Ozymandias Page 2

Shelley was educated at Eton and Oxford University and it was assumed that when he was twenty-one he would inherit his father's seat in Parliament. As a young man he was taken to the House of Commons where he met Sir Francis Burdett, the Radical M.P. for Westminster. Shelley, who had developed a strong hatred of tyranny while at Eton, was impressed by Burdett, and in 1810 dedicated one of his first poems to him. At university Shelley began reading books by radical political writers such as Tom Paine and William Godwin.

In 1811, Shelley published a pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. This gained the attention of the university administration and he was called to appear before the college's fellows. His refusal to repudiate the authorship of the pamphlet resulted in his being sent down (expelled) from Oxford on March 25, 1811, along with Hogg. The re-discovery in mid-2006 of Shelley's long-lost 'Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things', a long, strident anti-monarchical poem printed in Oxford, gives a new dimension to the expulsion, reinforcing Hogg's implication of political motives ('an affair of party'). Shelley was given the choice to be reinstated after his father intervened, on the condition that he would have had to recant his avowed views. His refusal to do so led to a falling out with his father.

Late in August 1811, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the younger daughter of a London tavern owner; by marrying her, he betrayed the acquisitive plans of his grandfather and father, who tried to starve him into submission but only drove the strong-willed youth to rebel against the established order. Early in 1812, Shelley, Harriet, and her older sister Eliza Westbrook went to Dublin, where Shelley circulated pamphlets advocating political rights for Roman Catholics, autonomy for Ireland, and freethinking ideals. The couple traveled to Lynmouth, Devon, where Shelley issued more political pamphlets, and then to North Wales, where they spent almost six months in 1812–13.

Lack of money finally drove Shelley to moneylenders in London, where in 1813 he issued Queen Mab, his first major poem—a nine-canto mixture of blank verse and lyric measures that attacks the evils of the past and present (commerce, war, the eating of meat, the church, monarchy, and marriage) but ends with resplendent hopes for humanity when freed from these vices. In June 1813 Harriet Shelley gave birth to their daughter Ianthe, but a year later Shelley fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of William Godwin and his first wife, née Mary Wollstonecraft. Against Godwin's objections, Shelley and Mary Godwin eloped to France on July 27, 1814, taking with them Mary's stepsister Jane (later “Claire”) Clairmont. Following travels through France, Switzerland, and Germany, they returned to London, where they were shunned by the Godwins and most other friends.

By mid-May 1816, Shelley, Mary, and Claire Clairmont hurried to Geneva to intercept Lord Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair. During this memorable summer, Shelley composed the poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc,” and Mary began her novel Frankenstein. Shelley's party returned to England in September, settling in Bath. Late in the year, Harriet Shelley drowned herself in London, and on December 30, 1816, Shelley and Mary were married with the Godwins' blessing. But a Chancery Court decision declared Shelley unfit to raise Ianthe and Charles (his children by Harriet), who were placed in foster care at his expense.

In March 1817 the Shelleys settled near Peacock at Marlow, where Shelley wrote his twelve-canto romance-epic Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City and Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein. They compiled History of a Six Weeks' Tour jointly from the letters and journals of their trips to Switzerland, concluding with “Mont Blanc.” In November, Laon and Cythna was suppressed by its printer and publisher, who feared that Shelley's idealized tale of a peaceful national revolution, bloodily suppressed by a league of king and priests, violated the laws against blasphemous libel. After revisions, it was reissued in 1818 as The Revolt of Islam.

Thus far, Shelley's literary career had been politically oriented. Queen Mab, the early poems first published in 1964 as The Esdaile Notebook, Laon and Cythna, and most of his prose works were devoted to reforming society; and even Alastor, Rosalind and Helen, and the personal lyrics voiced the concerns of an idealistic reformer who is disappointed or persecuted by an unreceptive society. But in Italy, far from the daily irritations of British politics, Shelley deepened his understanding of art and literature and, unable to reshape the world to conform to his vision, he concentrated on embodying his ideals within his poems. His aim became, as he wrote in “Ode to the West Wind,” to make his words “Ashes and sparks” as from “an unextinguished hearth,” thereby transforming subsequent generations and, through them, the world.

While completing Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, Shelley reacted to news of the Peterloo Massacre (August 1819) in England by writing The Masque of Anarchy and several radical songs that he hoped would rouse the British people to active but nonviolent political protest. Later in 1819 he sent to England Peter Bell the Third, which joins literary satire of William Wordsworth's Peter Bell to attacks on corruptions in British society, and he drafted A Philosophical View of Reform, his longest (though incomplete) prose work, urging moderate reform to prevent a bloody revolution that might lead to new tyranny. Too radical to be published during Shelley's lifetime, The Masque of Anarchy appeared after the reformist elections of 1832, Peter Bell the Third and the political ballads in 1839–40, and A Philosophical View of Reform not until 1920.

Shelley and Edward Williams drowned on July 8, 1822, when their boat sank during the stormy return voyage to Lerici.