177- ] English Literature
Percey Bysshe Shelley
Literary
Career , Life & Romanticism
The
life and works of Percy Bysshe Shelley exemplify English Romanticism in both
its extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair. Romanticism’s major
themes—restlessness and brooding, rebellion against authority, interchange with
nature, the power of the visionary imagination and of poetry, the pursuit of
ideal love, and the untamed spirit ever in search of freedom—all of these
Shelley exemplified in the way he lived his life and live on in the substantial
body of work that he left the world after his legendary death by drowning at
age 29. From the beginning of his writing career at the age of 17, throughout
his life, and even to the present day, the very name of Shelley has evoked
either the strongest vehemence or the warmest praise, bordering on worship.
More than any other English Romantic writer, with the possible exception of his
friend George Gordon, Lord Byron, Shelley’s life and reputation have had a
history and life of their own apart from the reputation of his various works,
and one that contiued to evolve even after his death from drowning at the age
of 29. Born on August 4, 1792—the year of the Terror in France—Percy Bysshe
Shelley (the “Bysshe” from his grandfather, a peer of the realm) was the son of
Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley. As the elder son among one brother, John, and
four sisters, Elizabeth, Mary, Margaret, and Hellen, Percy stood in line not
only to inherit his grandfather’s considerable estate but also to sit in
Parliament one day. In his position as oldest male child, young Percy was
beloved and admired by his sisters, his parents, and even the servants in his
early reign as young lord of Field Place, the family home near Horsham, Sussex.
Playful and imaginative, he devised games to play with his sisters and told
ghost stories to an enrapt and willing-to-be-thrilled audience.
However,
the idyllic and receptive world of Field Place did not prepare him for the
regimented discipline and the taunting boys of Syon House Academy, which
Shelley entered in 1802. Here Shelley was subjected to the usual bullying, made
all the worse by his failure to control his temper and his poor skills in
fighting. The most positive memories Shelley had of his two years at Syon House
were undoubtedly of the imaginative and lively lectures of Adam Walker on
science—electricity, astronomy, and chemistry—an interest which Shelley
retained throughout his life. In Shelley’s free-ranging mind there was no
contradiction between an interest in science and an appetite for trashy Gothic
romance thrillers, such as Matthew Gregory Lewis’s popular The Monk (1795).
Shelley’s
six years at Eton College, which he entered at age 12 in 1804, are more notable
for his early love interests and for his early literary endeavors than for what
he learned in the formal curriculum. Shelley was often bullied and taunted with
epithets such as “Mad Shelley” and “Shelley the atheist,” a situation
alleviated sometimes by the intervention of his older cousin, Tom Medwin, who
was later to become one of Shelley’s first biographers. The strongest adult
influence on Shelley during this time was not one of his masters but Dr. James
Lind, the physician to the royal household at nearby Windsor, whom Shelley
admired for his knowledge and free spirits and idealized as a kind of
substitute father figure. As Newman Ivey White notes, Dr. Lind was the
prototype of the benevolent old man who frees Laon from prison in The Revolt of
Islam. Shelley’s access to Dr. Lind’s extensive library enabled him to pursue
his earlier interests in science and magic as well as to begin a wide range of
reading in philosophy and literature. By the end of his career at Eton he was
reading widely in Plato, Pliny, and Lucretius, reading Robert Southey
enthusiastically and Walter Scott less so, as well as continuing to read many
Gothic romances.
While
at Eton Shelley began two pursuits that would continue with intense fervor
throughout his life: writing and loving, the two often blending together so
that the loving becomes the subject of the writing. Although Shelley began
writing poems while at Eton, some of which were published in 1810 in Original
Poetry; by Victor and Cazire and some of which were not published until the
1960s as The Esdaile Notebook, it was perhaps inevitable that his first
publication should have been a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810). As is typical of
popular Gothic romances at the time, the innocent and virtuous hero and
heroine, Verezzi and Julia, and the villains, Matilda and Zastrozzi, are
broadly drawn. It is noteworthy that Shelley put his heretical and atheistical
opinions into the mouth of the villain Zastrozzi, thereby airing those
dangerous opinions without having them ascribed to him as the author or
narrator. It was reviewed twice, one a suspiciously favorable review and the
other a predictably vehement attack, the first but not the last to associate
the author’s name with “immorality.”
Shelley’s
other publication prior to entering Oxford, Original Poetry; by Victor and
Cazire—a joint effort by Shelley and his sister Elizabeth—deservedly met the
same fate with the critics as Zastrozzi, one reviewer having described the
volume as “songs of sentimental nonsense, and very absurd tales of horror.”
These early reviews, however justified they may have been concerning his
juvenilia, set the tone for his treatment by the critics throughout his career,
even for many of his greatest works. While the doggerel verse does not
foreshadow Shelley’s mastery of the lyric, the subject matter of the poems is
characteristically Shelleyan: poetry, love, sorrow, hope, nature, and politics.
Shelley’s love interest in these poems was his cousin Harriet Grove, but their
relationship was discouraged by their families.
When
Shelley went up to University College, Oxford, in 1810 he was already a
published writer and a voracious reader with intellectual interests far beyond
the scope of the prescribed curriculum. Timothy Shelley, proud of his son and
wanting to indulge his apparently harmless interests in literature, could not
have foreseen where it might lead when he took Shelley to the booksellers
Slatter and Munday and instructed them as follows: “My son here has a literary
turn; he is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.”
Shortly
after entering Oxford, Shelley met fellow freshman Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and
this meeting that was to change both their lives forever after, perhaps Hogg’s
even more than Shelley’s. The two young men immediately became fast friends,
each stimulating the imagination and intellect of the other in their animated
discussions of philosophy, literature, science, magic, religion, and politics.
In his biography of Shelley, Hogg recalled the time they spent in Shelley’s
rooms, reading, discussing, arguing, and Shelley performing scientific
experiments.
During
his brief stay at Oxford, where he remained for less than a year, Shelley had
published two comparatively harmless attempts at Gothic fiction and poetry, as
well as a prose pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811). That pamphlet was to
have a disastrous effect on his relationship with his family and a dramatic
effect on his life. Written mostly before he arrived at Oxford, Shelley’s
second Gothic romance, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, is notable for the
appearance of a prototypical Shelleyan poet figure, though its two plots are
hopelessly complicated and confusing, and, in the opinion of many commentators,
unfinished. It appears that in the early excitement of college life and other
interests, Shelley lost interest in following through on what was to have been
a full-blown three-decker romance.
