Everything about Percy Bysshe Shelley totally explained
Percy Bysshe Shelley (
August 4 1792 –
July 8 1822; ) was one of the major
English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest
lyric poets of the
English language. He is perhaps most famous for such
anthology pieces as
Ozymandias,
Ode to the West Wind,
To a Skylark, and
The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including
Alastor,
Adonais,
The Revolt of Islam,
Prometheus Unbound and the
unfinished The Triumph of Life.
Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising
idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him an authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life and afterward. He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets, including the major
Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets
Robert Browning,
Alfred Lord Tennyson,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as
William Butler Yeats and poets in other languages such as
Jibanananda Das and
Subramanya Bharathy. He was also admired by
Karl Marx,
Henry Stephens Salt, and
Bertrand Russell. Famous for his association with his contemporaries
John Keats and
Lord Byron, he was also married to novelist
Mary Shelley.
Life
Education and early works
Son of Sir Timothy Shelley, a Whig Member of Parliament, and his mother a Sussex landowner, Shelley grew up in Horsham, Sussex, and received his early education at home, tutored by Reverend Evan Edwards of Warnham. In 1802, he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford. In 1804, Shelley entered
Eton College, where he fared little better, subjected to an almost daily mob torment his classmates called "Shelley-baits". Surrounded, the young Shelley would have his books torn from his hands and his clothes pulled at and torn until he cried out madly in his high-pitched "cracked soprano" of a voice. On
April 10,
1810, he
matriculated at
University College, Oxford. Legend has it that Shelley attended only one lecture while at Oxford, but frequently read sixteen hours a day. By all accounts, he was unpopular with both students and dons. His first publication was a Gothic novel,
Zastrozzi (1810), in which he gave vent to his
atheistic worldview through the villain Zastrozzi. In the same year, Shelley, together with his sister Elizabeth, published
Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. While at Oxford, he issued a collection of verses (perhaps ostensibly burlesque but quite subversive),
Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, with
Thomas Jefferson Hogg.
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
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'd have had to recant his avowed views. His refusal to do so led to a falling out with his father. His mother died at a young age just like he did.
Married life
Four months after being expelled, the 19-year-old Shelley travelled to
Scotland with the 16-year-old schoolgirl Harriet Westbrook to get married. After their marriage on
August 28,
1811, Shelley invited his college friend Hogg to share their household, including his wife. When Harriet objected, however, Shelley brought her to
Keswick in England's
Lake District, intending to write. Distracted by political events, he visited
Ireland shortly afterward in order to engage in radical pamphleteering. Here he wrote his
Address to the Irish People and was seen at several nationalist rallies. His activities earned him the unfavourable attention of the British government.
Unhappy in his nearly three-year-old marriage, Shelley often left his wife and child (Ianthe Shelley, 1813-76) alone, first to study Italian with a certain Cornelia Turner, and eventually to visit
William Godwin's home and bookshop in London. It was here that he met Godwin's daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later known as
Mary Shelley. Mary was the daughter of
Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
On July 28, 1814, Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child when he ran away with Mary, also inviting her step-sister Jane (later Claire) Clairmont along for company. The three sailed to Europe, crossed
France, and settled in
Switzerland, an account of which was subsequently published by the Shelleys. After six weeks, homesick and destitute, the three young people returned to England.
In the autumn of 1815, while living close to London with Mary and avoiding creditors, he wrote
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. It attracted little attention at the time, but it has now come to be recognized as his first major achievement. At this point in his writing career, Shelley was deeply influenced by
Wordsworth's poetry and English language.
Introduction to Byron
In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary made a second trip to Switzerland. They were prompted to do so by Mary's stepsister
Claire Clairmont, who had commenced a liaison with Lord Byron the previous April just before his self-exile on the continent. Byron had lost interest in Claire, and she used the opportunity of meeting the Shelleys as bait to lure him to
Geneva. The Shelleys and Byron rented neighbouring houses on the shores of
Lake Geneva. Regular conversation with Byron had an invigorating effect on Shelley's output of poetry. While on a boating tour the two took together, Shelley was inspired to write his
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, often considered his first significant production since
Alastor. A tour of
Chamonix in the French
Alps inspired
Mont Blanc, a poem in which Shelley claims to have pondered questions of historical inevitability and the relationship between the human
mind and external
nature.
