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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) - Life, Features and Themes

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)


Life


Family Aristocratic Sussex family. He lived in an atmosphere of conservativism which was hostile not only to any radical ideas but even to political moderation.

Marriage 2 wives:

Harriet Westbrook (this marriage castled 3 years and they had 2 children but Harriet committed suicide by drowning herself causing a sense of guilt in Shelley).

Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin (they married in 1816 and they had 3 children but 2 of these died).

Education Aristocratic public school (Eton), then he entered in Oxford University where he was expelled because of a pamphlet "The necessity of Atheism"

Personality he was eccentric and Flamboyant, despised social convention. He was labeled "Mad Shelley". He was really generous. He suffered of mental anxiety, melancholy, crises of dejection and he had also some hallucinations (especially after the death of his 1st wife). He was also characterized by a lot of contradiction (especially in his poems).

Journeys he campaigned in Dublin for Irish independence. He went to France with Mary Godwin and Claire Clermont (Mary's stepsister). In 1818 he left for Italy (Pisa and gulf of Spezia).

Religion he was considered an atheist, he defended atheism. He condemned all dogmas and religious practices and saw religion as an instrument in the hand of the priests.

Politics he was a radical fired with revolutionary plans of regeneration of the world. He hated the tyranny and loved any kind of reforms (he was the true heir of the French Revolution). He attacked the Royal family and the government in "England in 1819".

Death Shelley was dead when he was very young. On July 8,1822 he was sailing with his friend Edward Williams and a sailor-boy near Viareggio on the ship Ariel, until they were caught in a storm and they were drowned.


Features and Themes


Liberty or Freedom he expressed his radical political view both in forceful and direct polemical pieces. He believed that any type of institution, be it Church or State, commerce or money, education or marriage, led to superstition and selfishness, and that man can express his utmost capabilities only if he is free from external restraints.

Love it's the principle of all actions, the force that moves both the physical universe and the inner world of the spirit. Through love the world can be improved. He didn't believe in God but in some powers pervading the universe, which he called "Love" and the "One" and visualized in images of light and fire.

Beauty he believed that poetry was eternal and a source of power: in "Epipsychidion" he tells of his search for beauty in the form of woman. If the spirit of beauty could forever remain with his heart, man would be immortal. Beauty is mostly to be found in his nature poems.

Intellectual beauty is imagination or poetic inspiration which floats unseen among men. It's an universal ideas, something which we cannot grasp with our senses, which come from our intimate soul when, in a particular of our life, in intimate communion with nature, we feel that an unknown power makes us, for a moment, immortal.

Nature his sensibility for nature was very similar to those of Wordsworth (Pantheism). Shelley saw nature permeated by the great spiritual force, which animated everything. But unlike W. he didn't found message in nature and consolation in it, but only pleasure.

Shelley's apprehension of the natural world passes through the appreciation of his beauty, but he aspires to an identification with nature through the most intellectual part of it. So the nature he describes is a sort of beautiful veil that hides the external truth of the one. All the natural elements are symbols of his poetic cosmogony. Finally nature is also a sort of refuge from the injustice of the ordinary world and the interlocution of this melancholy dreams and of his indomitable hopes.

-Differences between Wordsworth and Shelley: Shelley does not find inspiration through   emotions recollected in tranquility such as Wordsworth did, but he found it through the immediate contact with the perception. It could lead to total reciprocity and identification between man and nature.



-Platonism: linked to his pantheism. Platonism was also a sign of Shelley's interest in ancient Greece. He admire the cradle of democracy as well as the beauty of Greek art. He believed in the separation of the world of the senses from the super-sensory world which can be grasped only through reason. Like Plato he believed that the only reality is the spirit and that the nature is alive as man.

-Pantheism: becomes for Shelley an actual true faith not an aesthetic conception of the universe (as for Wordsworth) or a philosophical doctrine (as for Coleridge).

Pacifism and Revolution he was a pacifist and he despised the use of revenge as the ultimate weakness. S. saw revolution not as a sudden solution to all the problems but as a long-term process (central to this process is the education).

Education of the people towards a fuller understanding of freedom. It's a key to democracy.

Reformist capable of very practical proposal for reform. In "philosophical view of reform" he suggested gradual reform of parliament, the redistribution of wealth, emancipation of women.

He believed that Beauty, Love, Justice and Truth are the universal ideas through which the transcendental world could express itself.

Horror and terror he was fascinated with horror  and terror, both in literature and in reality, he was able to terrify himself and his friends (vision and dream). He deliberately cultivated the heightened sensibility induced by terror because he believed that it was linked to artistic inspiration. He used horrific elements to create excitement (in his early works). Later they are made to represent the dark side of human nature which expresses itself in tyranny and psychological disturbance.

Pain/death of his children, of his 1st wife. Unhappiness: his 2nd wife sufferance through his absence and betrayals convinced him that his ideal of a community based on free love was unworkable.

Ideal of Good it is the source of all the things. Shelley believed that men, tied to this life on Earth, had the power to attain moral perfection and so he could re-unite himself with the "pure source" from which he came. But this pure source wasn't God because for Shelley is impossible that existed a essence that was both Love and Almighty, because the 2 terms are antithetical.

Lyricism and Symbolism He used image and symbols (like Blake) of 10 contrasting with the accepted associations (Good is represented by the snake), metaphors, poetic imagery and musicality in his lines.

Poetry For Shelley poetry is "something divine, the centre and the circumference of knowledge". It is the expression of imagination and is equated with love and it reveals the order and beauty of the universe. He was against the consideration on poetry of Thomas Peacock (for him the poetry in the 19th cent became superfluous and it necessary would decline), in fact for Shelley the poetry was the principal agent of progress on the human mind.

Poet is the "unacknowledged legislator of the world". Through his use of imagination the poet enters into the world of the platonic ideals and so in contact with the remote ideals or true reality. He contributes to the civilization.

Imagination For S. Imagination is "the faculty of synthesis and Wholeness". The imagination not only reunited what the reason sets apart, it reached the universal  and infinite and produces a vision of beauty and truth.

Reason For S. is "the faculty of analysis and calculation".


Works


The Necessity of Atheism pamphlet written in 1819 at Oxford. Shelley says that he hadn't proof of the existence of God.

A Defence of poetry he critic the ideas of Thomas Peacock on the poetry. (1821)

The Cenci Verse drama inspired by the story of Beatrice Cenci who had killed his father. S. included a lot of gothic elements. (1819)

Prometheus Unbound philosophical drama inspired by Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound". Talks about the struggle between Prometheus (symbol of man's desire of liberty) and Jupiter (symbol of tyranny). (1819)

Queen Mab allegory of the past, present and future of the world. (1813)

Alastor, or the spirit of solitude Shelley expressed his desperation and isolation. (1816)

The Masque of Anarchy inspired by the Peterloo massacre. (1819)

Epipsychidion inspired by the poet's love for an Italian countess, Emilia Viviani. (1821)

Adonais an elegy on the death of Keats. (1821)

Hymn to intellectual beauty

Ozymandias

Ode to the West Wind

The Cloud

To a Skylark

A Dirge







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