Percy bysshe shelley (1792-1822)

Shelley, although a radical nonconformist in every aspect of his life and thought, emerged from a conservative aristocratic background. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. At Oxford in 1810 he collaborated with another student on a pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, which claimed that God’s existence cannot be proved empirically. Shelley was expelled from the university. This event opened a breach between Shelley and his father than widened over the years.

In London he met Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a well-to-do tavern-keeper. Shelley eloped with Harriet to Edinburgh and married her, against his conviction that marriage was a tyrannical and degrading social institution. Shelley was eighteen at the time, and Harriet, sixteen. In February 1812 the young couple travelled to Dublin to distribute Shelley’s Address to the Irish People and otherwise take part in the movement for Catholic emancipation and for the amelioration of the oppressed and poverty-stricken people.

More than any other Romantic poet Shelley embodied the spirit of rebel and reformer. His refusal to accept social conventions, political oppression and any form of tyranny manifested itself in his verse, too, where the theme of revolt is often present. Before he was a poet Shelley was a prophet, and his poetry is largely a medium for his prophetic writing. He refused to accept life as it was, and tried to persuade others of the necessity of doing so.

His first important work, Queen Mab (1813), is a long prophetic poem. The setting is the journey of a disembodied soul through space, to whom the fairy Mab reveals in visions the woeful past, the dreadful present, and the utopian future. Announcing that “there is no God!” Mab calls institutional religion and codified morality as the roots of social evil. She prophesies that, under the rule of the goddess Necessity, all institutions will wither away, and humanity will return to its natural condition of goodness and felicity.

The same year Shelley became a disciple of the radical social philosopher William Godwin, author of the Inquiry Concerning Political Justice. He also fell in love with the beautiful Mary Godwin, William Godwin’s daughter. Acting according to his conviction that cohabitation without love is immoral, he abandoned Harriet, fled to France with Mary and invited Harriet to come live with them in the relationship of a sister. When he returned to London, Shelley found that the general public, his family, and most of his friends regarded him not only as an atheist and revolutionary but also as a gross immoralist. When two years later Harriet, pregnant by an unknown lover, drowned herself in a fit of despair, the courts denied Shelley the custody of their two children. Shelley married Mary Godwin and in 1818 moved to Italy. In 1818-19 Clara and William, the children of Percy and Mary Shelley both died. The tragedy threw Mary into a state of apathy and self-absorption that destroyed the earlier harmony of her relationship with her husband and from which even the birth of another son, Percy Florence, could not entirely rescue her.

In these circumstances, in a state verging on despair, Shelley wrote his greatest works: a drama, Prometheus Unbound; a tragedy The Cenci; numerous lyric poems; a visionary call for a proletarian revolution, The Mask of Anarchy; a satire on Wordsworth, Peter Bell the Third; a political essay, A Philosophical View of Reform; an elegy on the death of Keats, Adonais; a lyrical drama, Hellas, evoked by the Greek war for liberation from the Turks, in which he again projected his vision of a coming golden age; a literary essay, A Defence of Poetry.

Although he did not give up his hopes for a millennial future (he wore a ring with the motto Il buon tempo verrá – “the good time will come”), in Prometheus Unbound he attributed the evils of present society to humanity’s own moral failures and grounded the possibility of radical social reforms on the prior reform of the moral imaginative faculties through the redeeming power of love.

Shelley’s poems show the influence of his study of Plato and Neo-Platonist who divided the cosmos into two worlds – the ordinary world of changes, morality, evil, and suffering and the criterion world of perfect and eternal forms, of which the world of sense perception is only a distant and illusory reflection. But Shelley was also a student of English empirical philosophy, which limits knowledge to valid reasoning on what is given in sense-experience. He held to the ideals envisioned by an imagination that transcends experience, but refused to assert that these ideals are anything more than high possibilities. To Shelley’s sceptical idealism, the hope of the ultimate redemption of life by love is not a certainty, but a moral obligation. We must, he asserts, cling to hope because its contrary, despair about human possibility, is self-fulfilling. Hope does not guarantee achievement and but it keeps open the possibility to achievement and so releases the imaginative and creative powers.

In 1820 the Shelleys settled in Pisa and a group of friends. Shelley’s “Pisan Circle” gathered around them, including for a while Lord Byron, a retired lieutenant Edward Williams and his wife Jane, to whom Shelley addressed some of his best lyrics and verse letters. The end came suddenly, and in a way provisioned in the last stanza of Adonais, in which he described his spirit as a ship driven by a violent storm out into the dark unknown. On July 8, 1822, Shelley and Edward Williams were sailing their open-boat, “Don Juan”, from Leghorn to their summer house on the Gulf of Spezia. A violent squall swamped the boat. When several days later the bodies were washed ashore they were cremated, and Shelley’s ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome near the graves of John Keats and William Shelley, the poet’s son. Byron, who did not pay moral compliments lightly, wrote about Shelley as “the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison”.

Wordsworth said about him: “Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style”. Shelley’s writing includes poetry, prose and drama. He expanded the metrical resources of verse, showed an astonishing range of voice: controlled passion, the calm and heroic dignity, etc. Technically speaking, Shelley was a highly accomplished poet. His verse covers a wider range of metric and stanzaic forms than seen in the works of his contemporaries. He was a master of traditional verse forms like the Spenserian stanza, the couplet, blank verse and the Dantesque terza rima. He moved confidently from the political ballad to the classical elegy, but is best remembered for his eloquent, short lyric poetry, which often reaches depths of musicality and intensity rarely matched by writers after his death.

Prometheus Unbound is Shelley’s masterpiece published in 1820. Upon its completion he wrote in a letter: “It is a drama, with characters and mechanism of a kind yet unattempted”. It is based on the Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, which dramatizes the sufferings of Prometheus, unrepentant champion of humanity, who, because he had stolen fire from Heaven, was condemned by Zeus to be chained to the Mount Caucasus and be tortured by a vulture feeding on his liver. In a lost sequel, Aeschylus reconciles Prometheus with his oppressor. Shelley continued Aeschylus’ story but transformed it into a symbolic drama about the origin of evil and the possibility of overcoming it. In Queen Mab Shelley had expressed his belief that injustice and suffering can be eliminated by an external revolution that will wipe out the causes of evil, which are existing social, political, and religious institutions. Implicit in Prometheus Unbound is the view that the origin of evil and the possibility of reform are the moral responsibility of men and women themselves. Social chaos and wars are a gigantic projection of human moral disorder and inner division; tyrants are the outer representatives of our baser elements; hatred for others is a product of self-contempt; and political reform is impossible unless we have reformed our own nature at its roots. Shelley warns that even should such a victory take place – the reintegration of splintered humanity, a restoration of moral and political order, and a release of all our creative powers in art and science – the price of its continuation is an unremitting vigilance lest the serpent deep in human nature should break loose and start the cycle all over again.

Shelley said: “Didactic poetry is my abhorrence”. Prometheus Unbound is not a dramatized philosophical essay or a moral allegory but an intricate imaginative construction. However, the new-Christian poet, William Butler Yeats, called it one of “the sacred books of the world”.