Personal difficulties and second marriage
After the Shelleys returned to England,
Fanny Imlay,
Mary Godwin's half-sister and a member of Godwin's household, killed herself in late autumn. In December 1816, Shelley's estranged wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in
Hyde Park,
London. On
December 30,
1816, a few weeks after Harriet's body was recovered, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married. The marriage was intended, in part, to help secure Shelley's custody of his children by Harriet, but the plan fell through: the children were handed over to foster parents by the courts.
The Shelleys took up residence in the village of
Marlow,
Buckinghamshire where a friend of Percy's,
Thomas Love Peacock, lived. Shelley took part in the literary circle that surrounded
Leigh Hunt, and during this period, he met John Keats. Shelley's major production during this time was
Laon and Cythna, a long, narrative poem in which he attacked religion and featured a pair of incestuous lovers. It was hastily withdrawn after only a few copies were published. It was later edited and reissued as
The Revolt of Islam in 1818. Shelley also wrote two revolutionary political tracts under the
nom de plume of "The Hermit of Marlowe."
Travels in the Italian peninsula
Early in 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England in order to take Claire's daughter, Allegra, to her father Byron, who had taken up residence in
Venice. Contact with the older and more established poet encouraged Shelley to write once again. During the latter part of the year, he wrote
Julian and Maddalo, a lightly disguised rendering of his boat trips and conversations with Byron in Venice, finishing with a visit to a madhouse. This poem marked the appearance of Shelley's "urbane style". He then began the long verse drama
Prometheus Unbound, a re-writing of the lost play by the ancient Greek poet
Aeschylus, which features talking mountains and a petulant spirit who overthrows
Jupiter. Tragedy struck in 1818 and 1819, when his son Will died of fever in
Rome, and his infant daughter Clara Everina died during yet another household move.
A daughter, Elena Adelaide Shelley, was born
December 27,
1818 in
Naples,
Italy and registered there as the daughter of Shelley and a woman named Marina Padurin. However, the identity of the mother is an unsolved mystery. Some scholars speculate that her true mother was actually Claire Clairmont or Elise Foggi, a nursemaid for the Shelley family. Other scholars postulate that she was a foundling Shelley adopted in hopes of distracting Mary after the deaths of William and Clara. Shelley referred to Elena in letters as his "Neapolitan ward". However, Elena was placed with foster parents a few days after her birth and the Shelley family moved on to yet another Italian city, leaving her behind. Elena died 17 months later, on
June 10,
1820.
The Shelleys moved around various Italian cities during these years. Shelley completed
Prometheus Unbound in Rome, and he spent the summer of 1819 writing a tragedy,
The Cenci, in
Livorno. In this year, prompted among other causes by the
Peterloo massacre, he wrote his best-known political poems:
The Masque of Anarchy and
Men of England. These were most likely his most-remembered works during the 19th century. Around this time period, he wrote the essay
The Philosophical View of Reform, which was his most thorough exposition of his political views to that date.
In 1820, hearing of
John Keats' illness from a friend, Shelley wrote him a letter inviting him to join him at his residence at Pisa. Keats replied with hopes of seeing him, but instead, arrangements were made for Keats to travel to Rome with the artist Joseph Severn.
In 1821, inspired by the death of Keats, Shelley wrote the elegy
Adonais. The text of this famous poem can be found at
(External Link
)
In 1822, Shelley arranged for
Leigh Hunt, the British poet and editor who had been one of his chief supporters in England, to come to Italy with his family. He meant for the three of them — himself, Byron and Hunt — to create a journal, which would be called
The Liberal. With Hunt as editor, their controversial writings would be disseminated, and the journal would act as a counter-blast to conservative periodicals such as
Blackwood's Magazine and
The Quarterly Review.
