Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (b. 1792–d. 1822) is now recognized as a major writer, chiefly a poet, of the Romantic period. His life was short, peripatetic, and frequently dogged by scandal. Treated badly in the reviews, he never knew great literary success in his lifetime. From privileged beginnings, Shelley quickly ran into trouble at Oxford: he was expelled in his second term, in 1811, for refusing to deny the authorship of the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. By the time of the private publication of his long “Philosophical Poem” Queen Mab (1813), Shelley had been married, increasingly unhappily, for nearly two years to Harriet Westbrook, who would later commit suicide in 1816. Having eloped with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1814, Shelley published his first major volume Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems in early 1816, and the pair spent the summer of that year with Byron on the Continent, during which time Shelley wrote his famous lyrics “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc.” Shelley and Mary married in late 1816. Never secure in his finances, and feeling generally disillusioned with life in England, Shelley left for good in 1818, moving with Mary to Italy, where Byron, a firm influence, was residing. There, the Shelleys, Byron, and their circle lived as exiles, Shelley writing and publishing some of his finest poems, including Prometheus Unbound (1820), Epipsychidion, and Adonais (both 1821), all in spite of difficult personal circumstances: in his final years, Shelley endured grief (the deaths of his children Clara and William), anxiety (increasing strain in his relationship with Mary), and bouts of ill health (nephritis and ophthalmia). Before reaching the age of thirty, Shelley drowned in the Bay of Spezia, his boat, the Don Juan, having gone down in a storm. The twenty-four-year-old Mary, in the midst of a fresh bereavement, heroically took on the task of saving and copying Shelley’s manuscripts, publishing his Posthumous Poems in 1824; further (highly admirable, but flawed) editions of Shelley’s poetry and prose, also edited by Mary, followed (1839/40). Since his death, critical opinion on Shelley has varied wildly, and his reputation has been checkered. Famously, Matthew Arnold defined Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” T. S. Eliot lamented that “the ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of adolescence,” and F. R. Leavis judged that he had “a weak grasp on the actual.” Since the 1950s in North America (later in Britain), Shelley’s status as an important writer, and his place on university syllabuses, has become more secure. This article will present, selectively, some of the most important sources on Shelley, concentrating primarily on post-1950s scholarship.