Percy Bysshe SHELLEY (1792-1822)
CHRONOLOGY
1792 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Field-Place
(Sussex) son of Timothy, baronet, MP
1802–04 Syon House Academy
1804–10 Eton
1810 University College, Oxford.
Publ. Zastrozzi Gothic novel & Original
Poetry of Victor and Cazire publ. &
withdrawn. Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson.
1811 Expelled, with T. J. Hogg, for having published The
Necessity of Atheism. Elopes with Harriet Westbrook. Hogg
tries to seduce Harriet.
1812 Dublin. Address to the Irish People. Declaration of Rights.
Lynmouth, Devon. North Wales. Letter to Lord
Elleborough. Meets Godwin.
1813 Queen Mab. Ianthe born.
1814 A Refutation of Deism. Falls in love with Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin; elope to France Mary's stepsister
Jane (alias ‘Claire’) Clairmont. Switzerland, Germany,
London. Charles born.
1815 Grand-father dies: annual income. T. J. Hogg, T.
Love Peacock.
1816 Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude. Geneva with Mary &
Claire to intercept Byron. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ &
‘Mont Blanc,’ Mary begins Frankenstein. England (Bath).
Harriet drowns herself. Percy Bysche and Mary married.
Shelley declared unfit to raise Ianthe & Charles. William
born.
1817 Friendship with Leigh Hunt. Allegra Byron, Claire's
daughter. Marlow. Porposal for Putting Reform to the Vote.
Laon & Cythna written but suppressed. Rosalind and Helen.
Marys finishes Frankenstein. History of a Six Weeks' Tour.
Clara born.
1818 Laon & Cythna published as The Revolt of Islam. Sends
Allegra to Byron. Italy, with Byron: Milan, Pisa, Leghorn,
Venice, Rome, Naples. Essay ‘On Love.’ Rosalind &
Helen. ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ Julian & Maddalo. Begins
Prometheus Unbound. Clara dies.
1819 Leghorn. William dies. The Cenci. Florence. Finishes
Prometheus Unbound. Percy Florence born. The Masque of
Anarchy (1832),
1820 Publ. The Cenci & Prometheus Unbound, ‘Ode to
Liberty,’ ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ ‘The Cloud,’ & ‘To a
Sky-Lark.’ Peter Bell the Third (1839). ‘The Witch of Atlas,’
A Philosophical View of Reform (1920) drafted. ‘The Witch
of Atlas,’ Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant published
& suppressed.
1821 Falls in love with Teresa (‘Emily’) Viviani:
Epipsychidion. Essay: A Defence of Poetry (1840). Keats dies:
Adonais. Ravenna.
1822 Hellas. Lerici. Death of Allegra. Begins ‘The
Triumph of Life.’ Receives his boat the Don Juan (Ariel).
Sails to Leghorn to meet Leigh Hunt, drowns with
Edward Williams on return voyage, in the Bay of Spezia.
CITATIONS
1.
Of hatred I am proud,—with scorn content;
Indifference, which once hurt me, now is grown
Itself indifferent. (‘The Serpent Is Shut Out from
Paradise’)
2.
… The man
Of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton (Queen Mab).
3.
Religion! But for thee, prolific fiend,
Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men
Thou taintest all thou lookst upon!—… (Queen Mab)
4.
… I know
The past, and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by his errors, and derive
Experience from his folly (Queen Mab).
5.
Hell is a city much like London—
A populous and a smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity. (Peter Bell the Third)
6.
We dimly see within our intellectual nature a
miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all
that we contemn or despise, the ideal prototype of
everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of
conceiving as belonging to the nature of man… a soul
within our soul… The discovery of its antitype: the
meeting with an understanding capable of clearly
estimating the deductions of our own, … this is the
invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends.
7.
Hither the poet came. His eyes beheld
Their own wan light through the reflected lines
Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth
Of that still fountain; as the human heart,
Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,
Sees his own treacherous likeness there… (Alastor 46974).
8.
‘Those who love not their fellow beings live
unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable
grave.’ (Alastor, Preface)
9.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
'Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable. (Epipsychidion 573-9)
10. … Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its wings of fire.—
I pant , I sink, I tremble, I expire! (Epipsychidion 587-91)
11. Earth groans beneath religion's iron age,
And priests dare babble of a God of peace,
Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,
Murdering the while, uprooting every germ
Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,
Making the earth a slaughterhouse! (Queen Mab)
12. Man, oh, not men! A chain of linkèd thought,
Of love and might to be divided not,
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress—
As the Sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze,
The unquiet Republic of the maze
Of Planets, struggling fierce towards Heaven's free
wilderness.
Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine controul
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labour and Pain and Grief in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts—none knew how gentle they
could be! (Prometheus Unbound IV, 394-407)
13. This is the age of the war of the oppressed against
the oppressors…But a new race has arisen throughout
Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which
are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh
generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants
foresee and dread. (Hellas, Preface)
14. Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquished number
Shake your chains to Earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few. (‘The Mask of Anarchy’)
15. [A Defence of Poetry] is perhaps the first appearance
of the kinetic or revolutionary theory of poetry’ (T.S.
Eliot )
16. The great writers of our age are, we have reason to
suppose, the companions and forerunners of some
unimagined change in our social condition or the
opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is
discharging its collective lightning.
17. Necessity! Thou mother of the world!/ Unlike the
God of human error, thou / Requirest no prayers or
praises (Queen Mab)
18. … Hark! The rushing snow!
The sun-awakened avalanche! Whose mass,
Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake, in Heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round
Shaken to their roots: as do the mountains now
(Prometheus Unbound 36-42).
19. Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And by the incantation of this verse;
Scatter, as from an unextinguishable hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (‘Ode to the
West Wind’)
20. Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be
subjected to the accidents of surrounding impression. (A
Defence of Poetry)
21. Reason is to the Imagination as the instrument to
the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the
substance. (A Defence of Poetry)
22. M.H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971)
23. The cultivation of those sciences which have
enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external
world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally
circumscribed those of the internal world, and man,
having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. (A
Defence of Poetry)
24. The imagery which I have employed will be found
in many instances to be drawn from the operations of the
human mind, or from those external actions by which
they are expressed. This is unusual in modern Poetry;
although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of
the same kind (Prometheus Unbound , ‘Preface’).
25. Forms more real than living man, / Nurslings of
immortality! (Prometheus Unbound I, 744-5)
26. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended
inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which
futurity casts upon the present, the words which express
what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to
battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence which
is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world. (A Defence of Poetry)
27. Poetry lifts the veil form the hidden beauty of the
world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were
unfamiliar. (A Defence of Poetry)
28. The everlasting universe of things / Flows through
the mind. (‘Mont Blanc’)
29. Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference
is merely nominal between those two classes of thought
which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas
and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of
reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds
similar to that which is employed is now questioning its
own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The
words, I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference
subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus
indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the
different modifications of the one mind. (‘On Life’)
30. Death is the veil which those who live call life. (The
Earth, Prometheus Unbound)
31. ‘Then what is Life?’ I said… the cripple cast
His eyes upon the car which now had rolled
Onward, as if that look must be the last,
And answered… ‘Happy those for whom the fold
Of