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Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4 1792 – July 8 1822; pronounced
['pɜːsi bɪʃ 'ʃɛli]) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest
lyric poets of the English language. He is
perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind,
To a Skylark, and The Masque of
Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and
the unfinished The Triumph of Life.
Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong
skeptical voice, made him a notorious and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three
generations of poets, including the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets
Robert Browning, Alfred
Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler
Yeats and poets in other languages such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy). He was also admired by Karl Marx,
Henry Stephens Salt, Bertrand Russell and
George Bernard Shaw. Famous for his association with his equally short-lived
contemporaries John Keats and Lord
Byron, he was married to novelist Mary Shelley.
Life
Education and early works
Son of an MP, Shelley grew up in Sussex, and received his early education at
home, tutored by Reverend Evan Edwards of Warnham. In 1802, he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford. He was routinely
bullied while he was there, both because of his "girlish" appearance and his family's aristocratic ties. Shelley had a poor
temper and was particularly inept with his fists. As one of his classmates wrote, he was "like a girl in boy's clothes, fighting
with open hands."[1] In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College,
where he fared little better, subjected to an almost daily mob torment his classmates called "Shelley-baits". Surrounded, the
young Shelley would have his books torn from his hands and his clothes pulled at and torn until he cried out madly in his
high-pitched "cracked soprano" of a voice.[2] On
April 10, 1810 he matriculated at University College, Oxford. Legend has it that Shelley attended only one lecture while at Oxford, but frequently read
sixteen hours a day. By all accounts he was unpopular with both students and dons, but managed to forge a close relationship with
Thomas Jefferson Hogg. His first publication was a Gothic novel,
Zastrozzi (1810), in which he gave vent to his atheistic worldview through the villain Zastrozzi. In the same year, Shelley,
together with his sister Elizabeth, published Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. While at Oxford, he issued a
collection of verses (perhaps ostensibly burlesque but quite subversive), Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, with
Jefferson Davis Hogg..
In 1811, Shelley published a pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. This
gained the attention of the university administration and he was called to appear before the college's fellows. His refusal to
repudiate the authorship of the pamphlet resulted in his being sent down (expelled) from Oxford on March 25, 1811, along with Hogg. The re-discovery in mid-2006 of Shelley's
long-lost 'Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things', a long, strident anti-monarchical poem printed in Oxford, gives a new
dimension to the expulsion, reinforcing Hogg's implication of political motives ('an affair of party').[3] Shelley was given the choice to be reinstated after his father intervened, on the
condition that he would have had to recant his avowed views. His refusal to do so led to a falling out with his father.
Married life
Four months after being expelled, the 19-year-old Shelley travelled to Scotland with the
16-year-old schoolgirl Harriet Westbrook to get married. After their marriage on August 28,
1811, Shelley invited his college friend Hogg to share their household, which included his wife.
When Harriet objected, however, Shelley abandoned this first attempt at open marriage and
brought her to Keswick in England's Lake
District, intending to write. Distracted by political events, he visited Ireland shortly
afterward in order to engage in radical pamphleteering. Here he wrote the Address to the Irish
People and was seen at several nationalist rallies. His activities earned him the unfavourable attention of the British
government.
Unhappy in his nearly three-year-old marriage, Shelley often left his wife and child (Ianthe Shelley, 1813-76) alone while he
visited William Godwin's home and bookshop in London. It was here that he met and fell in
love with Godwin's intelligent and well-educated daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, known to the world as Mary Shelley. Mary was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft,
the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Mary
Wollstonecraft had had an affair with Godwin, was briefly married to him, and died a few days after giving birth to Mary in
1797.
On July 28, 1814, Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child to elope with a 16-year-old for the second time. In fact, he
managed to catch two 16-year-olds at this time: when he ran away with Mary, he also invited her step-sister Jane (later Claire)
Clairmont along for company. The three sailed to Europe, crossed France, and settled in
Switzerland, an account of which was subsequently published by the Shelleys. After six
weeks, homesick and destitute, the three young people returned to England. There they found that William Godwin, the one-time
champion and practitioner of free love, refused to speak to Mary or Shelley.
In the autumn of 1815, while living close to London with Mary and avoiding creditors, Shelley produced the verse allegory
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. It attracted little
attention at the time, but it has now come to be recognized as his first major poem. At this point in his writing career, Shelley
was deeply influenced by Wordsworth's poetry.