Leigh Hunt's son, the editor
Thornton Leigh Hunt, when later asked whether he preferred Shelley or Byron as a man, replied:-
» "On one occasion I'd to fetch or take to Byron some copy for the paper which my father, himself and Shelley, jointly conducted. I found him seated on a lounge feasting himself from a drum of figs. He asked me if I'd like a fig. Now, in that, Leno, consists the difference, Shelley would have handed me the drum and allowed me to help myself."
Drowning
On
July 8,
1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to
Lerici in his schooner,
Don Juan. Shelley claimed to have met his
Doppelgänger, foreboding his own death. He was returning from having set up
The Liberal with the newly-arrived Leigh Hunt. The name
"Don Juan", a compliment to Byron, was chosen by
Edward John Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle. However, according to Mary Shelley's testimony, Shelley changed it to "
Ariel". This annoyed Byron, who forced the painting of the words "Don Juan" on the mainsail. This offended the Shelleys, who felt that the boat was made to look much like a coal barge. The vessel, an open boat designed from a
Royal Dockyards model, was custom-built in
Genoa for Shelley. It didn't capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her "Note on Poems of 1822" (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never seaworthy.
Many believe his death wasn't accidental. Some say that Shelley was depressed in those days and that he wanted to die; others that he didn't know how to navigate; others believe that some pirates mistook the boat for Byron's and attacked him, and others have even more fantastical stories. There is a mass of evidence, though scattered and contradictory, that Shelley may have been murdered for political reasons. Previously, at his cottage in
Tann-yr-allt in
Wales, he'd been surprised and apparently attacked by a man who may have been an intelligence agent.
In the days before he died, he was almost shot on two separate occasions. A British consul defended the shooter from the first of these two incidents, keeping him from all legal consequence. Two other Englishmen were with him on the boat. One was a retired Navy officer,
Edward Ellerker Williams and the other a boatboy, Charles Vivien, who should have known how to navigate to the nearby coast at
Livorno. The boat was found ten miles (16 km) offshore, and it was suggested that one side of the boat had been rammed and staved in by a much stronger vessel. However, the liferaft was unused and still attached to the boat. The bodies were found completely clothed, including boots. In his 'Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron', Trelawny noted that the shirt that Williams's body was clad in was 'partly drawn over the head, as if the wearer had been in the act of taking it off [...] and [hewas missing] one boot, indicating also that he'd attempted to strip.' Trelawny also relates a supposed deathbed confession by an Italian fisherman who claimed to have rammed Shelley's boat in order to rob him, a plan confounded by the rapid sinking of the vessel.
The day following Shelley's death, the
Tory newspaper "The Courier" gloated "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned,
now he knows whether there's a God or not."
Shelley's body washed ashore and later, in keeping with
quarantine regulations, was
cremated on the beach near
Viareggio. An 1889 painting by
Louis Eduard Fournier,
The Funeral of Shelley (also known as
The Cremation of Shelley), contains inaccuracies. In pre-Victorian times it was English custom that women not attend funerals, for health reasons. Mary Shelley didn't attend but was featured in the painting, kneeling at the left-hand side. Leigh Hunt stayed in the carriage during the ceremony but is also pictured. Also, Trelawney, in his account of the recovery of Shelley's body, records that "the face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless," and by the time that the party returned to the beach for the cremation, the body was even further decomposed. In his graphic account of the cremation, he writes of Byron being unable to face the scene, and withdrawing to the beach.
Shelley's heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by
Edward Trelawny; Mary Shelley kept it for the rest of her life, and it was interred next to her grave at St. Peter's Church in
Bournemouth. Shelley's ashes were interred in the
Protestant Cemetery in
Rome under an ancient
pyramid in the city walls with the
Latin inscription,
Cor Cordium ("Heart of Hearts"), and a few lines from
Shakespeare's
The Tempest. The grave site is the second in the cemetery. Some weeks after Shelley had been put to rest, Trelawny had come to Rome, hadn't liked his friend's position among a number of other graves, and had purchased what seemed to him a better plot near the old wall. The ashes had been exhumed and moved to their present location. Trelawny had purchased the adjacent plot, and over sixty years later his remains were placed there.
