Romanticism and Modern Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley An
Romanticism and Modern Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley: An Introduction November 15, 2018
Birth and Education • born on 4 August 1792 as the eldest son of Elizabeth Shelley and Sir Timothy Shelley, a country gentleman and Whig Member of Parliament. • brought up to be a politician, and a conservative one at that time, and his later development into a radical, republican and atheist poet was in severe contrast both to his education and his family's wishes. • in his childhood he was an avid scientist. • Shelley's Oxford rooms filled with scientific equipment, 'an electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers'. • He did well at his studies and left Eton with a good grasp of both Greek and Latin.
The Necessity of Atheism • Shelley and Hogg published their pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. • a dogmatic materialist doctrine: 'no testimony can be admitted which is contrary to reason'. • expelled from Oxford in March 1811
Elopement with Harriet Westbrook • They left London in the summer and married on 29 August in Edinburgh. • They travelled to Ireland where they distribute “An Address to the Irish People” • Drowned herself in December 1816, aged twenty-one. Her body was recovered from the Serpentine on 10 December.
A Defence of Poetry • Shelley offers a philosophical analysis of the role of the poet as a special kind of person, one who can see the essential harmonies of the world beneath the discordant images people find in their everyday lives. • Shelley assigns the poet a higher calling: the revelation of truth about life and the promotion of universal betterment. • The true poet is a visionary who is inspired to create art as a means of revealing something about the nature of the world. The poem itself is merely an attempt to reproduce that vision.
His first major poem: Queen Mab • a fairy in Romeo and Juliet, as "she is the fairies' midwife" a symbol for freedom. • a fairy tale that presents a future vision of a utopia on earth. • The theme of the work is the perfectibility of man by moral means.
Mary Wollstonecraft • In July 1814 Mary and Shelley eloped, travelling to Switzerland with her stepsister, Clare Clairmont. • Returning to England in September of 1816, they were told that Harriet Shelley had committed suicide. In December, Mary and Shelley married.
Byron • In mid-1816 Shelley and Mary made a second trip to Switzerland beginning a liaison with Lord Byron. • The couple and Byron rented neighbouring houses on the shores of Lake Geneva. Regular conversation with Byron had an invigorating effect on Shelley's output of poetry: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Alastor, Mont Blanc. • Joining the literary circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and during this period he met John Keats.
Italy • On 11 March 1818 the Shelleys and Claire left England to take Claire's daughter, Allegra, to her father Byron, who had taken up residence in Venice. • A baby girl, Elena Adelaide Shelley, was born on 27 December 1818 in Naples, Italy, and registered there as the daughter of Shelley and a woman named "Marina Padurin". However, the identity of the mother is an unsolved mystery. • The Shelleys moved between various Italian cities during these years; in later 1818 they were living in Florence, in a pensione on the Via Valfonda. • Shelley's time in Italy, between 1818 and 1822, divides into two periods. During the first, he and his family moved from place to place, visiting all the sights of the Grand Tour. During the second, they settled in and around Pisa.
Death • On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm on the Gulf of Spezia while returning from Leghorn (Livorno) to Lerici in his sailing boat, the Don Juan. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with the newly arrived Leigh Hunt. • Shelley's body washed ashore and later, in keeping with quarantine regulations, was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. In Shelley's pocket was a small book of Keats' poetry. • Upon hearing this, Byron (never one to give compliments) said of Shelley: "I never met a man who wasn't a beast in comparison to him"
Shelley’s Grave in Rome • Shelley's ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near an ancient pyramid in the city walls. • His grave bears the Latin inscription, Cordium (Heart of Hearts), and, in reference to his death at sea, a few lines of "Ariel's Song" from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange. “ • A memorial was eventually created for Shelley at the Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, along with his old friends Lord Byron and John Keats.
A Defence of Poetry • Shelley offers a philosophical analysis of the role of the poet as a special kind of person, one who can see the essential harmonies of the world beneath the discordant images people find in their everyday lives. • Shelley assigns the poet a higher calling: the revelation of truth about life and the promotion of universal betterment. • The true poet is a visionary who is inspired to create art as a means of revealing something about the nature of the world. The poem itself is merely an attempt to reproduce that vision.
Shelley vs. Peacock • Shelley is defending poetry against the attack by Thomas Love Peacock in “The Four Ages of Poetry. ”(1820) Peacock’s point was that poetry never amounts to much in civilized society such as ancient Greece or Rome. • Peacock claims, “a poet of our times is a semibarbarian in a civilized community. ” • Shelley responds to it by saying that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ”
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