Shelley
and Hogg’s joint collection of poems, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret
Nicholson (1810, the title character taken from “that noted female who
attempted the life of the King [George III] in 1786”), was purported to have
been found and edited by “John Fitzvictor,” the two authors wisely having
decided to place neither of their names on the title page in that age when both
author and publisher could easily end up in prison on convictions of treason
and sedition. The slender volume includes a mixed bag of poems, including
Gothic and melancholy lyrics as well as an antiwar, antimonarchical poem simply
titled “War,” notable for being the first appearance of Shelley’s lifelong
attack on monarchies and all authority figures.
Indeed
Shelley and Hogg’s decision to publish Shelley’s Necessity of Atheism, together
with their sending copies of it to the conservative Oxford dons, seems more
calculated to antagonize authority than to persuade by rational argument.
Actually the title of the pamphlet is more inflammatory than the argument,
which centers upon “the nature of belief,” a position Shelley derived from the
skeptical philosophies of John Locke and David Hume. Belief cannot come from a
voluntary act of will; the burden of proof for belief can be found in only
three sources: the senses, reason, or testimony. Nevertheless, the Oxford
authorities acted swiftly and decisively, expelling both Shelley and Hogg in
March 1811. The two could probably have been reinstated with the intervention
of Shelley’s father, but they would have had to disavow the pamphlet and
declare themselves Christians. Mr. Shelley insisted upon the additional demand
that they should not see each other for a stipulated period of time. Shelley
was intransigent, not only refusing to accede to his father’s demands but
taking an insulting and high tone with him as well. The result was a complete
break between Shelley and his father, which entailed financial distress for
Shelley at least until he would come of age two years hence. Thus early in his
life Shelley demonstrated his idealism by his willingness to sacrifice comfort
and security rather than compromise his principles or beliefs.
For
the next two years Shelley’s personal and financial affairs demanded so much of
his attention and energies that he had little left to devote to literary
ventures. After his expulsion from Oxford, in addition to being occupied with
financial matters and keeping company with Hogg, Shelley’s attentions were
given to two women, Elizabeth Hitchener, his philosophical “soul sister” and
correspondent, and Harriet Westbrook, an attractive young woman of 16 whom
Shelley had met through his sister Hellen.
Apparently
acting more from motives of principle and from the idea that he might mold the
impressionable young Harriet than from real love for her, Shelley impulsively
decided to “rescue” her from her oppressive situation at her boarding school in
Clapham. Shelley and Harriet eloped to Edinburgh, where, Shelley violating his
principle of Godwinian free love in favor of Harriet’s happiness and
reputation, they were married on August 28 or 29, 1811. The couple was soon
joined by Hogg, who went with them to York and, being unable to pursue
Shelley’s plan for a liaison between Hogg and Shelley’s sister Elizabeth,
promptly fell in love with Harriet and tried to seduce her—a pattern he was to
repeat, later falling in love with Mary Shelley and eventually settling down
with Jane Williams. Shelley’s principles of free love could have accommodated a
ménage à trois but not without Harriet’s willing consent, so Hogg was
effectively made an outcast. Though the breach was partially healed, he never
again enjoyed the same intimacy with Shelley as he had had before this incident.
Shelley
and Harriet, accompanied by Harriet’s sister Eliza, whose presence Shelley
found increasingly oppressive, decided to leave York—probably to escape
Hogg—and settle in Keswick in November 1811. Here Shelley met Robert Southey,
whose Thalaba (1801) and Curse of Kehama (1810) he had much admired. But
Shelley began to see the older poet as an apostate from radicalism, especially
since Southey patronized him and tried to steer him away from radical causes.
Shelley became much more interested in meeting another of his cultural heroes:
William Godwin, whose Political Justice (1793) had been for Shelley a book to
live by. Upon hearing that the author of his moral and political bible was
still living, Shelley immediately introduced himself to Godwin. This acquaintance
was to have at least as much influence on Shelley’s personal life as his
reading of Political Justice had on his political ideas.
While
at Keswick Shelley conceived a plan to put his radical political ideas into
action . He had been working on a pamphlet simply titled An Address, to the
Irish People (1812), and nothing less would do than publishing it, distributing
it, and delivering it in person to its intended audience, the oppressed Irish
Catholics. Shelley, Harriet, and Eliza arrived in Dublin in February 1812 and
began to distribute the pamphlet, which favored Catholic emancipation but
cautioned the Irish to proceed slowly so as not to be drawn into violence.
Another
“Irish” pamphlet, Proposals for an Association of those Philanthropists, followed
closely upon the first (March 1812). Despite Godwin’s misgivings, expressed
strongly to Shelley in letters, lest radical organizations might follow the
path of the Jacobinical societies that led to the French Terror, Shelley
realized that the Irish would not attain any degree of freedom without unity
and organization. The Proposals are Shelley’s earliest public statement of the
way in which love and politics should be inseparable: “Love for humankind”
should “place individuals at distance from self,” thereby promoting “universal
feeling.” Shelley felt that he could do no more in Ireland, so the Shelleys and
Eliza settled briefly in Cwm Elan, Wales, where Shelley continued to write
radical pamphlets. He distilled the arguments in An Address and the Proposals
in Declaration of Rights, a broadside which he distributed with the help of his
servant Daniel Healey (or Hill), who was arrested, technically for distributing
a broadside without a printer’s name on it, but really because the material was
subversive. This episode incensed Shelley about how little real freedom of the
press existed in England; his response was another pamphlet, A Letter to Lord
Ellenborough (1812), an eloquent argument in favor of freedom of the press and
of speech. Rather than pleading his own case, Shelley wisely focuses on the
well-publicized trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton, a London bookseller who had been
sentenced to prison for publishing partof Paine’s The Age of Reason.
Amid
financial difficulties, local gossip about an immoral household, and fears that
Shelley himself might be arrested, the Shelleys and Eliza, now accompanied by
Elizabeth Hitchener, who had joined them in Lynmouth, prudently decided to flee
and stay for a while near Tremadoc. During this early period of his life,
Shelley had quietly been composing poems in a notebook, which fell into the
hands of the Esdaile family after Shelley’s death and which was not published
until this century, as The Esdaile Notebook (1964). The poems included therein
are an interesting mix of very personal poems, treating his feelings for
Harriet and some of his moments of despair and isolation, and public,
political, and social poems, treating themes of liberty, the Irish cause, the
plight of the poor, the futility of war, and his hatred of religious hypocrisy
and monarchies. Partaking of the central metaphors of poetic discourse of this
time, showing the influence of William Wordsworth, the poems in The Esdaile
Notebook are written in straightforward language and reiterate the power of nature
and the naturalness of poetry. Devoid of mythology, these poems rely upon
common personal and political allusions, the 18th-century convention of
abstractions, contemporary lyric forms, genres, and content. Writing these
poems was for Shelley a kind of poet’s apprenticeship, which he did not feel
confident about bringing to the public’s eye during his lifetime.