A reclining statue, of Shelley's body washed up onto the shore, created by sculptor
Edward Onslow Ford at the behest of Shelley's daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, is the centerpiece of the
Shelley Memorial at
University College, Oxford.
Shelley in fiction
Julian Rathbone's 2002 novel
A Very English Agent, about 19th century government spy Charles Boylan, carries a lengthy section on Shelley's time in Italy, in which Boylan tampers with Shelley's boat on orders from the English government, thus causing his death. Rathbone though is at pains to state he's "a novelist, not a historian" and that his work is very much a piece of
fiction.
He also makes an appearance in
Jude Morgan's 2005 novel
Passion, along with
Byron,
Keats,
Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and a wealth of other English Romantic figures, though the novel's main focus is the lives of the women behind the famous poets:
Lady Caroline Lamb,
Augusta Leigh, Mary Shelley, and
Fanny Brawne.
Shelley appears in
Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss. The book is a time travel romance featuring Mary Shelley. There was also a movie made, based on the novel, directed by
Roger Corman and starring
John Hurt and
Bridget Fonda, in 1990.
Shelley also features prominently in
The Stress of Her Regard, a 1989 novel by
Tim Powers which proposes a
secret history connecting the English
Romantic writers with the mythology of
vampires and
lamia.
He makes an appearance in the
alternative history novel
The Difference Engine by
William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling. Only referenced in passing by another character, in this world he doesn't drown in Italy, but lives to become a fierce critic (and perhaps saboteur) of Lord Byron's pro-industrial 'Radical party' government, for which he's arrested, declared insane, and placed in a madhouse.
Events in Shelley's and Byron's relationship at the house on Lake Geneva in 1816 have been fictionalized in film three times.
(1) A 1986 British production,
Gothic, directed by
Ken Russell, and starring
Gabriel Byrne,
Julian Sands, and
Natasha Richardson
(2) A 1988 Spanish production,
Rowing with the Wind (
Remando al viento), starring
Lizzie McInnerny as Mary Shelley,
Hugh Grant and
Elizabeth Hurley
Both these movies deal mostly with Mary Shelley's creation of the Frankenstein novel, while Percy tends to be quite a minor character in both films.
Shelley is, however, the main character in a movie entitled
Haunted Summer, made in 1988, starring
Laura Dern and
Eric Stoltz. It is set in the same time frame as
Rowing with the Wind. Though somewhat sensationalistic in some scenes,
Haunted Summer's impressive strength is its three-dimensional characterization of Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. The psychology of these three is quite accurate, realistic and vivid, and the movie uses words for its dialogue that the three actually said during their lives. The movie also does a good job of recreating Switzerland in 1816, where the four exiles lived.
Howard Brenton's play,
Bloody Poetry, first performed at the Haymarket Theater in Leicester in 1984, concerns itself with the complex relationships and rivalries between Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron.
Shelley is also the main character in
Bulgarian poet
Pencho Slaveykov's philosophical poem,
Heart of Hearts.
Mary and Percy Shelley also appears in a 2006 novel
AngelMonster, by
Veronica Bennet. This book is a fictional version of Mary's and Percy's elopement and the series of depressing events.
Percy, Mary and her sister Claire are some of the main characters in the novel,
The Vampyre: The Secret History of Lord Byron, by
Tom Holland (1995). The story concerns
Lord Byron, poet and friend of Percy Shelley. Their meeting and the growth of their friendship are described, along with a hypothetical account of the time the foursome shared in
Switzerland. Holland provides a fictional conclusion to the mysteries that surround Shelley's death.
Shelley's cremation at Viareggio and the removal of his heart by Trelawny are described in
Tennessee Williams' play
Camino Real by a fictionalized Lord Byron.
Shelley's strange death and his claims of having met a Doppelganger served as inspiration for the 1978 short story "Paper Boat", written by
Tanith Lee
A quote from Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound is said by Captain Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the episode "Skin of Evil". "A great poet once said, All spirits are enslaved that serve things evil"
Advocacy of vegetarianism
Both Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley were strong advocates of
vegetarianism. Shelley wrote several essays on the subject, the most prominent of which being "A Vindication of Natural Diet" and "On the Vegetable System of Diet".