Introduction to Byron
In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary made a second trip to Switzerland. They were
prompted to do so by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had commenced a liaison
with Lord Byron the previous April just before his self-exile on the continent. Byron had lost interest in Claire, and she used
the opportunity of meeting the Shelleys as bait to lure him to Geneva. The Shelleys and Byron
rented neighbouring houses on the shores of Lake Geneva. Regular conversation with Byron had
an invigorating effect on Shelley's poetry. While on a boating tour the two took together, Shelley was inspired to write his
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, often considered his first significant
production since Alastor. A tour of Chamonix in the French Alps inspired Mont Blanc, a difficult poem in which Shelley pondered questions of historical inevitability
and the relationship between the human mind and external nature.
Shelley, in turn, influenced Byron's poetry. This new influence showed itself in the third part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron was working on, as well as in Manfred, which he wrote in the autumn of 1816. At the same time, Mary was inspired to begin writing
Frankenstein, in part, by way of a competition between Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire. The goal of the
competition was to see who could write the best horror story. At the end of summer, the Shelleys and Claire returned to England.
Claire was pregnant with Byron's daughter, Allegra Byron, a fact that would have an
enormous impact on Shelley's future.
Personal tragedies and second marriage
The return to England was marred with tragedy. Fanny Imlay, Mary Godwin's half-sister
and a member of Godwin's household, killed herself in late autumn. In December 1816, Shelley's estranged wife Harriet drowned
herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. On December 30, 1816, a
few weeks after Harriet's body was recovered, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married. The marriage was intended, in part, to help
secure Shelley's custody of his children by Harriet, but it was in vain: the children were handed over to foster parents by the
courts.
The Shelleys took up residence in the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire where a friend of Percy's, Thomas Love
Peacock, lived. Shelley took part in the literary circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt,
and during this period, he met John Keats. Shelley's major production during this time was Laon and Cythna, a long,
narrative poem in which he attacked religion and featured a pair of incestuous lovers. It was hastily withdrawn after only a few
copies were published. It was later edited and reissued as The Revolt of
Islam in 1818. Shelley also wrote two revolutionary political tracts under the nom de
plume of "The Hermit of Marlowe."
Travels in the Italian peninsula
Early in 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England in order to take Claire's daughter, Allegra, to her father Byron, who had
taken up residence in Venice. Contact with the older and more established poet encouraged Shelley
to write once again. During the latter part of the year, he wrote Julian and Maddalo, a lightly disguised rendering of his
boat trips and conversations with Byron in Venice, finishing with a visit to a madhouse. This poem marked the appearance of
Shelley's "urbane style". He then began the long verse drama Prometheus
Unbound, a re-writing of the lost play by the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus, which
features talking mountains and a petulant spirit who overthrows Jupiter. Tragedy struck in 1818
and 1819, when his son Will died of fever in Rome, and his infant daughter Clara Everina died
during yet another household move.
A daughter, Elena Adelaide Shelley, was born December 27, 1818 in Naples, Italy and registered there as the
daughter of Shelley and a woman named Marina Padurin. However, the identity of the mother is an unsolved mystery. Some scholars
speculate that her true mother was actually Claire Clairmont or Elise Foggi, a nursemaid for the Shelley family. Other scholars
postulate that she was a foundling Shelley adopted in hopes of distracting Mary after the deaths of William and Clara.[4] Shelley referred to Elena in letters as his "Neapolitan ward".
However, Elena was placed with foster parents a few days after her birth and the Shelley family moved on to yet another Italian
city, leaving her behind. Elena died 17 months later, on June 10, 1820.
The Shelleys moved around various Italian cities during these years. Shelley completed Prometheus Unbound in Rome, and
he spent the summer of 1819 writing a tragedy, The Cenci, in Livorno. In this year,
prompted among other causes by the Peterloo massacre, he wrote his best-known
political poems: The Masque of Anarchy and Men of England. These were most likely his most-remembered works during
the 19th century. Around this time period, he wrote the essay The Philosophical View of Reform, which was his most
thorough exposition of his political views to that date.