The
Shelleys spent periods during 1812 and 1813 in London, where Shelley was able
to make new acquaintances among liberal and literary circles and to renew
earlier friendships such as those with Hogg and Leigh Hunt, a radical London
publisher and writer who was to be Shelley’s lifelong defender. In addition,
Shelley became a member of the Boinville circle, an informal literary
discussion group, and met Thomas Hookham, a radical bookseller and publisher,
and another aspiring writer, Thomas Love Peacock, who became a kind of friendly
literary foil for Shelley and later one of his biographers. In October 1812
Shelley finally met his political father, Godwin, who, like Elizabeth Hitchener
(expelled from the Shelley circle), failed to live up to Shelley’s idealized
image of him. Instead of inspiring Shelley with his political wisdom and
intellect, Godwin became a nagging financial burden to Shelley for the rest of
his life.
Shelley’s
major literary project at this time was Queen Mab, printed by his friend
Hookham in May or June of 1813. Queen Mab is a political epic in which the
fairy queen Mab takes the spirit of Ianthe (the name Percy and Harriet gave their
first child, born in June 1813) on a time and space journey to reveal the ideal
nature of humanity’s potential behind the mistakes of history and the blind
acceptance of “outward shows” of power. The poem reiterates many of the themes
of Shelley’s political pamphlets, attacking the oppressiveness of religious
dogma and superstition as well as of customs and institutions such as the
monarchy. The poem’s perspective is utopian, viewing the pettiness and
selfishness of the world from distant, lofty heights and suggesting the great
potential of the uncorrupted human soul. The utopian and visionary perspectives
of the poem foreshadow the apocalyptic and millennial vision of Shelley’s later
poetry. That Shelley was using poetry to convey radical political ideas in
response to the threats of freedom of the press is clear in his feeling the
necessity to assure Hookham that “a poem is safe: the iron-souled attorney
general would scarcely dare to attack.” Lest his philosophical or political
points should get lost in the poetry, Shelley added copious prose notes to the
end of the poem, the familiar attacks on religion, monarchy, and wealth, the
advocacy of vegetarianism, free love, and free beliefs, and explanatory notes
on geology, astronomy, necessity, and the labor theory of value. Queen Mab was
distributed only privately at the time it was printed, but in 1821 it began to
appear in unauthorized, pirated editions, somewhat to Shelley’s embarrassment.
Interestingly enough, the poem became a kind of radical bible to many in the
Chartist movement in the 1830s and 1840s.
Once
Shelley became a frequent visitor to the Godwin household, it was inevitable
that he would meet the three young women living there: Mary Godwin, Jane (later
Claire) Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay. It was equally inevitable that all three
women would fall in love with Shelley in varying degrees and that Shelley
should fall in love with Mary. As the daughter of Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft (whose writings Shelley had already read and admired), Mary represented
to Shelley an ideal offspring of two great minds. Growing up in the Godwin
household had exposed Mary to ideas, and she could read freely in the books in
Godwin’s library; moreover, she had an independent mind and was willing to
argue with Shelley, rather than be passively molded by him, like Harriet.
Perhaps the only real tragedy was that Shelley had not met Mary before he
married Harriet. Although Shelley believed he was following Godwin’s principles
of free love in replacing Harriet with Mary as the object of his highest love
and in offering Harriet to live with them as his sister rather than his wife,
Godwin bitterly opposed the relationship, and Harriet became estranged and
completely shattered. Knowing that Godwin and his wife would do what they could
to stop them, Shelley and Mary, accompanied by Jane Clairmont, eloped on the
night of July 27, 1814, first to Calais, then to Paris, and on to Switzerland.
After a six-week stay, the three were forced to return to England because of
money problems.
Upon
their return to London, the Shelleys were ostracized for their elopement,
especially by the Godwins, and Shelley, at least until his grandfather Bysshe
died in January 1815, had to spend much of his time trying to raise money from
post-obit bonds in order to meet Harriet’s needs and satisfy his own many
creditors. Harriet gave birth to a son, Charles, in November 1814, and in
February 1815 Mary gave birth prematurely to a child who died only two weeks
later. In his usual pattern Hogg conceived a love for Mary, and Shelley, with
Mary’s initial consent, agreed to the experiment in free love, but Mary lost
interest.
Shelley’s
only publication in 1814, A Refutation of Deism: in a Dialogue, is a
two-pronged attack on what he regarded as the crumbling superstructure of the
established institutions of religious belief in early-19th-century England.
Directed toward intellectuals and Deists, A Refutation of Deism picks apart the
arguments supporting both Christianity and Deism, thus leaving atheism as the
only rational ground to stand upon.
With
improved finances and health in 1815, Shelley not only found the time to write
poetry but began to develop a more sophisticated and symbolic style that
foreshadows his mature productions. The volume published in 1816, Alastor; or,
The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems, is Shelley’s public initiation into
the Romantic idiom of poetry pioneered by Wordsworth and perhaps directly
inspired by the publication of The Excursion in 1814.
Alastor,
with its use of symbols, visionary elements, and mythic sources (the
Narcissus-Echo myth in particular), marks a real advance over Shelley’s earlier
efforts in writing poetry. There are elements of autobiography in the poem,
both in the sense that Shelley felt himself to be haunted by real (his
creditors) or imagined (assailants) spirits at various times in his life and in
the sense that in his personal relationships he had made and would again make
the same mistake that the Poet makes: of seeking “in vain for a prototype of
his conception” of the idealized part of himself. In the preface to the poem
Shelley cautions against this solitary quest, warning not only that such
pursuits will result in the neglect of one’s social duties but that they will
lead one to loneliness, alienation, and ultimately death.
Yet
what gives Alastor vibrancy and tension—life—is that it is not a didactic
morality poem; it is a subtle and complex poem in which the two kinds of poetry
represented by the Narrator, the Wordsworthian poet of nature, and the visionary
Poet of genius are drawn into a kind of complementary conflict. The Narrator
relates the story of the Poet’s life and quest, interspersing his narration
with panegyrics to nature. Like his famous literary counterparts—Werther, St.
Preux, the Solitary, Childe Harold—the Poet is alienated early in life,
travels, and becomes a wanderer searching for some truth that will give his
life meaning.
The
year 1816 proved to be exciting for Shelley, Mary and Claire Clairmont. In
January, Mary gave birth to a son, named William after her father. In the
spring Claire threw herself at Lord Byron, recently separated from Lady Byron,
and became his mistress. In May she persuaded Shelley and Mary to alter their
plans for a trip to Italy and go to Lake Geneva instead, where she knew Byron
was headed. The two poets found each other stimulating and spent much time
together, sailing on Lake Geneva and discussing poetry and other topics,
including ghosts and spirits, into the night. During one of these ghostly
“seances,” Byron proposed that each person present—himself, Shelley, Mary,
Claire, and his physician, Dr. John Polidori—should write a ghost story. Mary’s
contribution to the contest became the novel Frankenstein; published in 1818
with a preface by Shelley, it became one of the most popular works of the whole
Romantic period.
