Skip to main content

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sort Name
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Ratings
No reviews
Type
Person
Gender
Male
Date of birth
1792-08-04
Place of birth
Horsham
Date of death
1822-07-08
Place of death
Italy

Wikipedia

Percy Bysshe Shelley ( BISH; 4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."

Shelley's reputation fluctuated during the 20th century, but in recent decades he has achieved increasing critical acclaim for the sweeping momentum of his poetic imagery, his mastery of genres and verse forms, and the complex interplay of sceptical, idealist, and materialist ideas in his work. Among his best-known works are "Ozymandias" (1818), "Ode to the West Wind" (1819), "To a Skylark" (1820), "Adonais" (1821), the philosophical essay "The Necessity of Atheism" (1811), which his friend T. J. Hogg may have co-authored, and the political ballad "The Mask of Anarchy" (1819). His other major works include the verse dramas The Cenci (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Hellas (1822), and the long narrative poems Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815), Julian and Maddalo (1819), Adonais (1821), and The Triumph of Life (1822).

Shelley also wrote prose fiction and a quantity of essays on political, social, and philosophical issues. Much of this poetry and prose was not published in his lifetime, or only published in expurgated form, due to the risk of prosecution for political and religious libel. From the 1820s, his poems and political and ethical writings became popular in Owenist, Chartist, and radical political circles, and later drew admirers as diverse as Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Bernard Shaw.

Shelley's life was marked by family crises, ill health, and a backlash against his atheism, political views, and defiance of social conventions. He went into permanent self-exile in Italy in 1818 and over the next four years produced what Zachary Leader and Michael O'Neill call "some of the finest poetry of the Romantic period". His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein. He died in a boating accident in 1822 at age 29.

Continue reading at Wikipedia... Wikipedia content provided under the terms of the Creative Commons BY-SA license

Annotation

English Romantic poet. His second marriage was to the writer Mary Shelley (1816-1822).

Last modified: 2020-08-11 (revision #19973)

Editions


Add Edition

There are no Editions yet!

Help us complete BookBrainz


Not sure what to do? Visit the help page to get started.

Identifiers

Goodreads Author ID
45882
ISNI
0000 0001 2103 1840
LibraryThing Author
shelleypercybysshe
OpenLibrary Author ID
OL20743A
VIAF
95159449
Wikidata ID
Q93343

Related Collections

This entity does not appear in any public collection.
Click the "Add to collection" button below to add it to an existing collection or create a new one.

Add Work

Reviews No reviews

No reviews yet.


Last Modified
2024-03-28