Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

English poet of the period of Romanticism, known for his extreme emotional and physical sensitivity, his vivid imagination, his rebellion against authority of all kinds, and the Pantheism, idealistic and visionary aspiration, and musical quality of his poetry. His works include Queen Mab ( 1813); Alastor (1816); The Revolt of Islam (1818); Prometheus Unbound ( 1819); The Cenci ( 1819); The Witch of Atlas (1820); Adonais (1821). His best-known single poems are Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, The Sensitive Plant, Mutability, The Indian Serenade, To Night, Ozymandias, The Cloud, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and Stanzas Written in Dejection. He had an important influence on Browning and Swinburne.

Shelley, who is in many ways considered a typical romantic poet, was childlike, naively self-centered and irresponsible, and amoral in character. As early as his schooldays he became known for his excessive sensibility and his rebellious spirit, being called "Mad Shelley" and "Shelley the Atheist." He was married twice, on both occasions after an unconventional elopement, and had a number of attachments with other women of his acquaintance, seeking in them an ideal spiritual mate. In 1817 the English court removed from his custody his two children by his first marriage with Harriet Westbrook, and, heart-broken, the poet left England for Italy, where he did his best work. See also Byron, a close friend of Shelley. He was drowned in a storm at sea in the Adriatic, and his body was cremated. The Orphan Angel, a novel by Elinor Wylie, tells 2 fanciful story of Shelley's adventures in the America of his day, after he has been rescued from the sea by an American whaling vessel in the storm which in fact caused his death.