Shelley
was deeply impressed with the power of the natural scenery, brought on by the
combination of the lake and the surrounding mountains, especially Mont Blanc.He
was stimulated to write two of his finest poems: “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
and “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.” The “Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty” reveals the influence of Wordsworth. As Wordsworth does in
“Tintern Abbey,” Shelley in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” suggests how his
imagination and poetic sensitivity were formed by nature, and more
significantly, by visitations from the shadowy power of intellectual beauty and
how, in turn, he dedicated his poetic powers to intellectual beauty.
In
Mont Blanc Shelley discovers a similar but even more enigmatic power, but the
conclusion he reaches is more skeptical, less Wordsworthian. Shelley chose a
familiar romantic topic for this poem: the awesome effect on the observer
wrought by Mont Blanc in particular or the Alps in general. Though Shelley
admired the new kind of poetry ushered in by Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was
equally convinced by 1815 that both the older poets were political apostates,
having sold out to religion and the political status quo in the reaction that
followed Napoleon’s defeat. Thus the relationship with nature that Shelley
explores in Mont Blanc is more ridden with skepticism and doubt than the
pantheism of Wordsworth or the Christian revelation of Coleridge. The only
meaning the poet can draw from the mountain’s impenetrable, impassable visage
is what his own imagination can supply. To the imaginative observer the
mountain provides a parable of creation and destruction in its lower reaches
and valleys and of unknowable permanence and power in the majestic solitudes of
its uppermost heights. Probably no passage in Shelley’s canon has been more
widely disputed than the final three lines of Mont Blanc:
And
what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If
to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence
and solitude were vacancy?
The
enigmatic mountain leaves the speaker with no assurance that the imagination
may endow with meaning the awful blankness of nature.
After
their return to England, Shelley and Mary were faced with the disasters of two
suicides: Fanny Imlay, Mary’s half-sister and an admirer of Shelley, and
Harriet, Shelley’s wife. Since both women had been, at least at one time, in
love with Shelley, Shelley and Mary must have felt in some measure responsible.
Shelley married Mary on December 30, 1816, and became involved in drawn-out
court proceedings with the Westbrooks, led by his old adversary Eliza, over the
custody of Shelley and Harriet’s children, Ianthe and Charles. Some of
Shelley’s writings, most prominently Queen Mab, were cited during the proceedings
to show that Shelley held moral and religious opinions that rendered him unfit
to assume custody. By the time the case was finally decided in 1818, with Lord
Eldon making provisions for the children to be cared for by a guardian, the
Shelleys were in Italy with Shelley never to return to England.
In
March of 1817 the Shelleys settled in Marlow, an environment that provided the
flexibility of moving in literary circles and the tranquillity needed for
thinking and writing. Now more friendly with Mary and Shelley, probably because
of their marriage, Godwin was a visitor. In addition to regular conversations
with Peacock, Shelley became good friends with Leigh Hunt and met some of the
young writers in Hunt’s circle, including John Keats and Horace Smith. Given
the fact that Shelley’s liberal friends and acquaintances were politically
opposed to the reactionary forces in England after Napoleon’s defeat, it is not
surprising that Shelley’s writings during his Marlow period are politically
charged: two pamphlets, A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout
the Kingdom and An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess
Charlotte, and one political epic, The Revolt of Islam.
Shelley
signed both pamphlets “The Hermit of Marlow.” The first suggests petitions to
increase suffrage, along the lines of what would eventually be put into
practice in the 1832 Reform Bill. The second pamphlet is a rhetorical tour de
force in which Shelley chastises even liberals, borrowing a phrase from Thomas
Paine’s The Rights of Man: “We pity the plumage but forget the dying bird.”
Shelley suggests that in the public outpour of mourning over the untimely death
of Princess Charlotte, people, even the friends of liberty and reform, have
neglected the executions of three laborers, who in turn become symbols of all
the poor and the unjustly treated.
Shelley
was again confronted with the problem of censorship with his longest poem in
its original version, with its original title: Laon and Cythna; or, The
Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century, which was
withdrawn after only a few copies were published. Even the comparatively
liberal Ollier brothers, Shelley’s publishers, objected to the brother-sister
incest between the two title characters and to some of the attacks on religion.
Shelley took out the incestuous relationship, deleted other objectionable
passages, and republished the poem as The Revolt of Islam; A Poem, in Twelve
Cantos. His description of the poem in the preface suggests some of its
structural difficulties: “It is a succession of pictures illustrating the
growth and progress of individual mind aspiring to excellence, and devoted to
the love of mankind.” Dedicated to the idea that “love is celebrated everywhere
as the sole law which should govern the moral world,” The Revolt of Islam
provides a poetic forum for Shelley to condemn oppression, religious fraud,
war, tyrants, and their consequences—“civil war, famine, plague, superstition,
and an utter extinction of the domestic affection”—and to recommend hope,
enlightenment, love, “moral dignity and freedom.”
Shelley
probably wrote Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue before he left England,
though the poem was not published by Ollier until 1819. Shelley derives the
relationship between Rosalind and Helen from the friendship that had existed
between Mary Shelley and Isabel Baxter before her husband, a domestic tyrant
like Rosalind’s husband, caused the friendship to be broken off. For shock
value Shelley introduces the incest theme in the relationship between Rosalind
and her brother and the theme of free love in the relationship between Helen
and Lionel, whose prototypes are Laon and Cythna. As an aristocrat who writes
radical poetry, Lionel appears to be based upon Shelley himself. After both
women lose their male lovers, they turn to each other in sisterly love,
exchanging tales of woe and social injustice.
The
Shelleys and their children, William and Clara, along with Claire and Allegra,
set out for Italy in March 1818. They went for reasons of health and finances,
and to take Allegra to her father. For Shelley’s development as a poet the
change of climate proved fruitful, for he was to write some of his greatest
poetry under the clear Italian skies. Once in Italy, Shelley found himself in
the delicate position of having to mediate between Claire and Byron over
Allegra, which later resulted in Allegra being placed in a convent and dying.
The expatriates stayed in Pisa and Leghorn before settling for the summer in
Bagni di Lucca, in the Apennines. They found congenial company in John and
Maria Gisborne and her son, Henry Reveley, an engineer developing a steamboat.
