Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
I think that no other poet but Percy Bysshe Shelley looks so much like a poet. With long flowing hair, an almost feminine face, and a generally disheveled look, he certainly looks the part of a romantic English poet, which he was, par excellence. He was a member of the aristocracy, so far as wealth and political connections could take his family. The family wealth was collected by Percy’s grandfather through a series of marriages to heiresses, along with baronetcy awarded for loyalty to the Whigs. Percy was the heir for the title and fortune, but did not live long enough to collect either. Born in 1792, the first child of Timothy Shelley (followed by 5 sisters), Percy was sent to Eton and then Oxford. Although he possessed many classically feminine traits, particularly sensitivity and slightness, he was known as being somewhat of a rebel. At Oxford he met one of his best friends, Thomas Hogg, and continued alongside him to learn what he wanted, instead of listening to his teachers. He would often be doing some odd experiment or another with chemistry and alchemy. He had bought an early type of battery and proceeded to shock himself among all of his other various endeavors.It was also during his time at Oxford (1811) that he wrote “The Necessity of Atheism” and promptly got expelled for it when he refused to deny that it was he who wrote it. Unfortunately for his friend Hogg, he too got expelled for denying that he wrote it. While at Oxford, Shelley had been in love with Harriet Westbrook and very quickly after being expelled he married her. |
Percy Bysshe Shelley: 1792-1822 Amelia Curran, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819
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From his misinterpreted reading of Mary Wollstonecraft, he subscribed to her dislike of marriages. He mistakenly thought that free sex was what Mary Wollstonecraft had defended. After wandering around for a little bit, he and his wife went to Ireland, where Percy wrote to support the radical politics of the Irish. This time spent in Ireland was not popular within the British government, and is the basis of many conspiracy theories surrounding his death. It was about this time when Percy started visiting the household of William Godwin, the former husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and a writer in his own right. In Godwin he saw a fellow radical intellectual. The household of William Godwin also contained Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters. Though certainly inspired by the aura of the elder daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny, Percy fell in love with her younger daughter Mary. He left his young wife and unborn child and eloped to France with Mary in July of 1814. They took along Mary’s half sister Jane Clairmont, thereafter known as Claire. The three wandered around Europe for about six weeks, and later published their adventure in “History of a Six Week Tour Through…” After being home for a while, the Shelleys and Claire traveled once again to Switzerland because Claire had started an affair with Lord Byron, who was there. They went, and soon Lord Byron and Percy were good friends, a fact that certainly helped Percy’s career – being associated with an older, more established poet. During this time Percy associated much with Claire, and though it isn’t clear whether they were lovers, they certainly were close. When Mary was grieving for one of their dead children, Percy considered running off with Claire to the Middle East. In the span of a couple months, both Fanny, Mary’s half sister, and Harriet, Percy’s first (and current) wife, committed suicide. These deaths, along with the number of babies Percy and Mary lost, must have had tremendous reverberations. After staying in England for a few years, the Shelleys and Claire once again traveled to Europe. They went to give Allegra, Claire’s daughter, to her father, Lord Byron. By this time both Percy and his new wife Mary were both established authors -- Percy through his many poems and Mary through Frankenstein. The three of them were staying in Italy for a time, when Percy purchased a small ship with which to sail around the Mediterranean. His friends and he were going out one day, and one of his friends gave Percy his copy of one of Keats’s books of poetry, which he put in his pocket. Despite warning that there was an oncoming squall approaching, one of Percy’s friends was anxious to get underway. The squall came up, and there was no more ship to be seen. His body was found a few days later, and was identified mainly from the book of Keats’s poetry in his pocket. He was cremated on the beach he was found on, and burned slowly. As the chest opened, the heart appeared, seemingly impenetrable to the flames. His friend Trelawny seized the abnormally large heart from the burning corpse, which Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley kept. The gothic image of his heart surviving the funeral pyre is rivaled only by his poetry, and is a fitting end for Percy Bysshe Shelley, the greatest of the Romantic poets. - by Michael DesJardins
Allott, Miriam, ed. Essays on Shelley. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982. Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley A Biography. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Clutton-Brock, A. Shelley the Man and the Poet. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company Publishers, 1922.
Dowden, Edward, Richard Garnett, and Michael Rossetti. Letters about Shelley. Ed. R. S. Garnett. New York: Hodder and Stoughtn, 1917.
Dowden, Edward. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Pateroster House, 1896.
Gordon, Lyndall. Vindication. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose. Vol. VI. London: Reeves and Turner, 1880.
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