Shelley, in heartfelt dedication to
sentient beings, wrote: "If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery;" "Never again may blood of bird or beast/ Stain with its venomous stream a human feast,/ To the pure skies in accusation steaming;" and "It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it's rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror doesn't excite intolerable loathing and disgust."
Shelley was a strong advocate for
social justice for the 'lower classes'. He witnessed many of the same mistreatments occurring in the domestication and slaughtering of animals, and he became a fighter for the rights of all living creatures that he saw being treated unjustly. How he reconciled his views with his lack of responsibility for Harriet and his offspring, both inside and outside of marriage, is a matter of some debate.
Family history
Ancestry
Shelley was a seventeenth generation descendant of
Richard Fitzalan, 10th Earl of Arundel through his son
John Fitzalan,
Marshall of England (d. 1379). John was married to
Baroness Eleanor Maltravers (1345 –
January 10,
1404/1405). Their eldest son succeeded them as
John FitzAlan, 2nd Baron Arundel (1365 – 1391). He was himself married to
Elizabeth le Despenser (d.
April 1/
April 10,
1408).
Elizabeth was a great-granddaughter of
Hugh the younger Despenser by his second son Edward Despenser of
Buckland (d.
September 30,
1342). Her parents were Sir Edward Despenser, 1st Lord Despenser (
March 24,
1336 –
November 11,
1375) and Elizabeth Burghersh (d.
July 26,
1409).
The eldest son of Elizabeth by Baron Maltravers was
John Fitzalan, 13th Earl of Arundel. Their third son was Sir
Thomas Fitzalan of Beechwood. His own daughter Eleanor Fitzalan was married to Sir Thomas Browne of Beechworth Castle. They had four sons and one daughter, Katherine Browne, who in 1471 married Humphrey Sackville of Buckhurst (1426 –
January 24 1488).
Their oldest son Richard Sackville of Buckhurst (1472 –
July 18 1524) was married in 1492 to Isabel Dyggs. Their oldest son Sir John Sackville of Buckhurst (1492 –
October 5,
1557) was married to Margaret Boleyn. Margaret was a sister to
Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire. His younger brother Richard Sackville had a less prominent marriage which resulted in the birth of Anne Sackville. Anne herself was later married to Henry Shelley.
Henry became father to a younger Henry Shelley. This younger Henry had at least three sons. The youngest of them Richard Shelley was later married to Joan Fuste, daughter of John Fuste from Ichingfield. Their grandson John Shelley of
Fen Place was married himself to Helen Bysshe, daughter of Roger Bysshe. Their son Timothy Shelley of Fen Place (born c. 1700) married
widow Johanna Plum from
New York City. Timothy and Johanna were the great-grandparents of Percy.
Family
Percy was born to Sir Timothy Shelley (
September 7,
1753 –
April 24,
1844) and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold following their marriage in October, 1791. His father was son and heir to Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st
Baronet of
Castle Goring (
June 21,
1731 –
January 6,
1815) by his wife Mary Catherine Michell (d.
November 7,
1760). His mother was daughter of Charles Pilfold of
Effingham. Through his paternal grandmother Percy was great-grandson to
Reverend Theobald Michell of Horsham.
He was the eldest of seven children. His younger siblings were:
Shelley's uncle, brother to his mother Elizabeth Pilfold, was Captain
John Pilfold, a famous Naval Commander that served under
Admiral Nelson during the
Battle of Trafalgar.
Descendants
Three children survived Shelley: Ianthe and Charles, his daughter and son by Harriet; and Percy Florence, his son by Mary. Charles suffered from
tuberculosis but died in a rain storm as he was struck by lightning in 1826. Percy Florence, who eventually inherited the
baronetcy in 1844, died without children. The only lineal descendants of the poet are therefore the children of Ianthe.
Ianthe Eliza Shelley was married in 1837 to Edward Jeffries Esdaile. The marriage resulted in the birth of two sons and a daughter. Ianthe died in 1876.