Two
poems written at Este, “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills” and Julian and
Maddalo, grew out of Shelley’s experiences in the summer and fall of 1818. The
immediate source for “Lines” is a day spent in the Euganean Hills overlooking
Padua and Venice. The emotional source is Shelley’s misery over the death of
his child Clara in September 1818 and Mary’s subsequent depression. Shelley
concludes this beautiful poem with a wish for domestic tranquillity for himself
and those he loves and a hope that the world will recognize its brotherhood and
“grow young again.”
Julian
and Maddalo, not published until its inclusion in Posthumous Poems (1824), is
Shelley’s most direct poetic treatment of his relationship with Lord Byron. In
the poem Julian (Shelley) takes the side of optimism and hope in the face of
despondency and evidence of misery, while Maddalo (Byron) takes a pessimistic
view, stemming partly from his pride. For the side of hope Julian cites the
beauty of Nature in this “Paradise of Exiles, Italy!” and the natural goodness
of childhood, describing Shelley’s own play with Byron’s child Allegra as
evidence: “A lovelier toy sweet nature never made, / A serious, subtle, wild,
yet gentle being.” Julian asserts the power of the mind over itself: “Where is
the love, beauty, and truth we seek / But in our mind?”
Maddalo
accuses Julian of talking “Utopia,” citing as evidence for his pessimism a
madman who was once as idealistic as Julian. Each thinking he will support his
own arguments, they decide to visit the madman, whom commentators have
variously identified as Tasso or as Shelley’s alter ego. But the madman’s
soliloquy is inconclusive. He says that part of his suffering is his own doing,
but part seems inflicted upon him from some outside power. However, he has
retained his ideals and integrity, still believing in the possibility of social
reform and eschewing revenge against his lover, who has scorned him for her
paramour. He believes that love leads to misery, suggesting, “There is one road
to peace and that is truth.” After hearing the madman’s soliloquy, both Julian
and Maddalo are subdued and feel pity. Maddalo concludes, “Most wretched men /
Are cradled into poetry by wrong, / They learn in suffering what they teach in
song.” Julian returns many years later only to find Maddalo away, the madman
and his lover dead, and Maddalo’s child a grown woman. He learns from her that
the madman’s lover returned for a while but deserted him once again. He finally
agrees with the woman that “the cold world shall not know” the last private
details of the madman’s misery. Many of the other poems Shelley wrote during
this same period, such as the fine lyric “Stanzas Written in Dejection near
Naples,” depict Shelley’s despair over his estranged relationship with Mary and
were also not published until Posthumous Poems .
Shelley
provided rapturous descriptions of his travels in Italy in his letters to
Peacock, expressing his particular delight in Roman ruins. But these delights
were balanced by yet another tragedy, the death of their son, William, in June
1819. An additional cause for despair was what came to be known as the “Hoppner
Scandal,” so called because the Shelleys’ discharged servant Elise Foggi had
related to the Hoppners, Byron’s friends in Venice, that unbeknownst to Mary,
Claire had born Shelley a child in Naples. Records support the existence of
Shelley’s “Neapolitan Charge,” Elena Adelaide Shelley, but to this day scholars
view the parentage of this child as speculative.
During
this 1818 -1819 period Shelley wrote what many consider to be his masterpiece,
Prometheus Unbound (1820), subtitled A Lyrical Drama, perhaps to suggest a
hybrid genre. Shelley had been developing the symbolism, imagery, and ideas for
the poem for several years. For example, he states in the preface that “the
imagery which I have employed will be found … to have been drawn from the
operations of the human mind,” a technique he had already used in Mont Blanc.
Shelley had had a longstanding interest in and familiarity with Aeschylus’s
Prometheus Bound, even translating it for Byron, but he could not accept the
idea that Aeschylus had bound the champion of mankind for eternity, or even
worse, that Prometheus would have been reconciled with Jupiter in Aeschylus’s
lost drama, the sequel to Prometheus Bound. As Shelley avers in the preface, “I
was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion
with the Oppressor of mankind.” The choice of Prometheus as his hero is not
surprising, given this mythological character’s association with rebellion and
isolation from his act of giving fire to man against the gods’ wishes and his
reputation as a “forethinker” or prophet. For Shelley he came to symbolize the
mind or soul of man in its highest potential.
Shelley
knew that Prometheus Unbound would never be popular, but he thought that it
might have a beneficial influence on some already enlightened intellects. In
letters to his publisher Ollier, Shelley proclaimed that although this was his
“favorite poem,” he did not expect it to sell more than 20 copies and
instructed Ollier to send copies to Hunt, Peacock, Hogg, Godwin, Keats, Horace
Smith, Thomas Moore, and Byron. The reviewers were predictably harsh in their
condemnation of the poem’s moral and political principles, but there was also
praise, with words such as “beauty” and “genius” used in various reviews.
In
the same volume as Prometheus Unbound, Ollier published were some of Shelley’s finest extended
lyrics, including “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” “To a Skylark,” and “Ode
to Liberty.” Written in the autumn of 1819 when the Shelleys were in Florence,
“Ode to the West Wind” employs natural imagery and symbolism to foretell not
only a change in the physical but in the political climate. Writing in terza
rima to suggest the force and pace of the wind, Shelley asks the wind to drive
him forth as it does the leaves, the clouds, and the waves so that his poetic
song will have the same irresistible power for change to awaken Earth:
Scatter
as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes
and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be
through my lips to unawakened Earth
The
trumpet of a prophecy!
Almost
immediately after finishing the first three acts of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley
began work on another drama, The Cenci (1819). This time instead of using
mythology and classical literature as his source material, he used the true
Renaissance story of the macabre Cenci family, the villainous count and his
virtuous daughter, Beatrice. Shelley believed that this drama, unlike
Prometheus Unbound, would be popular and stageable, even suggesting his
favorite actress for the part of Beatrice. The Gothic trappings, the
elimination of “mere poetry,” and the absence of didactic political instruction
were calculated to make the drama accessible to a wide audience.
Shelley’s
political disclaimer in the preface is, of course, belied by the fact that
Beatrice’s rebellion against her tyrannical father is yet another version of
Shelley’s lifelong struggle against any form of authority, be it kingly,
priestly, or fatherly. Count Cenci acts on the assumption that his patriarchal
power is absolute, sanctioned as it is by the Pope, the head of Church and
State. He knows no checks, first toasting his sons’ deaths in a bizarre parody
of the communion ceremony, then raping Beatrice. In Shelley’s hands Beatrice’s
murderous revenge is a revolutionary act against patriarchal authority, not a
personal vendetta.
In
his hope that the play would be read widely and staged, Shelley again misjudged
the predominance of conservativism in the literary milieu of Regency England.