In 1820, hearing of John Keats' illness from a friend, Shelley wrote him a letter inviting
him to join him at his residence at Pisa. Keats replied with hopes of seeing him, but instead, arrangements were made for Keats
to travel to Rome with the artist Joseph Severn.
In 1821, inspired by the death of Keats, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais. The text of
this famous poem can be found at [1]
In 1822, Shelley arranged for James Henry Leigh Hunt, the British poet and editor who had
been one of his chief supporters in England, to come to Italy with his family. He meant for the three of them — himself, Byron
and Hunt — to create a journal, which would be called The Liberal. With Hunt as editor, their controversial writings would
be disseminated, and the journal would act as a counter-blast to conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly
Review.
James Henry Leigh Hunt's son, the editor Thornton Leigh
Hunt, when later asked whether he preferred Shelley or Byron as a man, replied:-
- "On one occasion I had to fetch or take to Byron some copy for the paper which my father, himself and Shelley, jointly
conducted. I found him seated on a lounge feasting himself from a drum of figs. He asked me if I would like a fig. Now, in that,
Leno, consists the difference, Shelley would have handed me the drum and allowed me to
help myself."[5]
Drowning
On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday,
Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner,
Don Juan. Shelley claimed to have met his Doppelgänger, foreboding his own death. 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 Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle. However, according to Mary Shelley's
testimony, Shelley changed it to "Ariel". This annoyed Byron, who forced the
painting of the words "Don Juan" on the mainsail. This offended the Shelleys, who felt that the boat was made to look much like a
coal barge. The vessel, an open boat designed from a Royal Dockyards model, was custom-built in
Genoa for Shelley. It did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her "Note on Poems of
1822" (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never seaworthy.
Many believe his death was not accidental. Some say that Shelley was depressed in those days and that he wanted to die; others
that he did not know how to navigate; others believe that some pirates mistook the boat for Byron's and attacked him, and others
have even more fantastical stories. There is a mass of evidence, though scattered and contradictory, that Shelley may have been
murdered for political reasons. Previously, at his cottage in Tann-yr-allt in Wales, he had been surprised and apparently attacked by a man who was probably an intelligence agent. Details of
this incident can be found in Richard Holmes's biography, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975).
The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier (1889); pictured in the center are, from left, Trelawny, Hunt and
Byron
In the days before he died, he was almost shot on two separate occasions. [citation needed] A British consul defended the
shooter from the first of these two incidents, keeping him from all legal consequence. There is also evidence that they met an
Italian Naval ship just before the storm that took their lives and refused assistance from the Navy. As for navigation, two other
Englishmen were with him on the boat. [citation needed] One was a retired Navy officer, Edward Williams and the other a boatboy,
Charles Vivien, who should have known how to navigate to the nearby coast at Livorno. They drowned with Shelley, but an Italian
boy who was also aboard did not drown. [citation needed]His identity, however, has remained a mystery. The boat was found beneath
the waves near the shore, and it was plainly seen that one side of the boat had been rammed and staved in by a much stronger
vessel. However, the liferaft was unused and still attached to the boat. Had it been an accident, they would at least have tried
to swim for the beach. To do this, they most likely would have removed their clothing. However, the bodies were found completely
clothed, including boots. In his 'Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron', Trelawny noted that the shirt that
Williams's body was clad in was 'partly drawn over the head, as if the wearer had been in the act of taking it off [...] and [he
was missing] one boot, indicating also that he had attempted to strip.' Trelawny also relates a supposed deathbed confession by
an Italian fisherman who claimed to have rammed Shelley's boat in order to rob him, a plan confounded by the rapid sinking of the
vessel. A large amount of cash and valuables was found untouched in the boat.
The day following Shelley's death, the Tory newspaper "The Courier" gloated "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has
been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or no." (See Edmund Blunden, Shelley, A Life Story, London:
Oxford University Press, 1965). Byron, however, was moved to say in a letter to the publisher John Murray: "You were all brutally
mistaken about Shelley, who was without exception the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew anyone who was not a
beast in comparison."
