Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Selected Poems
A Defence of Poetry
British
Romanticism
From an early age, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a controversial figure. He was the first-born male of his family, and therefore he had expectations of a substantial family inheritance. He was expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism (1811), copies of which he sent to every conservative professor at the college. Shelley and his father parted company upon his refusal to accept Christianity as a means of reinstatement to the college, forcing Shelley to wait for two years to receive his inheritance. Shelley would continue to defy religious hypocrisy and espouse politically radical ideas for the rest of his short life.
Shelley’s defiance of social traditions extended to his personal life. His first wife, Harriett Westbook, committed suicide when Shelley began an affair with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The group of radical intellectuals with which Shelley associated touted free love and lived on the fringe of respectable society. Shelley legally married Mary, but continued to have affairs with many women as the couple made their way across Europe. Mary Shelley would later write the Romantic masterpiece Frankenstein.
Shelley’s death by drowning in 1822 established him as a tragic figure in the Romantic era. In spite of the few years in which he lived and composed, Shelley leaves behind some of the period’s most elegant poetry. He is buried beside John Keats in Italy.
A Defence of Poetry
In his defense, published in 1821, Shelley relates the poem as “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth,” and poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” He defends poetry against the allegation that it has no value in a world of science and rational thought. Distinguishing between two mental operations, reason as the logical thought process and imagination as the power of perception, Shelley concludes that poetry is necessary for the mind to recognize beauty, and that beauty defines human civilization.
Selected Poems
Shelley’s poetry practically trips from the lips in tremendous similes, alliterations, and phrases. In “Mutability,” he presents the changeable and swift flow of life; in “To Wordsworth,” a reordering of the Shakespearean sonnet, he laments the way in which Wordsworth has abandoned truth and freedom for comfort and fame; in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” he celebrates poetry’s purpose in lifting the human mind from the mundane things of the world; in “Ozymandias,” he explains the vanity of greatness in the fall of Ramesses II of Egypt; and, in “Song to the Men of England,” a radical and revolutionary work, he bemoans the working class’s oppression by the aristocracy of England. It is in “Ode to the West Wind,” however, that Shelley’s brilliance truly shines. He adopts Dante’s terza rima rhyme scheme to emphasize the movement of seasons, both of nature and of humankind. The poem ends with his much-quoted question, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
Consider while reading:
- According to Shelley, in what ways does poetry elevate and celebrate the human condition?
- Discuss Shelley’s alteration of traditional poetry forms. For example, why does the poet change the English sonnet?
- Discuss the way in which Shelley invokes the west wind to carry his words across the world.
Written by Karen Dodson
