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 even during his school years, he suffered at Eton College because of his delicate nerves.
He began his studies at Oxford in 1810, where he formed a friendship with T. J. Hogg, who was later to be one of his biographers. He began his literary career with several extremely conventional “Gothic” novels, in which he imitated the worst and most exaggerated parts of the stories then in vogue. His first verses (1810) likewise lack any true poetic value. Absorbing the ideas of the Neoplatonists along with those of the French Enlightenment and English radicals, S. wrote in 1811 *The Defence of Atheism*, which earned him expulsion from Oxford University. He had an unhappy love affair with his cousin Harriet Grove in his adolescence, then a brief passion for a young governess, and then 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, in love with Mary Godwin—the daughter of the anarchist William Godwin, with whom he had carried on a long correspondence—he abandoned Harriet to her tragic fate as a suicide. The gravity of this episode, of which S. seemed not to be aware, refusing to accept responsibility for it, cast an unfavorable light on his character as a man. S. later tried to engage in revolutionary political activity in Ireland and attempted a reclamation project in Wales, but these initiatives came to nothing. 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 Byron. In his *Hymn to Intellectual Beauty* (1816), the predominance of Platonic currents over radical ones is already evident. After Harriet’s suicide, S. returned to England and married Mary. In *The Revolt of Islam* (1818), an unhappy composition, he extols 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* is another tribute to Byron, whom he greatly admired despite the substantial differences in their characters and talents. In the same year, in Naples, S. composed some of his most beautiful and melancholy verses. In the following year he wrote his major compositions in Rome: *Prometheus Unbound* and *The Cenci*. In the first, the speculative substratum is complex and confused, but the symbolism and lyrical impulse contain many superb passages. The second, completed in Livorno in 1819, is also rich in poetic beauties, though not suited to performance. Among his satirical, fiery, and violent compositions, *The Masque of Anarchy* and *Peter Bell the Third* (written in the same year) are noteworthy; the first in response to the so-called “Peterloo Massacre,” and the second directed against Wordsworth’s apostasy. The poet’s Platonism intensifies in *Epipsychidion* (1821), dedicated to a Tuscan lady, Emilia Viviani. In the same year, to commemorate Keats’s death, S. wrote *Adonais*, certainly one of the most beautiful English elegies. Of *Hellas*, a drama written to celebrate the Greek Revolution, only the choruses survive. His last poem, *The Triumph of Life*, falls under the influence of Dante and Petrarch’s *Trionfi*.
S.’s anticlericalism is merely a form of his intolerance of all constituted authority, but in his more mature works he shows that he had accepted—without abandoning his rationalistic canons—the fundamental principles of a Christian ethics steeped in Platonism. As a lyric poet he was exceptional, and his poetry, in its richness of forms and rhythms and in the warmth of its inspiration, is among the most striking of the Romantic era. 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 the vogue of Byron, but was exalted by Carducci and D’Annunzio and passionately studied by A. De Bois.