Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is esteemed by some scholars the finest lyric poet in the English language. He is perhaps most widely famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy; but his major works were long visionary poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism made him a notorious and much denigrated figure in his own life, but he became the idol of the following two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats.) He was also famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, and, like them, for his untimely death at a young age. He was married to the equally famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. He was interested in the concept of free love and often went to great and sometimes dubious lengths to promote the idea (once, for instance, sleeping with his wife's step-sister after his wife had miscarried).

Legacy

Shelley's mainstream following did not develop until a generation after his passing; this contrasted with Lord Byron, who was popular amongst the upper classes during his lifetime, despite his radical views. For decades after his death Shelley was mainly appreciated by the major Victorian poets, such as Tennyson and Browning, by the pre-Raphaelites, and by socialists and the labour movement – Karl Marx and Bernard Shaw were among his admirers. Only in the latter part of the 19th century did Shelley's work, or rather his more innocuous work, become respectable – popularised by, among others, Henry Salt, whose acclaimed biography Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Pioneer was first published in 1896. In the period between World War I and the mid-twentieth century, dominated as it was by the critical ideas of T. S. Eliot, Shelley's verse was treated with contempt by the critical establishment – due in large part to Eliot's reaction against the poet's militant atheism. In the late 1950s, encouraged by scholars such as Harold Bloom, Shelley began to resume his reputation. Aspects of Shelley's poetry and poetics have also been attractive for postmodernist critics, who value Shelley's scepticism and highly metaphorical constructions.

Related Topics:
Lord Byron - Upper class - Browning - Pre-Raphaelites - Socialists - Labour movement - Karl Marx - 19th century - Henry Salt - 1896 - World War I - T. S. Eliot - Harold Bloom

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~