Shelley's son Percy Florence Shelley, and his wife Jane, adopted Jane's niece Bessie Florence Gibson. Bessie married Leopold James Yorke Campbell Scarlett, and so the Scarletts (later the Scarlett/Abingers after their son, Shelley Leopold Laurence Scarlett, succeeded his second cousin to become the fifth Baron Abinger in 1903) became heirs to the Shelleys. Several members of the Scarlett family were born at Percy Florence's seaside home '
Boscombe Manor', in
Bournemouth. The 1891 census shows Lady Shelley living at Boscombe Manor with several great nephews.
Legacy
Shelley's mainstream following didn't develop until a generation after his passing. This differed from Lord Byron, who was popular among all classes during his lifetime despite his radical views. For decades after his death, Shelley was mainly only appreciated by the major Victorian poets, the
pre-Raphaelites, the
socialists and the
labour movement. One reason for this was the extreme discomfort with Shelley's
radical politics which led popular anthologists to confine Shelley's reputation to the relatively sanitised 'magazine' pieces such as 'Ozymandias' or 'Lines to an Indian Air'.
Karl Marx,
Henry Salt,
Mahatma Gandhi,
George Bernard Shaw,
Alfred Nobel,
Upton Sinclair, and
William Butler Yeats were admirers of his works.
Ralph Vaughan Williams,
Sergei Rachmaninoff,
Roger Quilter,
John Vanderslice and
Samuel Barber composed music based on his poems.
Critics such as
Matthew Arnold endeavoured to rewrite Shelley's legacy to make him seem a
lyricist and a
dilettante who had no serious intellectual position and whose longer poems were not worth study. Matthew Arnold famously described Shelley as a 'beautiful but ineffectual angel'. This position contrasted strongly with the judgement of the previous generation who knew Shelley as a skeptic and radical.
Many of Shelley's works remained unpublished or little known after his death, with longer pieces such as
A Philosophical View of Reform existing only in manuscript till the 1920s. This contributed to the Victorian idea of him as a minor lyricist. With the inception of formal literary studies in the early twentieth century and the slow rediscovery and re-evaluation of his
oeuvre by scholars such as
K.N. Cameron,
Donald H. Reiman and
Harold Bloom, the modern idea of Shelley couldn't be more different.
Paul Foot, in his
Red Shelley, has documented the pivotal role Shelley's works, especially
Queen Mab, have played in the genesis of British radicalism. Although Shelley's works were banned from respectable Victorian households, his political writings were pirated by men such as
Richard Carlile who regularly went to jail for printing 'seditious and blasphemous libel' (ie material proscribed by the government) and these cheap pirate editions reached hundreds of activists and workers throughout the nineteenth century.
In other countries such as India, Shelley's works both in the original and in translation have influenced poets such as
Rabindranath Tagore and
Jibanananda Das. A pirated copy of
Prometheus Unbound dated 1835 is said to have been seized in that year by customs at Bombay.
In 2005 the
University of Delaware Press published an extensive two-volume biography by
James Bieri. In 2008 the
Johns Hopkins University Press published Bieri's 856-page one-volume biography,
Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography.
List of major works
(1810) Zastrozzi and St Irvyne
(1811) The Necessity of Atheism
(1813) Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem
(1815) Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude
(1816) Mont Blanc
(1817) Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
(1817) The Revolt of Islam
(1818) Ozymandias
(1818) Plato, The Banquet (or Symposium) translation from Greek into English
(1819) The Cenci
(1819) Ode to the West Wind
(1819) The Masque of Anarchy
(1819) Men of England
(1819) England in 1819
(1819) The Witch of Atlas
(1819) A Philosophical View of Reform
(1819) Julian and Maddalo
(1820) Prometheus Unbound
(1820) To a Skylark
(1821) Adonais
(1821) Hellas
(1821) A Defence of Poetry (first published in 1840)
(1822) The Triumph of Life (unfinished, published in 1824 after Shelley died)
(1822) THE CLOUD [AROMANTIC POEM]Further Information
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