Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English writer and one of the major English Romantic poets. He was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, Warnham, Sussex, and died on 8 July 1822 in a boating accident at the age of 29. Radical in his poetry and in his political and social views, Shelley did not become famous during his lifetime. After his death, recognition of his work grew steadily, and he became an important influence on later poets including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats.

Shelley wrote during a tense age shaped in part by Britain’s war with Napoleonic France and a reactionary political climate at home. His views could be dangerous to publish. Much of his poetry and prose was either not published in his lifetime or appeared only in expurgated form because of the risk of prosecution for political and religious libel. From the 1820s, however, his poems and political and ethical writings found readers in Owenist, Chartist, and radical political circles, and later drew admirers as different as Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Bernard Shaw.

Among Shelley’s best-known works are the long poems Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), Julian and Maddalo (1818-19), The Mask of Anarchy (1819), Adonais (1821), and The Triumph of Life (1822). His shorter poems include “Ozymandias” (1818), “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), and “To a Skylark” (1820). He also wrote verse dramas such as The Cenci (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Hellas (1822), as well as prose fiction and essays on political, social, and philosophical subjects.

His habits of mind were formed early. As a child he showed an impressive memory and a gift for languages, while also developing interests in science, mystery, romance, and the supernatural. At Syon House Academy and later at Eton College, he was bullied and unhappy, and his nonconformity made him stand apart. At Eton, a part-time teacher, James Lind, encouraged his interest in the occult and introduced him to liberal and radical authors. Shelley also became interested in Plato and idealist philosophy, which he continued to study on his own.

At University College, Oxford, Shelley read widely, carried out scientific experiments, and became increasingly politicised under the influence of his close friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. His radical and anti-Christian views led to conflict with authority. After he and Hogg sent out The Necessity of Atheism, Shelley refused to answer questions about authorship and was expelled from Oxford on 25 March 1811. His life afterward was marked by family crises, ill health, and backlash against his atheism, politics, and defiance of social conventions. In 1818 he went into permanent self-exile in Italy, where he wrote some of his finest poetry. His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein.

Shelley’s words still carry force because they join lyric craft with argument, feeling, and intellectual unrest. Critics have praised the momentum of his imagery, his command of verse forms, and the complex play of sceptical, idealist, and materialist ideas in his work. His line, “In faith and hope the world will disagree, but all mankind's concern is charity,” shows the clarity that keeps readers returning to him: a radical poet asking, in plain moral terms, what human beings owe one another.