Shelley's body washed ashore, and later, in keeping with strict quarantine regulations, was cremated on the beach near
Viareggio. "The Funeral of Shelley" (also known as "The Cremation of Shelley"), by Louis
Eduard Fournier, is an 1889 painting of the scene at Shelley's funeral pyre. Unfortunately, this painting is known to be
inaccurate for several reasons. In pre-Victorian times, it was an English custom that women were not to attend funerals for
reasons of health. Mary Shelley did not attend the funeral, but she was featured in this painting, kneeling at the left-hand side
of the canvas. Leigh Hunt stayed in the carriage for the ceremony, though he is pictured. Also, Trelawney, in his account of the
recovery of Shelley's body, records that "the face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless",
and by the time that the party returned to the beach for the cremation, the body was even further decomposed. In his graphic
account of the cremation of Shelley's body, he writes of Lord Byron's being unable to face the scene, and withdrawing to the
beach.
Shelley's heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by Edward Trelawny; Mary Shelley kept it for the rest of her life.
Shelley's ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome under an
ancient pyramid in the city walls with the inscription 'Cor Cordium' or 'Heart of Hearts', and a few lines from "The Tempest" by
Shakespeare. The grave site is the second in the cemetery. Some weeks after Shelley was put to rest Trelawny came to Rome and did
not like the position of his friend among a number of others and purchased what seemed to him to be a better plot near the old
wall. The ashes were exhumed and moved to their present location. Trelawny purchased the adjacent plot and over 60 years later
his remains were placed there.
A reclining statue of Shelley's body washed up on the shore, created by the sculptor Edward Onslow Ford at Shelley's daughter-in-law Lady Jane Shelley's behest, can be found at
University College, Oxford as the centrepiece of the Shelley Memorial there.
Shelley in fiction
Julian Rathbone's 2002 novel A Very English Agent, about 19th century government spy Charles Boylan, carries a lengthy
section on Shelley's time in Italy, in which Boylan tampers with Shelley's boat on orders from the English government, thus
causing his death. Rathbone though is at pains to state he is "a novelist, not a historian" and that his work is very much a
piece of fiction.
He also makes an appearance in Jude Morgan's 2005 novel
Passion, along with Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and a wealth of other English Romantic figures, though the novel's main
focus is the lives of the women behind the famous poets: Lady Caroline Lamb,
Augusta Leigh, Mary Shelley, and Fanny Brawne.
Shelley appears in Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss. The book is a
time travel romance featuring Mary Shelley. There was also a movie made, based on the novel, directed by Roger Corman and starring John Hurt and Bridget Fonda, in 1990.
Shelley also features prominently in The Stress of Her Regard, a 1989
novel by Tim Powers which proposes a secret history
connecting the English Romantic writers with the mythology of vampires and lamia.
He makes an appearance in the alternative history novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling. Only referenced in passing by another character, in this world he does
not drown in Italy, but lives to become a fierce critic (and perhaps saboteur) of Lord Byron's pro-industrial 'Radical party'
government, for which he is arrested, declared insane, and placed in a madhouse.
The events featuring the Shelley's and Lord Byron's relationship at the house beside Lake Geneva in 1816 have been
fictionalized in film, three times. (1) A 1986 British production, Gothic, directed
by Ken Russell, and starring Gabriel Byrne,
Julian Sands, and Natasha Richardson (2) A 1988
Spanish production, Rowing with the
Wind (Remando al viento), starring Lizzie McInnerny as Mary
Shelley,Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley Both these
movies deal mostly with Mary Shelley's creation of the Frankenstein novel, while Percy tends to be quite a minor character in
both films.
Shelley is, however, the main character in a movie entitled Haunted Summer, made in
1988, starring Laura Dern and Eric Stolz. It is considered to
be by far the best movie on Shelley,[citation needed] and is set in the same time frame as Rowing with the Wind. Though
somewhat sensationalistic in some scenes, Haunted Summer's impressive strength is its three-dimensional characterization
of Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. The psychology of these three is quite accurate, realistic and vivid, and the movie
wisely uses words for its dialogue that the three actually said during their lives. The movie also does a good job of recreating
Switzerland in 1816, where the four exiles lived.[citation needed]
Howard Brenton's play, Bloody Poetry, first performed at the Haymarket Theater in Leicester in 1984, concerns itself
with the complex relationships and rivalries between Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron.
Shelley is also the main character in Bulgarian poet Pencho Slaveykov's philosophical poem Heart of Hearts.
