Shelley, Percy Bysshe

SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE. - English Romantic poet, b. in London on 4 Aug. 1792, d. drowned in the bay of Lerici on 8 July 1822. A radical revolutionary and anarchist already in his school years, he suffered at Eton College because of his nervous delicacy.

Having begun his studies at Oxford in 1810, he formed there a friendship with T. J. Hogg, who was later to be one of his biographers. He began his career as a writer with some extremely conventional "black" novels, in which he imitated the worst and most overwrought parts of the exoticizing tales then in vogue. His first verses (1810) are likewise devoid of true poetic value. Absorbing the ideas of the Neoplatonists together with those of the French Enlightenment and of the English radicals, S. wrote in 1811 The defense of atheism, bringing about his expulsion from the University of Oxford. He had an unhappy love for his cousin Harriet Grove in adolescence, then a brief passion for a young schoolmistress, and then he became enamored of Harriet Westbrook. He fled with her and, despite his profession of anarchy, married her in Edinburgh in 1811. He continued with her a wandering life until, having fallen in love with Mary Godwin, the daughter of the anarchist William Godwin, with whom he had kept up a long correspondence, he abandoned Harriet to her sad 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. later attempted to carry on revolutionary political activity in Ireland and tried a work of land reclamation in Wales, but these were inconclusive initiatives. In 1814 he fled with Mary to Switzerland, returned to England where he quarreled with Godwin, and in 1816 was again in Switzerland where he met with Byron. In his Hymn to intellectual beauty (1816) the predominance of the Platonic currents over the radical ones is already evident. After Harriet's suicide, S. returned to England and married Mary. In The revolt of Islam (1818), a composition of his that is not very successful, 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 was born the short poem Julian and Maddalo. Lines written among the Euganean hills is another homage to Byron, whom he greatly admired despite the substantial difference in their characters and their talents. In the same year, in Naples, S. composed some of his most beautiful and most melancholy verses. In the following year he wrote in Rome his major compositions: Prometheus unbound and The Cenci. In the first the speculative substratum is complex and confused, but the symbolism and the lyrical impetus are in many passages superb. The second, completed at Livorno in 1819, is also rich in poetic beauties although it does not lend itself to staging. Among his satirical compositions, fiery and violent, one recalls 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 the apostasy of Wordsworth. The poet's Platonism is accentuated in Epipsychidion (1821) dedicated to a Tuscan gentlewoman, Emilia Viviani. In the same year S., to commemorate the death of Keats, wrote Adonais, certainly one of the most beautiful English elegies. Of Hellas, a drama written to celebrate the Greek revolution, only the choruses are worth preserving. His last poem, The triumph of life, falls under the influence of Dante and of Petrarch's Trionfi.

S.'s anticlericalism is merely a form of his intolerance of every constituted power, but in his more mature works he shows that he had accepted, while not abandoning his rationalistic canons, the fundamental principles of a Christian ethic imbued with Platonism. He was essentially a lyric poet, and his poetry, for richness of forms and rhythms and for warmth of inspiration, is among the most astonishing of the Romantic age. The Catholic poet Francis Thompson wrote on S. a very beautiful and enthusiastic essay. In England S. founded a school for Beddoes, for Tennyson, for the young Browning and later for Swinburne. In Italy he did not enjoy Byron's vogue, but he was exalted by Carducci and by D'Annunzio and passionately studied by A. De Bosis.

Augusto Guidi