The taboo theme of incest, the horror of parricide, the “blasphemous” treatment
of religion, the implicit attack on the family and all patriarchal
institutions, and Shelley’s own dangerous reputation—all broke the rules of
Regency society and ensured The Cenci would be condemned by all but a few reviewers
and friends, such as Leigh Hunt, to whom the play is dedicated. The play was
staged only once in the 19th century, by the Shelley Society in 1886.
Shelley’s
political ire was stirred in 1819 by what came to be known as the Manchester
Massacre, or “Peterloo.” During an assembly in St. Peter’s fields, where a
crowd was to be addressed by “Orator” Hunt, the local militia charged the
crowd, killing at least nine people and wounding many more. Shelley’s response
was to write several explicitly political poems, including The Masque of
Anarchy (1832), the sonnet “England in 1819,” and “Song to the Men of England,”
all of which were deemed too dangerous to publish during Shelley’s lifetime,
even by his friends. It likely frustrated Shelley that none of his attempts in
poetry and prose to address explicitly the political events of 1819 and 1820
were published during his lifetime.
Lest
Shelley should be thought of as only a humorless reformer where politics is
concerned and a serious visionary where poetry is concerned, two satires, Peter
Bell the Third and Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, and two
light-hearted poems, the “Letter to Maria Gisborne” and The Witch of Atlas,
suggest the contrary. Perhaps these more playful poems, written in late 1819 and
during 1820, were an outlet after his intensive poetic efforts in 1819.
Shelley
was prompted to write A Defence of Poetry, one of the most eloquent
justifications of poetry ever written, after reading Peacock’s 1820 essay “The
Four Ages of Poetry,” in which his friend had lightheartedly taken a cyclical
view of poetry and history and had reached the conclusion that poetry was in
decline, with the current age representing one of the low points in the cycle.
But A Defence of Poetry goes well beyond Peacock’s essay in the scope and
vision of its comprehensive definitions of poetry, poets, and imaginative
creation. Shelley defines poetry to include all of the arts and all creative
endeavors that bring permanent beauty or goodness to the world. Shelley’s statement
that “a Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one”
illustrates that poetic creations are not subservient to the vicissitudes of
history but rather partake of the Platonic realm of permanent forms and ideas.
The inspiration that endows imaginative poets with a momentary vision into the
realm of the beautiful and the permanent is another manifestation of Shelley’s
“intellectual beauty.” And yet Shelley argues that the social and moral
benefits of poetry are real. Poetry can help moral progress keep pace with
scientific and material progress, and as “the unacknowledged legislators of the
World,” poets can indirectly influence social consciousness for the better.
In
addition to Byron, the Gisbornes, the Masons, and Teresa Viviani, the Shelleys’
Pisan circle of friends grew to include the eccentric Professor Francesco
Pacchiani, who introduced them to Prince Mavrocordato, interesting to the
Shelleys and to Byron for his involvement in the Greeks’ struggle against the
Turks for independence. In 1821 Edward and Jane Williams both became intimate
friends with the Shelleys, and in 1822 they all met the literary adventurer
Edward John Trelawny, who would become another of Shelley’s biographers.
Moreover, Shelley had hopes that Hunt and Keats might come to Italy. Upon
hearing Keats was ill, he warmly invited him to Italy as his guest, but Keats
died in Rome on February 3, 1821, before Shelley even knew he was in Italy.
Perhaps not realizing the nature or the seriousness of Keats’s consumption, Shelley
labored under the misconception that the harsh reviews of Endymion (1818)
precipitated Keats’s illness and death. He was in this frame of mind as he
quickly set about writing an elegy on the young poet.
Drawing
upon the Greek elegies of Bion and Moshcus as well as upon Milton’s Lycidas,
Shelley probably derived his title, Adonais, as Earl R. Wasserman suggests,
from Bion’s Lament for Adonis and the Hebrew “Adonai” myth. Comprising 55
Spenserian stanzas, the poem begins as a conventional elegy with a call to
Urania, muse and mother of the poet, as well as to all of nature, to mourn. But
in the spring nature revives, emphasizing the contrast with the still-dead
Keats, as a procession of his fellow poets—Byron, Moore, Hunt, and Shelley
himself—comes forth, Shelley characterizing himself both as a “frail Form” and
as “A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift.” Shelley directs some vicious
attacks toward the reviewer he holds responsible for Keats’s death, but the
attacks may stem from his own treatment by the critics as much as from a desire
to avenge Keats. Beginning with stanza 39, a reversal takes place as the
speaker proclaims Adonais “is not dead, ... / He hath awakened from the dream
of life.” From this point on Keats is apotheosized as a star in a Platonic realm
of permanent beauty: “The soul of Adonais, like a star / Beacons from the abode
where the Eternal are.” Like many of Shelley’s heroes and heroines, Adonais in
death escapes the shadowy and mutable world and passes into “the white radiance
of Eternity.”
Shelley’s
enthusiasm for the stirrings of independence in Greece prompted him to write
Hellas (1822), which he dedicated to Prince Mavrocordato. As the title Hellas
suggests, Shelley is most concerned with the liberty of the Hellenic spirit: as
he says in the preface, “We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our
religion, our arts have their root in Greece.” The “Lyrical Drama” is “a series
of lyric pictures” spoken or sung by a chorus of captive Greek women
interspersed with dialogue between the main characters—the Turkish Sultan
Mahmud, his aid Hassan, the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus, and the Phantom of Mahomet
III. The chorus pays homage to the eternal spirit of liberty and expresses hope
for the Greek victory as Mahmud gradually draws the conclusion that the Turkish
forces are losing. Above all, Shelley is concerned that the thought and ideals
of Greece are preserved, not just the outward manifestations of present-day
Greece:
But
Greece and her foundations are
Built
below the tide of war,
Based
on the crystalline sea
Of
thought and its eternity .
The
poem ends with the final chorus prophecying in a soaring vision, “The world’s
great age begins anew,” suggesting that another golden age, like the first one
in Greece, will return to the world.
In
what was to be the last year of his life—1822, Shelley was frustrated in his
efforts to mediate between Byron and Claire over Allegra, irritated with the
Olliers’ delays, and depressed over what seemed to be Mary’s increasing
estrangement. He admired the apparently loving relationship between the
Williamses, and not surprisingly developed at least a platonic love for the
beautiful Jane Williams. Out of these feelings of despondency and admiration
Shelley wrote some of his most musical lyrics, including “Lines: ‘When the lamp
is shattered,’” “To Jane: The Invitation,” “To Jane: The Recollection,” “To
Jane ( ‘The keen stars were twinkling’),” and “Lines written in the Bay of
Lerici.”
