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Percy Bysshe ShelleyEnglish romantic poet
Date of Birth: 04.08.1792
Country:  Great Britain |
Content:
Biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet who created four outstanding works, including two poems and two poems. Born on August 4, 1792 in Field Place, Sussex, he was the eldest of seven children of affluent landowner Timothy Shelley, who was later elevated to baronetcy. After a relatively happy early childhood, Shelley attended schools such as Sion House near London (1802-1804) and Eton (1804-1810), before enrolling at University College, Oxford in October 1810. The university provided some compensation for his unhappy school years. He avidly read and showed a keen interest in logic, ethics, metaphysics, and criticism of Christianity. He also formed a friendship with T.J. Hogg (1792-1862), who shared many of his interests, although he was not as sharp-witted. In early 1811, they anonymously released a pamphlet entitled "The Necessity of Atheism," in which they asserted that the existence of God could not be rationally justified. Both were expelled on March 25, 1811 for persistently refusing to acknowledge or renounce their authorship.
Leaving Home
After leaving his family home, Shelley severed ties with his father, who had high hopes for him. He exacerbated the situation by secretly eloping with Harriet Westbrook, the sister of his schoolmate, in late August. He traveled through Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales, never staying in one place for long. He continued to read extensively and published brochures one after another, all with the thought of the imminent liberation of humanity. The prose works of this period were as weak as his earlier works and had a political and anti-religious character. In 1812, Shelley met William Godwin, the author of "Political Justice," and philosopher J.F. Newton, who developed theories of religion and morality far from conventional. Both had a profound influence on Shelley's worldview and to some extent on his entire life. Shelley's first significant work was the anonymously published poem "Queen Mab" in 1813, an optimistic deterministic treatise in verse that fully expressed his views on the causes of social ills and ways to eliminate them. Harriet gave birth to their daughter Ianthe, but their married life was not successful. In July 1814, the poet met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of his respected philosophical mentor, which led to the final collapse of his marriage. The lovers left for France and then Switzerland in late July. Due to premature labor, Harriet gave birth to their son Charles in December. Just three months later, Mary gave birth to their first child (who died in infancy). In early 1816, their son William was born, and that year ended with Harriet's suicide. In those same days, on December 30, Shelley and Mary married.
Later Years
During this period, Shelley created four outstanding works, including two poems and two poems. The poems written during the summer of 1816, when Shelley and Mary were guests of Lord Byron in Switzerland, were the abstract-philosophical "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and the pantheistic "Mont Blanc." The poem "Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude," written in 1815 in sonorous blank verse, is full of echoes of William Wordsworth's poetry and develops the characteristic Romantic motif of the young thinker's futile quest for reunion with an idealized phantom lady. "Laon and Cythna," later renamed "The Revolt of Islam," is a long poem written in Spenserian stanzas, telling the story of a couple in love who challenge social conventions and political tyranny. In his last year in England, Shelley was plagued by illness, struggled with financial difficulties, and was in a depressed state. In March, the court refused to grant him custody of Harriet's children. He helped Mary write "Frankenstein" (1818), took in and cared for her stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had an illegitimate child with Byron, and became a father for the fifth time when Clara was born in October.
In the spring of 1818, the long-awaited trip to Italy did not change their nomadic lifestyle. The Shelley family stayed in almost every large city or seaside resort between Milan and Naples during the tumultuous last four years of his life. Clara died in Venice, and in Naples, Shelley adopted a baby named Elena who lived for five months. In Rome, William died, and in Florence, Mary gave birth to their fourth child, Percy. Finally, they found relative peace during most of 1820-1822 in Pisa. Shelley's productivity in the last two years of his life is remarkable. In addition to dozens of beautiful lyrical poems and numerous translations, he created a dozen major and complex poetic works. He earned well-deserved fame with his treatise "A Defence of Poetry" (1821). "Prometheus Unbound" (1818-1819), a chamber lyrical drama with magnificent choral songs, is mainly based on the plot of Aeschylus, which Shelley radically transformed by changing the motivating motives driving the characters. Under Shelley's pen, the ancient tragedy was transformed into a typical Romantic drama of crime and punishment, repentance, and spiritual resurrection, into a moral exploration of the very possibility of redemption. "The Cenci" (1819), a five-act drama written in Shakespearean style, vividly reveals Shelley's concept of tragedy: the attempt to preserve the soul under constant pressure from a decaying society inevitably cripples people morally, except for "a few saintly souls." Of the two satirical poems, "Peter Bell the Third" is a vehement rebuke of Wordsworth's betrayal of free thought, and "Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant" (1820) is an "Aristophanic" comedy on the scandalous rupture between King George IV and Queen Caroline. Shelley also wrote a political allegory and moral lesson called "The Masque of Anarchy" (1819), a mythological poem called "The Witch of Atlas" (1820), an elegy on the death of John Keats called "Adonais" (1821), a lyrical drama called "Hellas" (1821) that glorified the Greek uprising against Turkish rule, and the unfinished "The Triumph of Life" (1822), in which he attempted to present a kind of spiritual history of Western civilization. The form of "vision," some motifs, and imagery in the poem were borrowed from Dante, and the system of poetic composition shows that Shelley had mastered the art of tercets.
Shelley's unique religious principles coincided with Christianity in at least one respect: divine love was the focal point of his spiritual universe. He sought to find its artistic embodiment, first in the form of the Virgin in "Alastor," then in Intellectual Beauty and, ultimately, in the image of Asia, the bride of Prometheus. Divine love is seen as the unifying element in three of his most remarkable lyrical works from 1819-1820: "Ode to the West Wind," "The Cloud," and "To a Skylark." The Witch from "The Witch of Atlas" and Emilia from "Epipsychidion" (1821) are symbolic representations of divine power. Finally, in "The Triumph of Life," Shelley returns to Intellectual Beauty, attempting to explain the origins of the divine in the history of humanity. On July 8, 1822, Shelley, his friend Lieutenant E.E. Williams, and sailor C. Vivian set sail from Livorno on Shelley's new sailing boat, the "Don Juan," for a leisurely cruise along the coast. In the second half of the day, a storm struck, and approximately ten miles from Viareggio, the felucca from Livorno apparently collided with the boat and sank it. The occupants of the boat drowned, and their severely mutilated bodies washed ashore some time later. On August 13, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and E.J. Trelawny ceremoniously cremated the bodies of Shelley and Williams. In early 1823, Shelley's remains were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, next to the recently buried John Keats.
