SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE. - English Romantic poet, b. in London on 4 Aug. 1792, d. by drowning in the Bay of Lerici on 8 July 1822. A radical revolutionary and anarchist already during his school years, he suffered at Eton College from his nervous sensitivity.
Having begun his studies at Oxford in 1810, he there formed a friendship with T. J. Hogg, who was later to become one of his biographers. He began his career as a writer with several extremely conventional “Gothic” novels, in which he imitated the worst and most exaggerated elements of the exoticizing tales then in vogue. His first verses (1810) likewise lack true poetic value. Absorbing the ideas of the Neoplatonists together with those of the French Enlightenment thinkers and the English radicals, S. wrote The defense of atheism in 1811, thereby securing his expulsion from the University of Oxford. He had an unhappy adolescent love affair with his cousin Harriet Grove, then a brief passion for a young schoolmistress, and subsequently fell in love with Harriet Westbrook. He eloped with her and, despite his profession of anarchism, married her in Edinburgh in 1811. He continued a wandering life with her until, having fallen in love with Mary Godwin, the daughter of the anarchist William Godwin, with whom he had maintained a long correspondence, he abandoned Harriet to her tragic fate as a suicide. The episode, whose gravity S. did not seem to realize, refusing to accept responsibility for it, casts an unfavorable light on his character as a man. S. subsequently attempted to undertake revolutionary political activity in Ireland and tried to carry out a land-reclamation project in Wales, but these initiatives led nowhere. In 1814 he fled with Mary to Switzerland, returned to England, where he stayed with Godwin, and in 1816 was once again in Switzerland, where he met Byron. In his Hymn to intellectual beauty (1816), the predominance of Platonic over radical currents is already evident. After Harriet’s suicide, S. returned to England and married Mary. In The revolt of Islam (1818), one of his less successful compositions, he exalts revolutionary ideals but deplores
the practice of the French Revolution. In the same year he met Byron again in Venice, and from their conversation arose the poem Julian and Maddalo. Lines written among the Euganean hills, another tribute to Byron, whom he greatly admired despite the fundamental difference between their characters and talents. In the same year, in Naples, S. composed some of his most beautiful and melancholy verses. The following year he wrote his major compositions in Rome: Prometheus unbound and The Cenci. In the former, the speculative substratum is complex and confused, but its symbolism and lyrical élan are magnificent in many passages. The latter, completed at Livorno in 1819, is likewise rich in poetic beauties, although it is not suited to performance. Among his fiery and violent satirical compositions are The masque of anarchy and Peter Bell the third, written in the same year, the first in response to the so-called “Peterloo Massacre” and the second directed against Wordsworth’s apostasy. The poet’s Platonism becomes more pronounced in Epiphyllion (1821), dedicated to a Tuscan gentlewoman, Emilia Viviani. In the same year, to commemorate Keats’s death, S. wrote Adonais, certainly one of the finest English elegies. Of Hellas, a drama written to celebrate the Greek revolution, only the choruses are worth preserving. His final poem, The triumph of life, falls under the influence of Dante and Petrarch’s Trionfi.
S.’s anticlericalism is merely one form of his intolerance of every established authority, but in his more mature works he shows that he had accepted, without abandoning rationalist principles, the fundamental principles of a Christian ethic imbued with Platonism. He was essentially a lyric poet, and his poetry, in its richness of forms and rhythms and its warmth of inspiration, is among the most striking of the Romantic period. The Catholic poet Francis Thompson wrote a beautiful and enthusiastic essay on S. In England S. influenced Beddoes, Tennyson, the young Browning and, later, Swinburne. In Italy he did not enjoy Byron’s popularity, but he was exalted by Carducci and D’Annunzio and passionately studied by A. De Bosis.