In
May 1822 the Shelleys and the Williamses left Pisa in order to rent Casa Magni
on the Bay of San Terenzo, near Lerici. Here Shelley and Edward would be able
to spend the summer sailing the Don Juan, their new boat, in the Gulf of
Spezia. Though Mary was disconsolate, Shelley was generally happy and set about
writing his last long poem, the fragmentary The Triumph of Life. Shelley uses
Petrarch’s Trionfi and Dante’s Divine Comedy as models. The former provides the
structure of a triumphal procession; the latter, the model of a guide leading
the poet to a new understanding and the rhyme scheme, terza rima. In a vision
the poet sees a chaotic procession of “life” in the midst of which is a chariot
guided by a “Janus-visaged Shadow,” suggesting that this pageant has no goal or
purpose. The poet is shocked to see Rousseau, the spiritual leader of
Romanticism, his eyes now burned out. Other famous figures, such as Voltaire,
Frederick the Great, and Immanuel Kant, appear in the procession, as Rousseau
explains that they were all overcome by life and offers up an axiomatic
dilemma: “why God made irreconcilable / Good and the means of good”? Only “the
sacred few who could not tame / Their spirits to the Conqueror” (Life) have
held themselves out of the corrupted procession: those who died young (one
thinks of Keats) and those who resisted life’s corrupting influences, such as
Socrates and Jesus.
At
this point the poet’s vision of the pageant of life gives way to Rousseau’s
vision of his own story. Rousseau relates seeing a form brighter than the sun,
“A Shape all light,” a female form reminiscent of intellectual beauty and other
ideal manifestations having to do with the poet’s creative powers. In the hopes
of quenching his thirst for knowledge, Rousseau accepts a drink from the cup
offered by the Shape, but the effect is to eclipse his vision of the Shape with
the vision of a “cold bright car,” the same chariot leading the pageant of
life. In the error of attempting to realize the ideal, a pattern recurrent in
many of Shelley’s poems, Rousseau has lost the vision of the ideal. In one of
those ironic twists of fate that seem to bring literature and life together,
near the end of the poem the poet asks Rousseau, “Then what is Life?” Shelley,
who believed that the complete answer to this question might lie in a realm
beyond this life, died before he could write the answer . Though many,
including T.S. Eliot, not usually an admirer of Shelley, believe that in The
Triumph of Life Shelley achieved a style and vision superior to all of his
other writings, how the poem would end, whether optimistically or pessimistically,
and what more Shelley might have achieved will be left to conjecture.
It
is certainly tempting to speculate what additional literature might have been
given the world had Keats, Hunt, Byron, and Shelley all been allowed to live in
each other’s company in Italy. At the time of Shelley’s death a project had
been hatched to bring Hunt to Italy, where he would begin a journal called The
Liberal, with Shelley and Byron as principal sponsors and contributors. After
several delays the Hunts had finally arrived in Leghorn, so Shelley and Edward
Williams sailed from Lerici to greet them, leaving Mary and Jane at Casa Magni.
After getting the Hunts settled in, Shelley and Williams set sail in the Don
Juan for the return trip to Lerici on July 8, but a squall enveloped and
overcame the boat. After Mary, Jane, and their friends had undergone several
days of anxious waiting with rapidly diminishing hopes, Shelley’s and
Williams’s bodies were discovered washed ashore on July 18. One of the
identifying objects on Shelley’s body was an open copy of Keats’s 1820 volume
of poems. Italian quarantine laws required that bodies washed ashore be burned,
so Shelley was cremated in the presence of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny. Trelawny
began one of the Shelley legends—that Shelley’s heart, too pure to burn, would
be preserved—when he plucked Shelley’s unburned heart and part of his jawbone
from the fire. He later arranged for Shelley’s ashes to be buried near Keats’s
grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome and is responsible for one of the
epitaphs that appear on Shelley’s gravestone, three lines from The Tempest:
“Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something
rich and strange.” The other epitaph on the stone was Leigh Hunt’s idea: “Cor
Cordium,” or “Heart of Hearts.”
The
Pisan circle broke up shortly afterward, with Mary and her son Percy Florence
(born in November 1819), Jane and her children, and the Hunts returning to
England and with Byron dying less than two years later in his efforts to help
the Greeks in their struggle for independence. Mary had difficulties with Sir
Timothy, Shelley’s father, who would allow her a small pension only on the
condition that nothing by or about Shelley be published during Sir Timothy’s
lifetime. She nonetheless edited the Posthumous Poems (1824) and a collected
edition of Poetical Works with her own explanatory notes (1839), and she
published a novel, The Last Man (1826), with a Shelleyan protagonist. Hunt
continued to be a valiant defender of Shelley’s works and reputation, and both
Hogg, who, true to form, fell in love with another of Shelley’s beloved women
(Jane Williams), and Peacock published biographies. Percy Florence Shelley
eventually inherited the Shelley estate and married Jane St. John, an admirer of
both his parents, who did all she could to preserve and enshrine Shelley’s
reputation.
Shelley’s
reputation after his death was shaped by the same extremes of worship and
hatred that he and his writings had elicited during his life. Among the
Victorians, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, Walter Bagehot, and Ralph Waldo
Emerson denigrated Shelley, and Samuel Clemens was never able to forgive
Shelley for his treatment of Harriet. Matthew Arnold issued the most memorable
and damaging statement on Shelley: “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in
the void his luminous wings in vain.” But the list of those who admired him or
were influenced by him is longer and perhaps even more distinguished: Benjamin
Disraeli, who created a Shelleyan protagonist in his novel Venetia (1837);
Robert Browning, who in his early poem Pauline (1833) paid tribute to Shelley
as the “Sun-treader”; Alfred Tennyson, who along with other “Cambridge
Apostles” argued the merits of Shelley versus Byron with Oxford debaters;
William Butler Yeats, whose poetry reveals the influence of Shelley’s visionary
poetics and his symbol making; H.S. Salt and Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling
(Marx’s daughter), all of whom claimed Shelley as a prototypical Marxist; and
Bernard Shaw, who admired Shelley’s radicalism and emulated his vegetarianism.
In addition, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Eliot, George
Lewes, and Thomas Hardy admired Shelley
and adopted some of his ideas.
Shelley
worship reached its zenith in 1886 with the formation of the Shelley Society,
the idea for which came from F.J. Furnivall, the son of Shelley’s physician at
Marlow. In addition to republishing several of Shelley’s works, the society
succeeded in, at long last, staging The Cenci. Because licensing laws that
forbade staging scenes of incest, the production was for members only, with
Browning, Wilde, and Shaw among those in attendance. Through the efforts of
American, British, and Roman committees, Keats’s last residence, at 26 Piazza
di Spagna in Rome, was purchased and on April 3, 1909 was formally dedicated as
the Keats-Shelley Memorial House.