Mary and Percy Shelley also appears in a 2006 novel AngelMonster, by Veronica Bennet. This book is a fictional version of Mary's and Percy's elopement and the series of
depressing events. Highly recommended for young adults.
Shelley's cremation at Viareggio and the removal of his heart by Trelawny are described in Tennessee Williams' play Camino Real by a
fictionalized Lord Byron.
Advocacy of vegetarianism
Both Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley were strong advocates of vegetarianism. Shelley
wrote several essays on the subject, the most prominent of which being "A Vindication of Natural Diet" and "On the Vegetable
System of Diet".
Shelley wrote: "If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is
the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human
artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their
social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed
only to endure unmitigated misery;" "Never again may blood of bird or beast/ Stain with its venomous stream a human feast,/ To
the pure skies in accusation steaming;" and "It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is
rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite
intolerable loathing and disgust."
Shelley was a strong advocate for social justice for the lower classes. He witnessed many of the same mistreatments occurring
in the domestication and slaughtering of animals, and he became a fighter for the rights of all living creatures that he saw
being treated unjustly. How he reconciled his views with his lack of responsibility for Harriet and his offspring, both inside
and outside of marriage, is a matter of some debate.
Family history
Ancestry
Shelley was a seventeenth generation descendant of Richard Fitzalan,
10th Earl of Arundel through his son John Fitzalan,
Marshall of England (d. 1379). John was married to Baroness
Eleanor Maltravers (1345 – January 10,
1404/1405). Their eldest son succeeded them as John FitzAlan, 2nd Baron Arundel (1365 – 1391). He was himself married to
Elizabeth le Despenser (d. April 1/
April 10, 1408).
Elizabeth was a great-granddaughter of Hugh the younger Despenser by his
second son Edward Despenser of Buckland (d. September
30, 1342). Her parents were Sir Edward Despenser, 1st Lord Despenser (March 24, 1336 – November 11,
1375) and Elizabeth Burghersh (d. July 26, 1409).
The eldest son of Elizabeth by Baron Maltravers was John Fitzalan, 13th
Earl of Arundel. Their third son was Sir Thomas Fitzalan of Beechwood. His own
daughter Eleanor Fitzalan was married to Sir Thomas Browne of Beechworth Castle. They had four sons and one daughter, Katherine
Browne, who in 1471 married Humphrey Sackville of Buckhurst (1426 – January 24
1488).
Their oldest son Richard Sackville of Buckhurst (1472 – July 18 1524) was married in 1492 to Isabel Dyggs. Their oldest son Sir John Sackville of Buckhurst (1492 –
October 5, 1557) was married to Margaret Boleyn. Margaret was a
sister to Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire. His younger brother
Richard Sackville had a less prominent marriage which resulted in the birth of Anne Sackville. Anne herself was later married to
Henry Shelley.
Henry became father to a younger Henry Shelley. This younger Henry had at least three sons. The youngest of them Richard
Shelley was later married to Joan Fuste, daughter of John Fuste from Ichingfield. Their grandson John Shelley of Fen Place was married himself to Helen Bysshe, daughter of Roger Bysshe. Their son Timothy Shelley of Fen Place
(born c. 1700) married widow Johanna Plum from New York
City. Timothy and Johanna were the great-grandparents of Percy.
Family
Percy was born to Sir Timothy Shelley (September 7, 1753 –
April 24, 1844) and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold following their
marriage in October, 1791. His father was son and heir to Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st Baronet of
Castle Goring (June 21, 1731 – January 6, 1815) by his wife Mary Catherine
Michell (d. November 7, 1760). His mother was daughter of
Charles Pilfold of Effingham. Through his paternal grandmother Percy was great-grandson to
Reverend Theobald Michell of Horsham.
He was the eldest of seven children. His younger siblings were:
Shelly's uncle, brother to his mother Elizabeth Pilfold, was Captain John Pilfold, a
famous Naval Commander that served under Admiral Nelson during the
Battle of Trafalgar.[6]
Descendants
Three children survived Shelley: Ianthe and Charles, his daughter and son by Harriet; and Percy Florence, his son by Mary.
Charles suffered from tuberculosis but died in a rain storm as he was struck by lightning
in 1826. Percy Florence, who eventually inherited the baronetcy in 1844, died without
children. The only lineal descendants of the poet are therefore the children of Ianthe.
