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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, into a wealthy Sussex family which eventually attained minor noble rank—the poet’s grandfather, a wealthy businessman, received a baronetcy in 1806. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a member of Parliament and a country gentleman. The young Shelley entered Eton, a prestigious school for boys, at the age of twelve. While he was there, he discovered the works of a philosopher named William Godwin, which he consumed passionately and in which he became a fervent believer; the young man wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution, and devoted his considerable passion and persuasive power to convincing others of the rightness of his beliefs. Entering Oxford in 1810, Shelley was expelled the following spring for his part in authoring a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism—atheism being an outrageous idea in religiously conservative 19th-century England.

At the age of 19, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the 16-year-old daughter of a tavern keeper, whom he married despite his inherent dislike of the tavern and distrust of the institution of marriage. Not long after, he made the personal acquaintance of William Godwin in London, and promptly fell in love with Godwin’s daughter Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1816, the Shelley and Mary ran away together for a tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany. Harriet, pregnant with Percy’s child, drowned herself in London in November of 1816; Mary and Percy were married weeks later. While in Switzerland, Shelley met Lord Byron, the most celebrated and controversial poet of the era, and the two men became close friends. After a time, they formed a circle of English expatriates in Pisa, traveling throughout Italy; during this time Shelley wrote most of his finest lyric poetry, including the immortal “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark.” In 1822, Shelley drowned while sailing in a storm off the Italian coast. He was not yet 30 years old. Mary Shelley (1797-1853) is best known today as the author of the Gothic and science fiction classic novel Frankenstein. She authored several other novels and was also the primary keeper of her husband's legacy and promoter of his works in the decades after his death.

Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets, the generation that came to prominence while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were settling into middle age. Where the older generation was marked by simple ideals and a reverence for nature, the poets of the younger generation (which also included John Keats and Lord Byron) came to be known for their sensuous aestheticism, their explorations of intense passions, their political radicalism, and their tragically short lives.

Shelley died when he was 29, Byron (who also drowned) died when he was 36, and Keats died at the age of 26. To an extent, the intensity of feeling emphasized by Romanticism meant that the movement was always associated with youth, and because Byron, Keats, and Shelley died young (and never had the opportunity to sink into conservatism and complacency as Wordsworth did), they have attained iconic status as the representative tragic Romantic artists. Shelley’s life and his poetry certainly support such an understanding, but it is important not to indulge in stereotypes to the extent that they obscure a poet’s individual character. Shelley’s joy, his magnanimity, his faith in humanity, and his optimism are unique among the Romantics; his expression of those feelings makes him one of the early 19th century’s most significant writers in English.

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