Percy Bysshe Shelly

-By Yash

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLY

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some critics as amongst the finest lyric poets in the English language.

Shelly’s major works

Shelley is best known for such classic poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy. His other major works include long, visionary poems such as Queen Mab (later reworked as The Daemon of the World), Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, the unfinished work The Triumph of Life; and the visionary verse dramas The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820).

EDUCATION  He received his early education at

home, tutored by the Reverend Evan Edwards of nearby Warnham. His cousin and lifelong friend Thomas Medwin, who lived nearby, recounted his early childhood in his "The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley". It was a happy and contented childhood spent largely in country pursuits such as fishing and hunting.

PERCY’S EARLIER WORKS He began writing some short fiction pieces. In

the course of his first and only year at Oxford University, in England (1810–1811), Shelley and a friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg issued a pamphlet provocatively entitled "The Necessity of Atheism (the belief that there is no God)." Both students were expelled from the university. This event intensified Shelley's rebelliousness against accepted notions of law and order, both in his private life and in government. In the summer of 1811 Shelley met and married Harriet Westbrook

MarriageIn 1810, Percy Shelley went to University College in Oxford. In 1811 he met and eloped to Edinburgh with Harriet Westbrook and, one year later, went with her and her older sister to Dublin, then to Devon and North Wales, where they stayed for six months into 1813. They married, and one year later, in 1814. However, with the birth of two children, their collapsed and he eloped once again, this time with Mary Godwin

SHELLEY'S FIRST POEMS

Shelley attempted to communicate his views on politics other topics in the poem "Queen Mab" (1813). Though an immature poem, nevertheless, it contained the germ of his mature philosophy: that throughout the cosmos there is "widely diffused / A spirit of activity and life," an omnipresent (being everywhere) energy that, unless misguided by people's lust for power, can lead humankind to paradise.

By the summer of 1814 Shelley had become closely involved with Mary Godwin (1797–1851). In late July Shelley left his wife and ran away to continental Europe with Godwin. In 1816, they married. The same year, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein .

FINAL POEMS AND PROSE WORKS

Shelley's concern with promoting the cause of freedom was genuine, but his personality found a more compatible outlet in his "visionary rhymes." In his poems the almost mystical concepts of oneness and love, of poetry and brotherhood are expressed. Such themes remained the source of his inspiration to the last. As he was nearing his thirtieth year, he wrote with a more urgent yet less harsh sense of the unbridgeable gap between the ideal and the real. He movingly expressed this sense in "The Sensitive Plant" (1820) and in the poem that he composed on the death of John Keats (1795–1821), "Adonais" (1821).

PERCY’S DEATH On 8 July 1822, less than a month

before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Leghorn (Livorno) to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with the newly arrived Leigh Hunt. The name "Don Juan", a compliment to Byron, was chosen by Edward John Trelawny, a member of the Shelley–Byron Pisan circle. However, according to Mary Shelley's testimony, Shelley changed it to "Ariel".