Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is one of the great English poets of the early 1800s. He wrote grand, beautiful poems about nature, love and liberty. His writing is uneven, his word choice often careless, but he more than makes up for it.
Mary Shelley, his second wife, is the one who wrote “Frankenstein”. She was the daughter of a philosopher that he wrote to.
He was a friend of Lord Byron. He admired Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, who influenced him deeply along with Southey.
Like them he was one of the Romantic poets: he wrote as an expression of his feelings and passions, especially about nature and love. He wanted to free writing from the old, dry rules of the 1700s.
Of all he wrote, the best known is “Ozymandias”. Here it is in full:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
He died a month before he was to turn 30. His boat overturned in the sea on his way back from a visit with Byron (who died two years later).
At first he wrote political prose – he wanted to change the world. Not bit by bit in the English way, but all at once. This was in an age when America and France had overturned their kings not long before. One of his best friends was named after Thomas Jefferson.
Shelley was a great believer in liberty. If man could be freed from the old kings and the old gods, he could become perfect. (He thought Christ was made up.)
Later, though, he turned from writing prose to change the world to writing verse to show how he felt about the world. That came from reading Wordsworth and Coleridge. It is his verse, most of it written in Italy, that made him an intellectual angel.
People either loved him or hated him. He lived life to the full according to his passions and his high ideas. He was not one for half measures or heeding the words of older, wiser heads.
So, the Shelley who would not put sugar in his tea because it meant making slave masters rich, was the same Shelley who abandoned his first wife and their two little children because of his passion for another woman. Shelley married that other woman – the same one who later wrote “Frankenstein” – just a month after his first wife killed herself.
See also:
Abagond 
Leave a Reply