Ianthe Eliza Shelley was married in 1837 to Edward Jeffries Esdaile. The marriage resulted in the birth of two sons and a
daughter. Ianthe died in 1876.
Shelley's son Percy Florence Shelley, and his wife Jane, adopted Jane's niece Bessie Florence Gibson. Bessie married Leopold
James Yorke Campbell Scarlett, and so the Scarletts (later the Scarlett/Abingers after their son, Shelley Leopold Laurence
Scarlett, succeeded his second cousin to become the fifth Baron Abinger in 1903) became heirs to the Shelleys. Several members of
the Scarlett family were born at Percy Florence's seaside home 'Boscombe Manor', in
Bournemouth. The 1891 census shows Lady Shelley living at Boscombe Manor with several great
nephews.
Legacy
Shelley's mainstream following did not develop until a generation after his passing. This differed from Lord Byron, who was
popular among all classes during his lifetime despite his radical views. For decades after his death, Shelley was mainly only
appreciated by the major Victorian poets, the pre-Raphaelites, the
socialists and the labour movement. One reason for
this was the extreme discomfort with Shelley's radical politics which led popular anthologists to confine Shelley's reputation to
the relatively sanitised 'magazine' pieces such as 'Ozymandias' or 'Lines to an Indian Air'.
Karl Marx, Henry Salt, Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats were admirers of his works. Ralph
Vaughan Williams, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Roger
Quilter, and Samuel Barber composed music based on his poems.
Critics such as Matthew Arnold endeavoured to rewrite Shelley's legacy to make him
seem a lyricist and a dilettante who had no serious intellectual position and whose longer poems were not worth study. Matthew
Arnold famously described Shelley as a 'beautiful but ineffectual angel'. This position contrasted strongly with the judgement of
the previous generation who knew Shelley as an atheist and radical.
Many of Shelley's works remained unpublished or little known after his death, with longer pieces such as A Philosophical View of Reform existing only in manuscript till the 1920s. This contributed to the
Victorian idea of him as a minor lyricist. With the inception of formal literary studies in the early twentieth century and the
slow rediscovery and re-evaluation of his oeuvre by scholars such as K.N. Cameron, Donald H. Reiman, and Harold Bloom, the modern idea of Shelley could
not be more different.
Paul Foot in his Red Shelley has documented the pivotal role Shelley's works,
especially Queen Mab, have played in the genesis of British radicalism. Although Shelley's works were banned from
respectable Victorian households, his political writings were pirated by men such as Richard Carlile who regularly went to jail
for printing 'seditious and blasphemous libel' (ie material proscribed by the government) and these cheap pirate editions reached
hundreds of activists and workers throughout the nineteenth century. Some details on this can also be found in William St Clair's
The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2005) and Richard D. Altick's The English Common Reader
(Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1998) 2nd. edn.
In other countries such as India, Shelley's works both in the original and in translation have influenced poets such as
Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. A
pirated copy of Prometheus Unbound dated 1835 is said to have been seized in that year by
customs at Bombay. In 2005 the University of Delaware Press published an extensive two-volume biography by Jame Bieri.
List of major works
Notes
‹ The template below (Refs) is being considered for deletion. See
templates for deletion to help reach a consensus. ›
- ^ [Ian Gilmour. Byron and Shelley: The Making of the Poets. New York: Carol
& Graf Publishers. 2002. 53.]
- ^ [Ian Gilmour. Byron and Shelley: The Making of the Poets. New York: Carol
& Graf Publishers. 2002. 96-97.]
- ^ Article in the Times Online
- ^ Benita Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame 1999:
p668.
- ^ John Bedford Leno. The Aftermath with Autobiography of the Author. London:
Reeves & Turner 1892.
- ^ The Life and Times of Captain John Pilfold,CB,RN; Hawkins, Desmond, Horsham
Museum Society, 1998
- ^ Plato, The Banquet, translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Pagan Press,
Provincetown 2001, ISBN 0-943742-12-0. Shelley's translation and his introductory essay, "A Discourse on the Manners of the
Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love", were first published unbowdlerized in 1931.
References
- Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader. Ohio: Ohio State
University Press, 1998.
- Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975.
- Maurois, André, Ariel ou la vie de Shelley, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1923
- St Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
- St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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