In
the early 20th century, however, Shelley’s literary reputation plunged to its
nadir with the advent of the “new humanism” and the “new criticism.” Paul Elmer
More and Irving Babbit attacked Romanticism in general and Shelley in
particular for being simple, irrational, and dangerous. T.S. Eliot and F.R.
Leavis criticized Shelley for being adolescent and for having “a weak grasp
upon the actual.” But again Shelley’s reputation has arisen from the ashes by
the efforts of respected scholars and critics of the latter half of this
century—including Newman Ivey White, Carlos Baker and Harold Bloom—who have
found in Shelley’s writings an inexhaustible fountainhead of social, political,
and philosophical concerns, complexities and subtleties in his use of myth and
language, including his skill in translating Greek, Italian, Spanish, and
German literature, and rich relationships with his cultural milieu. His name
forever linked with those of Byron and Keats, Shelley has come to symbolize the
free and soaring spirit of humankind. Even in the popular imagination, he is
associated with the idea that one should not content oneself with the mundane
but aspire to ever-loftier ideals of perfecting the self, and above all, with
the idea of hope. Though Shelley’s works will never be read by the masses, at
least the spirit of his wish in “Ode to the West Wind” is perhaps closer to
coming true today than he would have dared imagine:
by
the incantation of this verse,
Scatter,
as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes
and sparks, my words among mankind!
Shelley’s
ideas, embodied in his verse, his prose, and his life, remain as a challenge to
the servile acceptance of authority and as a challenge to us to achieve our
highest potential—to always aspire to higher goals for ourselves and for
society.
Legacy
Shelley
died leaving many of his works unfinished, unpublished or published in
expurgated versions with multiple errors. There have been a number of recent
projects aimed at establishing reliable editions of his manuscripts and works.
Among the most notable of these are:
Reiman,
D. H. (gen ed), The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts (23 vols.), New York
(1986–2002)
Reiman,
D. H. (gen ed), The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Shelley (9 vols.,
1985–97)
Reiman,
D. H., and Fraistat, N. (et al.) The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (3
vols.), 1999–2012, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press
Cameron,
K. N., and Reiman, D. H. (eds), Shelley and his Circle 1773–1822, Cambridge,
Mass., 1961– (8 vols.)
Everest
K., Matthews, G., et al. (eds), The Poems of Shelley, 1804–1821 (4 vols.),
Longman, 1989–2014
Murray,
E. B. (ed), The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1, 1811–1818, Oxford
University Press, 1995
Shelley's
long-lost "Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things" (1811) was
rediscovered in 2006 and subsequently made available online by the Bodleian
Library in Oxford.
John
Lauritsen and Charles E. Robinson have argued that Shelley's contribution to
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was extensive and that he should be
considered a collaborator or co-author. Professor Charlotte Gordon and others
have disputed this contention. Fiona Sampson has said: "In recent years
Percy's corrections, visible in the Frankenstein notebooks held at the Bodleian
Library in Oxford, have been seized on as evidence that he must have at least
co-authored the novel. In fact, when I examined the notebooks myself, I
realised that Percy did rather less than any line editor working in publishing
today."
The
Keats–Shelley Memorial Association, founded in 1903, supports the Keats–Shelley
House in Rome which is a museum and library dedicated to the Romantic writers
with a strong connection with Italy. The association is also responsible for
maintaining the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the non-Catholic Cemetery at
Testaccio. The association publishes the scholarly Keats–Shelley Review. It
also runs the annual Keats–Shelley and Young Romantics Writing Prizes and the
Keats–Shelley Fellowship.
Selected
works
Poetry,
fiction and verse drama
(1810)
Zastrozzi , (1810) Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (collaboration with
Elizabeth Shelley) , (1810) Posthumous Fragments of Margaret icholson: Being Poems Found Amongst the Papers
of That Noted Female Who ttempted the Life of the King in 1786 , (1810) St.
Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (published 1811) , (1810) The Wandering Jew
(published 1831) , (1812) The Devil's Walk: A Ballad , (1813) Queen Mab: A
Philosophical Poem , (1814) To Wordsworth
(1815)
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (Published 1816) , (1816) Mont Blanc
(1816)
On Death , (1817) Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (text) , (1817) Laon and Cythna;
or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century
(published 1818) , (1818) The Revolt of Islam, A Poem, in Twelve Cantos , (1818)
Ozymandias (text) , (1818) Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue (published in
1819) , (1818) Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills, October 1818 , (1819)
Love's Philosophy , (1819) The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts , (1819) Ode to
the West Wind (text) , (1819) The Mask of Anarchy (published 1832) , (1819)
England in 1819 , (1819) Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation , (1820) Peter Bell
the Third (published in 1839) (1820) Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama, in
Four Acts , (1820) To a Skylark
(1820)
The Cloud , (1820) The Sensitive Plant , (1820) Oedipus Tyrannus; Or, Swellfoot
The Tyrant: A Tragedy in Two Acts , (1820) The Witch of Atlas (published in
1824) , (1821) Adonais , (1821) Epipsychidion , (1822) Hellas, A Lyrical Drama
, (1822) The Triumph of Life (unfinished, published in 1824)
Short
prose works
"The
Assassins, A Fragment of a Romance" (1814) , "The Coliseum, A
Fragment" (1817) , "The Elysian Fields: A Lucianic Fragment"
(1818)
"Una
Favola (A Fable)" (1819, originally in Italian)
Essays
The
Necessity of Atheism (with T. J. Hogg) (1811) , Poetical Essay on the Existing
State of Things (1811) , An Address, to the Irish People (1812) , Declaration
of Rights (1812) , A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812) , A Vindication of
Natural Diet (1813) , A Refutation of Deism (1814)[194]
Speculations
on Metaphysics (1814) , On the Vegetable System of Diet (1814–1815; published
1929) , On a Future State (1815) , On The Punishment of Death (1815) , Speculations
on Morals (1817) , On Christianity (incomplete, 1817; published 1859) , On Love
(1818) , On the Literature, the Arts and the Manners of the Athenians (1818) , On
The Symposium, or Preface to The Banquet Of Plato (1818) , On Frankenstein
(1818; published in 1832) , On Life (1819) , A Philosophical View of Reform
(1819–20, first published 1920) , A Defence of Poetry (1821, published 1840)
Chapbooks
Wolfstein;
or, The Mysterious Bandit (1822) , Wolfstein, The Murderer; or, The Secrets of
a Robber's Cave (1830)
Translations
The
Banquet (or The Symposium) of Plato (1818) (first published in unbowdlerised
form 1931) , Ion of Plato (1821) , Collaborations with Mary Shelley , (1817)
History of a Six Weeks' Tour , (1820) Proserpine (1820) Midas
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