adonai's and it seems he was so caught up in the character of Keats while composing this elegy, he himself had to suffer the choke of a quick pull of the chain for praising one who is looked down upon. In the spring of 1815, Shelley was convinced he was suffering from a fatal disease and was dying, this left him in a gloom depressing state. The melancholy that attended this conviction can be detected in Alastor, generally looked upon as the first of Shelley s really important poems. The poem is about the search of ideal beauty in the world and inability to find it while searching for it.
Alastor is a spirit who frustrates the hopes of the central character of the poem, identified as the Poet In this poem Shelley first exhibits his interest in Greek philosophy, especially the philosopher Plato, and himself as a dreamer. Alastor also provides sighs of self-pity: The lone couch of his everlasting sleep: Gentle, and brave, and generous, -no lorn bard Breathed o er his dark fate one melodious sigh: He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. The poem shows how much the sensitive, well-meaning poet has been bruised by the world, the poet in the story not being Shelley himself but perhaps Shelley s feelings, ideas and works to this point in his life. Shelley s dreamer state first seen in Alastor is especially obvious in Epipsychidion. The poem, written in 1820 - 1821, was inspired by his meeting of and falling in love with nineteen year old Emilia Vivian who he felt much compassion for due to the fact that she was stuck in an arranged marriage even though such acts were customary in Italy at that time: Poor captive bird!
who, from thy narrow cage, Poorest such music, that it might assuage The rugged hearts of those who prisoner thee, Were they not deaf to all sweet melody Epipsychidion means, soul upon soul, in other words, he and Emilia are souls that belong together. It is a poem about the search for the Ideal, a desperate search in this case. This poem contains Shelley s philosophy of love, yet it is so stretched it cannot possibly be a definition of a woman, in this poem he came as near as is possible to expressing the inexpressible, and tracing the path where poetry tapers off into a vision which is beyond words. Prometheus Unbound was begun in 1818, completed in 1819 and published in 1820 and is universally acknowledged the most eloquent and persuasive of Shelley s lyrical profession of faith in human nature Prometheus Unbound is Shelley s sequel to Prometheus Bound written by Aeschylus, an early Greek dramatist.
Prometheus Bound tells the story of a titan, Prometheus, who reveals the secret of fire to man, this made him the rival of Zeus who took vengeance on him. Shelley s Prometheus is a noble champion of the rights of man who remains fearless when confronted by the threats of the cruel and vengeful Jupiter (other name for Zeus). This brings back Shelley to his childhood days at Eton where he was bullied and at Oxford where he read radical books and was expelled due to his beliefs. The story has to do with the liberation of Prometheus, who can be looked at as humanity, from Jupiter s vengeful grasp, who represents the tyranny of rulers and beliefs.
Prometheus is victorious in the end: This, like the glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. The Cenci, written in 1819 and published in 1820, is not only Shelley s best poetic drama, as drama, but one of the best plays of the 19 th century. Lyrical wise, it cannot overtake Prometheus Unbound but the story has such character development, action and twists it is considered his best drama. It is often compared to the great Macbeth, and many other glorious plays of the Elizabethan age seeing it was a deliberate attempt to imitate them.
To compare it to Macbeth, however, is to overpraise its excellence. Time has proved it to be a better closet-drama (a consciously literary performance designed to be read by an individual reader rather than acted or performed) than true stage play. As a boy, Shelley enjoyed the tales of terror, and during the Romantic period, there was a taste for violence and the electrifying, the sensational and the melodramatic, The Cenci caters to all those mentioned. The beginning of Shelley s preface gives a taste of this: The story is, that an old man, having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which showed itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion, aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to kill their common tyrant. The young maiden, who was urged to this tremendous deed by an impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gently and amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion.
The deed was quickly discovered, and, in spite of the most earnest players made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome, the criminals were put to death. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, states Shelley s famous The Defense of Poetry essay. The essay is an examination of his own poetry and poetry in general and his main beliefs lie in the following passage: We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economic knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce, which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know. Shelley is stating how advanced a poet s mind is, he believes that humanity lies in the imagination or imaginative life of all humans and poets are the most imaginative of the all artistic breeds. He hopes that poetry will become a meeting-place of the things that affect a modern society.
Thus poetry would be continuously revolutionized from generation to generation to have this continuing affect, yet will hopefully retain the traditions on which poetry was created and its power not be abused in the process: Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. Percy Bysshe Shelley was none existent to me before this essay, I never had the chance to read such masterpieces like Epipsychidion, The Cloud, Ode to the West Wind, Love s Philosophy, The Indian Serenade, Lines written among the Euganean Hills to name a few. Even though I am an amateur poetry reader at the most, I am still able to read his works and receive some personal satisfaction and a more profound meaning, though not to the extent as he had hoped, about the topics and themes of his rhymes. Was Percy Bysshe Shelley a true romantic?
It really doesn t matter. Percy achieved so much in his short life of thirty years; it would be a great injustice to only remember this genius for his romanticism. Percy stood for so much, whether it is right or wrong by today s standard is irrelevant, the relevancy is that he believed in what he was doing and we could all learn something from this man who was so much more than a simple poet. He was a visionary, a dreamer, and he did use his visions and dreams to the best of his ability to persuade men to shake off the chains of the past, of custom, of selfishness, and to press onward to the vital task of constructing a world characterized by kind ness, generosity, and love.
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